georgemcbay

Humans have had major wars throughout history, it's unrealistic to really think that will change.

Sure, but now all the major powers have society ending devices to deploy when they go to war.

And when you combine that with the fact that the US is currently actively proving it can't impose its will on even Iran despite having a much stronger conventional military, when the next war breaks out between major nuclear powers it is likely to accelerate to the worst possible outcome very quickly.

Why is everyone preparing for war so hard

Unfortunately I think the actual reason is because they know (despite what they say in public) that climate change is a real and present danger, and the resource and migration wars are coming.

If you look at everything that seems strange through this lens (see for example: Trump talking about how the US needs to take Canada and Greenland) it looks a lot less strange. There's at least some sort of rational throughline, even if its awful and militaristic (and likely only revealed at all to the public at this point because Trump is an age-addled old fool that has a broken public-speaking filter).

You might have forgot to tell it 'no mistakes' in the prompt?

The 4 boxes at the top are somehow double loading items on refresh (didn't look at the code, just the output) and generating an awful flicker.

If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!

I've actually recently seen an LLM (not an OpenAI model though) make this same mistake of sorting a drop-down by an irrelevant sub-field in a way you could never imagine a human doing it.

Still says something about their development culture that they either never noticed, or didn't care enough to fix it.

If in a decade we are discussing that online as opposed to tips on how to survive the most recent wet bulb event, then... wonderful, I'll take it.

I am less optimistic than you, but would love to be wrong.

UPDATE: I'm getting a lot of replies to this thread and while I'm not trying to be argumentative here, I have to ask if a lot of them aren't rooted in denial...

I do think there is a very common denialism that is rampant causing many people to believe on what is essentially faith that AI is going to get just good enough to be a perfect assistant to them, but then magically halt on progress right before it entirely replaces them.

And to be clear I believe LLMs are likely to plateau before they replace literally everyone working in software development, but I also think that a lot more than n% of developers believe they will be part of the n% who will survive unscathed, where n ends up being quite a small number.

It's crazy how one lucky break lets somebody spend the rest of their life throwing s*t at the wall to see what sticks to earn them more money.

The "Zuckerberg Method".

He wasn't the first, and won't be the last, but I'm pretty sure he has thrown the most shit.

Roughly speaking and anecdotally I get the sense that the AI hate is by far strongest in the US. Europe seems to be somewhat balanced (some hate, some optimism). And Asia seems to be the most optimistic about it.

I think the US is a lot more exposed to the apocalyptic narratives from the bosses of AI labs, who sort of painted themselves into that corner in the pursuit of valuations.

I'm sure that narrative plays into why AI is so hated in the US, but I think widespread distrust in our government to handle things well also plays a huge part in why the average American is so anti-AI.

Our social safety nets have all either been falling apart or have been being purposefully dismantled for decades. Most of us are wholly reliant on our jobs in order to be able to get even the most basic healthcare. Most working class people are already struggling to keep their heads above water in the face of constant inflation and limited wage growth.

When the most likely outcome if the job displacement narrative does turn out to be even partially true means you can't afford a place to live, can't afford to eat, can't get healthcare and based on current trajectories you suspect the most likely government solution to the problem could be rounding up more and more of a growing underclass and sticking them in corporate run prisons, it isn't too difficult to understand why people might not be super jazzed about AI.

“We need moon shots,” Larry would say, big, world-­changing ideas and initiatives, to make employees excited about innovating again. (Curing cancer wasn’t necessarily a moon shot, he once suggested, since it would only extend the average human life span by about three years.)

And yet I'd much prefer to have one kid with cancer be saved and allowed to live an average lifespan than to have thousands of old rich people extend their extractive existences for decades.

Can confirm.

While the CBTC already existed, I worked on the ultra-wideband positioning system originally demoed on the 7 line (and spent a lot of sleepless nights riding empty 7 line trains, testing out the system).

I wrote the original version of the system that would initiate the time-of-flight signals to the trackside UWB beacons and use multilateration to determine the train position (of both extreme ends of the full train) based on knowing the ECEF coordinates of those beacons, all written in C (with MISRA C restrictions) on what were basically Raspberry Pi compute modules.

Also wrote the app you can see a screenshot of at the top of this post:

https://www.masstransitmag.com/rail/railroad-signals-ptc-con...

That app was C++/QML/Qt-based, using OpenStreetMaps to visualize the position. Originally written just as a visualization tool to consume data that was part of a test/mockup system I made while writing the code (mostly in San Diego, so very far from the NYC tracks we did final testing on), but the visualization of how it found the train position based on time-of-flight distance calculations from the UWB beacons looked pretty cool so they ended up putting it up (receiving data from the real, live system) on monitors while doing the media demos back in early 2020.

While this is a generally useful suggestion you are giving, for Go in specific you can just use "golang".

All of the major search engines have understood that as a stand-in for "Go the programming language" for many years.

The article does address what they see as the difference ("its investments in product, consumer experience, site publishing, voice, and hardware are all directions that have clearer moats")

That said I think it is pretty easy to make a case that these would-be differentiators are either currently underwhelming or completely unproven (as in the case of hardware).

I still have trouble to admit to myself sometimes that people make dozens of millions with PHP

Or many billions. eg. Facebook was originally written in PHP.

As a 52 y/o who cares deeply about software development as an art I don't have trouble admitting that the tech hardly matters relative to the economics, that was obvious to me very early in my career.

I have just never really cared because there has always been a path where you can have a decent career being paid to work on and with good technology in spite of the fact that the technology wasn't important to the economics.

I do fear that the rapid adoption of LLMs will probably cause the path I took to narrow considerably. There will likely be less companies willing to pay people to work on elegant technology when they are all competing against endless code generation machines (and this is assuming software companies can exist at all in this future). But at my age that's more of a concern for younger people than me.

Its definitely an attack. Thats established from anthropics perspective.

How do things get "established" from someone's perspective, exactly?

By that logic it is established from my perspective that Anthropic has no right to train on anything I've written that is publicly available on the internet.

Of course, they don't care about my perspective, but then again I don't care about theirs.

The GoPros aren’t manufactured in the US either.

True. Virtually nothing is.

Though its probably worth noting that Apple's approach to China exists at a much more integrated and larger scale than your average US (or other western) electronics company and is more akin to a fully integrated partnership with various entities like Foxconn than the typical "let's offshore the manufacturing stage" that most other companies take.

Best I've come up with is we'll need to be adopted by technofeudlaist overlords to be our patrons like in the roman days

Continually progressing AI (combined with our current socioeconomic systems) throws a lot of uncertainty into our mid to long term future, but I don't think this is going to be what happens.

There are billions more of "us" than of "them", people don't respond well en masse to a drastic worsening of their societal status and "they" are lagging very far behind on building their robot armies.

If we poorly navigate this transition the outcome should be worrying them more than it worries us.

but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent.

Features might be easier to create, but I rarely ever get the feeling of I did that anymore from writing software.

"I told the LLM to do that" is different and far less satisfying for me.

Yeah, so now any thicker than usual or obviously powered/electronic Ray Bans are now creeper glasses, whether or not they record video. People will assume they do.

Release a model without a camera and people might actually give it a chance

They also have to look radically different, because anyone who sees someone wearing the current design will always just assume the person using them is a creeper recording creepy videos whether or not the glasses are even capable of doing that. The association is already made from the current model.

Go is my favorite language of all time, but it is my favorite language because of its inherent simplicity for a modernish language...and all the setups required to try to use it as mobile app development platform that I've seen are the opposite of simplicity.

When it comes to mobile app development I'll stick to Kotlin Multiplatform with Compose Multiplatform. I love Kotlin less than I love Go, but its still pretty good and its much simpler to write 99% of the app in Kotlin and Compose and just have a very small amount of platform-specific stuff in expect/actual functions than it is to deal with layers and layers of shims pulling together various technologies that were not designed to work together.

In practice the choices tend to be limited for a lot of the people for whom this rule change was meant to ensnare their money because it exists within 401k plans with limited portfolio options.

If 20 years ago you told me a single piece of software had 428 vulnerabilities I wouldn't have believed it.

For something as complex as an operating system or a web browser, even one from 20 years ago (say, Windows XP or IE/Firefox) I wouldn't have believed there were 428 vulnerabilities either, I would have assumed there were much more than that.

IBM Stock has worst day

(so far)

I’m sure Disney (or whoever made this app) cares very very little about this, or treats it as a negative.

Virtually every company will treat it as a negative as the first thing most users are going to do if you allow them 100% experience customization is remove all the ads.

"Oodle" to me will always be the compression library first and foremost, just like "pi" will always make me think first of the Raspberry Pi rather than the coding agent.

Perhaps someone should vibecode a product that allows AI developers to generate project names that don't come with confusing collision baggage.

I have trouble understanding why Sanders has decided to be vocal about these

Perhaps the majority of people in Vermont want him to be vocal about it and he is simply doing his actual job.

AI is wildly unpopular outside of our little tech bubble.

Sure but I still don't think there is much meaningful difference.

Google looks at both your current search/browse activity and gathered data (the gathered data being especially important for all the very many Google-served Ads off of google.com)

Facebook also looks at your current search/browse activity and gathered data.

The only real difference is Facebook search is universally entirely worthless so far less of that signal gets used relative to more passive snooping.

When you use Facebook you get ads for things you aren't looking for.

When you use Facebook you get ads for things you are looking for in a broad sense, they just happen to figure out what you are looking for via fingerprinting and spying on all your web and app activity (to the maximum extent allowed by platforms and regulators).

Google, of course, also does this in addition to looking at your currently active web search.

To be fair, the power was added as a failsafe to be used for legitimate clemency in cases of judicial overreach which is also a concern. I do believe it was added with good intentions.

But like many aspects of US federal government, the people who drafted the rules naively presumed the people invoking them would have some level of integrity and a shame response that would stop them from using it for openly corrupt purposes.

They were, of course, wrong.

At the very least they should have ignored Hamilton and made it so that Senate approval was required for the pardons... though even that wouldn't be enough of a check today because we now know that Congress is capable of completely abdicating its power to the executive branch.

everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption

This is absolutely what should happen, but what will almost certainly happen is that the most openly corrupt president the US has ever had will blanket pardon everyone who remains loyal to him for the remainder of his term and there will be no federal level criminal legal consequences for any of these people.

And this is kind of the optimistic outcome, the one where the corrupt people in power don't find a way to extend their power indefinitely, which is certainly their plan (their incompetence may stop this from happening).