Right. You are applying legalese word precision assumptions to throwaway online comments. I don't think that's going to work well.

Okay, here's one field: in the last four weeks, Claude Code has detected and diagnosed 91 genuine bugs in the open-source library I maintain. That's 91 bugs that likely would have remained unfixed indefinitely, unless/until I (or a user) happened to stumble across a resulting runtime misbehavior and then laboriously worked our way backwards to pinpoint the underlying software defect. I'd estimate probably 150 man-hours were saved, right there.

Especially the part at the end, "Don't fear the dead, and don't fear me." The whole clip looks like AI fakery.

With the ESA supplying the spacecraft, most of the software is likely to be competently written and/or open-source. This will prove to the Martians that there is indeed intelligent life on Earth.

It's a good question and one I'm working on trying to get an answer to. By giving AI hard, complex engineering problems, and then getting engineers to look at the output to determine if that output is meaningful or just expensive gibberish.

By doing this, I'm trying to feel around the edges of what AI could reasonably be used for. The trivial engineering problems usually given to it are problems that can usually be solved by people in a similar length of time. I believe the typical savings from AI use are in the order of 15% or less, which is great if you're a gecko involved in car insurance, but not so good if you're a business.

If the really hard problems aren't solvable by AI at all (it's all just gibberish) then you can never improve on that figure. It's as good as it is going to get.

I've open sourced what AIs have come up with so far, if you want to take a look. Because that is what is going to tell you if good can come out of AI or not.

I would think it goes further. If the company has already failed (ie: no longer exists) then the action is not taken by the company but a former employee of that company (even if said former employee was the CEO). Former employees are not granted special authority over PII or over company-owned information.

Irrelevant. PII protections are not subject to company discresion.

The conversations are not private, but PII laws nonetheless still apply. Anything in the messages that violates PII privacy laws is forbidden regardless of company policy. Policy cannot overrule the law.

Now, in the US, where privacy is a fiction and where double-dealing is not only perfectly acceptable but a part of workplace culture, that isn't too much of an issue. The laws exist on paper but have no real existence in practice.

However, business these days is international and American corps tend to forget that. Any conversation involving European computers (even if all employers and employees are in the US) falls under the GDPR and is under the aspices of the European courts and the ECHR, not the US legal system. And cloud servers are often in Ireland. Guess what. That means any conversation that takes place physically on those computers in Ireland plays by European rules, even if the virtual conversation was in the US.

This was settled by the courts a LONG time ago. If you carry out unlawful activities on a computer in a foreign country, you are subject to the laws of that country.

From the transcript about 43 minutes in of a public conversion with Eric Schmidt from Apr 10, 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
====
          "Question: Thanks for the great conversation so far. Leonard Justin. I'm a PhD student at MIT. Um, I was wondering if you could just discuss a bit more some of the risks you see coming specifically with respect to biology and how we should go about mitigating those. What's the role of the AI developers? What's the role of government? Um, yeah, how can we move forward on that?
        ----
        Schmidt: So, so you're going to know a lot more about this area than I, but speaking as an amateur in your field, the two current risks from these models are cyber and biorisks.
        The cyber ones are easy to understand. The system can generate cyber attacks and in theory can generate zero-day cyber attacks that we can't see and it can unleash them and furthermore it can do it at scale.
        In biology, you get some evil, you know, the equivalent of Osama bin Laden. They would start with an open-source model. Now these open source models have been restricted using a testing process. Uh they're called cards and they test it out and they delete that information from the model.
        It turns out it's relatively easy to un to reverse essentially those security modes around the model and that's a danger. So now you've got a model that can generate bad pathogens.
        Then the second thing you have to do is you have to find things to build them. Our collective assessment at the moment is that that's a nation state risk, not an individual terrorist risk. Although we could be wrong, but there's plenty of examples uh and this the the report talks about some of the Chinese examples where in theory if they wanted to they could not only manufacture bad things but sorry design them but also manufacture them.
        The good news and the reason we're all alive today is that the bio stuff is hard to manufacture and distribute and to make deadly and and spread and so forth and so on. Um there's lots of evidence for example that you can take a bad bio right now and modify it just enough that the testing regimes and the sort of surveillance regimes it bypasses and that's another threat.
        So that's what I worry about.
        But I think at the moment u our consensus is we're right below the threshold where this is an issue and the consensus in in my side of the industry is that one more or two more turns of the crank these issues will be -- and you know by then you'll be graduated and you can sort of help solve these problems.
        Um the a crank is turned every 18 months or so. This is about three years.
        ----
        Moderator: But theoretically, couldn't AI and biotechnology help you come up with a counter measure?
        ----
        Schmidt: Um, I had thought so, and that was the argument I made until I I do a lot of national security work. And there's a term called offense dominant. And an offense dominant is a is a situation in a military context where the attack cannot be countered at the same level as the attack. In other words, the damage is done.
        And most people, most biologists who've worked in this believe that while the model can be trained to counter this, the damage from the offense part is far greater than the ability to defend it, which is why we're so worried about it."
====

Ultimately, I feel a big part of the response to that threat needs to be a shift in perspective like through people laughing at my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." :-)

Explored in more detail here:
"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism"
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
        "... Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
        These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ...
        There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."

No, the one that answered:

"You know what he means, ahole. If this were truly a problem the jet fuel would be rationed and private aircraft would be at the bottom of the priority list"

The entire point of rationing would be to REMOVE the pure market forces that would deal out the limited commodity to those with the largest wallets and replace it with a scheme that benefits the most people, instead of the most money.

If you actually knew better, you'd have posted it, not just made a vague assertion.

Yes, and the only ships running on nuclear reactors are military ships. As I said: No civilian use-case.

That movie to this day cracks me up. Probably watched it over 10 times by now. I laugh just as much every time.

Yeah, that alternate reality must suck hard. They probably got Windows 11 20 years earlier than we did. Yikes!

Ow my balls!