Perl was way ahead of its time... they were doing "vibe coding" back in the 1990's :)

All true, which is why China's system isn't completely centralized like that. Centralization is a matter of degree, not a binary on/off switch. The Chinese government mandates the broad strokes, and leaves the detail work decentralized, to be handled by the market. They've got a lot more capitalism in their system at this point than they'd probably care to admit.

Waymo is currently at 250,000 autonomous rides per week, in six cities, and I mean autonomous in the strict sense of "there are no Waymo employees in the car". They seem to be competing pretty well.

As for how other companies will compete against Tesla in the future when Tesla finally makes good on their ambitious promises.... we'll find out, if and when Tesla finally makes good on their ambitious promises. You shouldn't count those chickens until they've hatched.

That reminds me of the Mark Twain quote: "Good judgement is the result of experience, and experience is the result of bad judgement".

i.e. you certainly can become an expert yourself, eventually, but you'll probably make some sub-optimal financial decisions in the process.

AI could provide the push to finally popularize secure, authenticated email, if only because the phishing attempts will become so realistic that there will be no other way to distinguish your grandma from a foreign scammer :/

I concur with that (I'm 52, no more 10-hour marathons at the keyboard for me!).

Note however that the proper metric to measure isn't "time elapsed to create code", but "time elapsed to get that code sufficiently bug-free that you can ship it to customers without it causing a mess".

Any high-school student (or AI) can write code that looks reasonable and passes the basic acceptance tests. The real trick is getting that last 1% correct, so that the code can "just run" indefinitely, unsupervised, for all use-cases, without crashing or misbehaving or otherwise requiring a human being's time to manage it.

We'll have to do that also, and if the problem was just a single, one-time step-change (i.e. "we'll have to live in temperature range B from now on, instead of traditional temperature range A"), that would be sufficient.

But it's not that easy, is it? The climate changes, and as long as we keep increasing the CO2 content of the amosphere, the climate keeps changing more.

So we could adapt to the climate we expect to be living in 20 years from now, but without also solving the emissions problem, that won't be enough: we'll have to adapt again some years after that, to a climate that's even worse. And again, some years after that, and so on, likely until our only remaining way to "adapt" is through mass die-offs.

Sir, you are mistaken. All those Bitcoins aren't going to mine themselves!

Corn, peas, broccoli, onions, tomato, apple, celery, and many other fruits and vegetables: 3 to 40 grams carbs per 1 gram protein.

Beef: 0 gram carbs per 1 gram protein.

Getting adequate protein from only fruits and vegetables requires care. Adding nuts might make it easier, but nuts have a lot of fat.

Having their face recorded on video and their credit card on file to be billed and/or prosecuted afterwards would deter many. Of course the hard-core troublemakers would use a face mask, and a fake or stolen credit card, and would probably skip the prank-fart-bomb kiddy stuff and strap in an IED instead.

OTOH you could do a lot of the same shenanigans with a traditional human-driven taxi as well, with less chance of being caught on video afterwards. So it isn't clear that the problem is any worse for Waymo than it is for anyone else.

We should categorize these not as 'errors', but as deliberate lies in the service of the fossil fuel industry, who Trump openly promised would get whatever they wanted if they helped him win the election.

That does suggest a good use-case for Copilot (or whatever the AI-helper-of-the-day is); it could detect when you are reinventing a wheel and suggest the standardized functionality that you could call instead.

... and who gets to decide?

(I'm tempted to write a short story about a country where everyone is expected to eat at least one ice cream cone a day, or else be considered defective, and what effects that social expectation would have on peoples' desire to eat ice cream).

What everyone wants is a user interface that just does what the user wants, without forcing the user to figure out which remote-button or unrecognizably-abstract onscreen icon to push to make it happen.

If Samsung's AI can implement that, e.g. by listening to free-form English commands and reliably acting on them in a useful manner (a big if, but not inconceivable), it will be popular.

Easier said than done, if most of your content is being streamed over the Internet.