To quote Predator 2, "Take a deep breath; loosen your sphincters."

Yes, I've I had interactions with it that I'd REALLY rather no one ever sees. I took the gamble, and I firmly believe my life is better for it.

Anyway. No one wants all our inner secrets blasted open so the NY Times can run them on the front page, *especially* the NY Times. Can you imagine what would happen if the Times, an organization of about 6000 people in a dying industry running out of money, disclosed every thought of the, I dunno, hundreds of millions who's ever interacted with OpenAI in some way? Including people with enough money buy them 1000 times over? They'd be such a smoking crater that the lawyers would have nothing left to fight over after about 3 milliseconds. I'd be enjoying my remaining lifetime of free daily Wordle as part of the settlement. (Are there even that many 5-letter words? Hm.)

Anyway. This is about not about the bump on your [redacted], or my crush on [redacted], or that time you admitted to [redacted]. This is an American story, which makes it about *money*. Specifically, the Times being one of the last holdouts in the death of 20th-century journalism, which is sad in its own right and I don't have an answer for. They are clinging to the last throes, and funding, of that era, and I guess this is what they've got left. They want to be paid off, hoping that the AI companies, with their infinite venture capital, will eventually stuff their mouths full of Benjamins until they shut up, which ultimately was probably the right thing for AI companies to do in the first place.

Expect Reddit, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia to follow suit. They'll get paid, and we'll enjoy. In the meantime, guys, chill. AI is the future, one way or another.

"We're here! We're engineered! Get used to it!"

I've been in the engineering biz for 25 years, had a highly successful salary progression, and have never once been "promoted." Every advancement has come through switching jobs, which is easy to do if you're good at what you do. Seriously, I'm what some of you might call old, and I think the concept of "promotion" is for gullible old people. Screw the gold watch; it's a stupid mirage.

I agree with a previous poster that this is a fantastic development, and allows Dell employees to trade a phantom Boomer promise that will never materialize for real, major benefit right now. Which means it won't last long once the Dell execs figure out

I won't even stoop to discussing the content of this embarrassing drivel. I feel slightly dumber just for having read the summary.

What's "mind-bending" to me is that someone with posting privileges on Slashdot *actually thought this was worth posting.* Seriously, "biological processes *create time*"? Wow, yeah! Sounds legit, and totally worthy of the attention of a group of intelligent people coming here to read serious science news! The world must know right away that Einstein, Hawking and every other renowned physicist for centuries was wildly off, and it was salamander neurons the whole time! What a day for humanity!

This voodoo gibberish is miles beneath the standards of this site and an utter waste of our time. If we wanted to read verbal diarrhea from crazies, we'd be on 4chan or some shit.

I will watch any time-travel thriller, but this one doesn't settle for just one or two time loops' worth of hyjinks. "Dark" really lets the characters make a tangled mess out of their timelines, and it's a freakin' blast to watch.

I needed to read an episode synopsis after watching each episode in order to absorb all the details and implications, but it's really worth the extra thought to understand it all.

Ccome on now. This ad frankly captures the depressed, escapist mood we all have right now perfectly. This post also captures Slashdot's tendency to cherry-pick out everything MSFT does as the source of all evil perfectly. Full disclosure, I have never worked for MSFT and am a day-to-day Mac and PS4 user.

I'm sorry if you're sad. So am I. Go out and exercise, or play some Halo, and stop filling up my News for Nerds with your bitching. I'd rather hear about Stuff That Matters.

This entire post (and almost all of the comments) seem based on the self-evident truth that all things Disney does are evil, because as we know, power === evil, and they have a lot of power. And, yes, they do plenty of evil! Paying zillions to their execs while laying off massive numbers of employees during the lockdown, for example.

Buuuuut...they're totally open that the whole point of this campaign is to use people's comments in some sort of promotion. So, *of course* they'd have to secure (something US law would consider) your permission to do that, and *of course* they're not going to send letters from their legal department to every commenter. How on earth would they?

So they're doing pretty much the only thing I can think of: tying permission to the use of this hashtag and the reply to that particular tweet. That's pretty much going to narrow the application of their terms of use to only the people who read that tweet and understand that their words are going to be used. Honestly, this sounds like the work of somebody trying to do the right thing within their legal department, walking the line between the law, their customers, and the whims of the marketing department. And despite, all the while, knowing they'll surely be vilified on Slashdot for merely drawing breath.

Can we dial down the knee-jerk hysteria? They could have just said nothing, and still used your tweets.

Oh my goodness, it took me a while to catch my breath after all that laughing. Thanks Unqork, I needed that after this week.

Those of us medium-to-old-timers may remember Microsoft Visual J++ in the late 90s, which was in my opinion one of the best RAD tools so far. It was another of MSFT's attempts at embrace-extend-and-extinguish, and despite its failure at the last part, it was a great product. Now, when I say "great," I mean "one of the only RAD tools ever to make my work slightly faster than manually coding up UIs." That's a far cry from "I don't have to use code anymore!" Naturally, the marketing gurus at Microsoft were touting VJ++ using much the same hype - "you won't have to code anymore!" And, of course, what was nonsense then is nonsense now.

There are two reasons: (1, and most importantly) logic flows in software do not exist in the confines of 2D space, which every visual tool of course does. Mapping out connections between pieces of logic, even in the best-designed programs, are a complex web that would be a complete mess if depicted in two (or even three) dimensions - understanding them would be harder than understanding normal code by a mile.

Secondly, these pre-made frameworks that purport to spit out anything you can imagine are aimed at non-technical executives who still believe there's a magic wand *just beyond their grasp.* A wand that confers the reality-creating power of an engineering department without dealing with those curmugeonly nay-sayers who always point out the sticky details of what they're asking. Inevitably, these frameworks are limited to the imaginations of those executives, and fall victim to the same lack of understanding of the devil in the details. There have been more than a few of these too.

So, go for it, Unqork! Collect your VC money and re-teach us the lessons we've learned so many times before. Meanwhile, we engineers will have to, once again, come up with explanations to our non-technical executives why the latest magic wand isn't going to work. And around once more the wheel of fate goes.

...over the total train wreck that is our existing system of recruiters and HR people. Perhaps before describing automation using such negative language as "de-humanizing," we should consider the (often utterly broken) human system it's replacing.

Recruiters are massively more biased than even the algorithms we see in the news for being biased. They know nothing about the field they are recruiting for, or else they'd be working in it, rather than in a much lower-paid, also-ran job that gets cut as soon as a recession looms. Worst of all, they have only-human levels of throughput: I can say from experience that after reading only 10 or so resumes, my brain goes so numb that I'm desperately searching for any simplifying bias I can, in order to get through the 100 I'm supposed to. And I'm the hiring manager, so I'm not even on the front lines - the recruiter probably has to screen 10 times that amount.

An algorithm can actually read and digest your resume. It doesn't throw it in the trash just because you didn't go to one of 8 colleges, or because your last name sounds like it has a certain ethnicity (or doesn't). It doesn't heavily favor the first few it reads, in an effort to just fill up the positions to end the torture of reading 100 more resumes.

Will it be a little weird to send in videos of myself answering interview questions to a program? Maybe. Then again, maybe that'll be better too. I'm not knocking it until I try it.

Yes, I am old enough to remember the floppy disk days - when wanting to play Doom, with its billboarded sprites and single-floor rooms, meant loading 18 zillion floppies into your drive. When wanting to draw a freakin' Mandelbrot set meant waiting 3 minutes, and god help you if you wanted to dabble in 3D graphics - I guess you could look up quaternions in the encyclopedia and try to go from there?

Doesn't anyone hear themselves making the "back in the good old days" argument? I hear it again and again, and no one ever seems to notice themselves re-hashing the same tired old pining for a glorious past that never was, or lamenting how terrible "kids today" don't care about quality and want to destroy society.

Things are *good* today. Not perfect, but that's natural in software. The programs of old (that we still use) have fewer bugs because they had like 1% of the code of modern projects, and have now had 40 years of experts staring at them. Of course they'll be less buggy than anything ambitious and new.

If you don't like it, get your hands on the keyboard and build something better. That's what engineers do.

Of course not. If it's 10,000 BC and your opponent is wielding an antelope's femur, having a sword is an overwhelming advantage! But in modern times, that answer changes. Now, a person clearly *can* be very effective with a sword, with a lot of training. But they could be much more effective with a .38, with much less training.

C++ is kind of like the sword of programming. It occupies an important place in history that should be remembered, and in the right hands, it's still fearsome. But gimme a break - in modern times, there are just better options, in every arena of computing. Other languages offer faster learning curves, less ability to blow your foot off because you didn't know some obscure intricacy of the language, and are simpler in pretty much every conceivable way.

C++ is a relic we should regard with a certain reverence, while not taking it seriously for the future.

That's like calling identical twins "duplicate twins" and saying we should drop half of them in any study of population genetics.

If two code files are the same, that's not just noise - a person made that happen for some purpose. It makes no difference whether you find that "bad" or "sloppy" - it's a legitimate part of the in-use population.

Now, that doesn't mean some studies shouldn't still drop them - for example, if I'm studying the *writing* of code, I might want a sample of unique stretches of code that were directly written, not just copied or forked. It just means we shouldn't presume we're improving the work of "other researchers" by casting all these files as useless filler (and I'm guessing most people who are smart enough to research code have already thought of this and are either accounting for it in some way).

Please, before you post on Slashdot about code vulnerabilities, make sure you have at least programmed a "Hello, World" before. This post reminds me of the time a frustrated boss demanded to know why the game AI I was programming didn't "just use common sense."

More vulnerabilities are happening because there is a *massive* increase in software in consumer products. A bazillion products now have codebases that didn't before - ovens, toys, even my damn Christmas tree. Combine that with professional and social media that's always looking to dredge up outrage, and an increase in bad actors who realize that public outrage can work in their favor, and boom! You have a constant stream of stories about security holes. Why is that hard to understand?

Engineers are increasingly educated about new security threats - we evolve much faster in dealing with new challenges than almost any other type of worker. But yes, things get through, because this shit is hard - much harder than clueless internet whining. Also, because we're on the front lines of two wars - against those who tear down what others build, and against those who squelch innovation to preserve their own fat-cat positions - that is exponentially more intense than it was even a few years ago.

Expect the future to get *much* bumpier than this.

While this is an excellent example of silicon valley BS-speak that really means something else, it reminds me a lot of the right-wing code words we hear so often these days: "law and order," "unity," "freedom," etc. We all know what these words really mean, when spoken by certain people.

But, these phrases were all chosen for the honor of being used to cover up dumbness for a reason - because they do represent good ideas, when they are used genuinely and not as some flimsy sheep's clothing for something else. Much like freedom, pivots are good - when they are real. They *can* represent innovation, humility and persistence. Netflix used to send me DVDs in the mail, but they pivoted into the world's streaming overlord. A previous poster mentioned others, all valid.

I'd probably try to focus fire on the hypocrisy of the cover-up rather than on the cover being used.

Seriously, "be very afraid"? Of what, seeing a poorly-targeted ad?

This kind of sky-is-falling rhetoric is usually accompanied by some hysterical but hypothetical situation - what if we are denied jobs for our political stances? What if our employer found out we watch pee-pee porn? What if the jack boots come and...yadda yadda yadda. This post doesn't even bother with that anymore, which I think is what the real threat is in modern times - mindless, shrieky fearmongering about abstract threats. That's basically Fox News's business model, and it gave us Trump.

We've been living with these "dire threats" for a long time now, and nothing has materialized. I don't care if my employer knows my adult entertainment preferences, because they still need my skills. If I'm denied a job for my political stances, they were probably doing me a favor anyway. And if the jack boots aren't at my door under Fuhrer Trump, they aren't coming. Plus, the jack boots probably have their own porn preferences to hide.

I'm not saying it's not an outrage that our government is disregarding the Fourth Amendment, along with most of the others by now. Of course it is, and that's worth discussing. But how, concretely, bad are those things in our everyday lives? Can we at least remain civilized enough to not sound like a bunch of damn conspiracy nuts, long enough to consider that other priorities might be more worth our "fear"?

The internet was built by DARPA and universities, and the web by large research labs - paragons of decentralization? I think not. This fantasy of decentralization got added on later by college kids listening to Napster and thinking it would all turn into some golden, trans-national mass of utopian rainbows. I was one of those college kids in the 90s, and gave that kind of thinking a funny look even back then. Much like nuclear power and Tang, the internet is just a weapon of war that we have somewhat re-purposed into cat videos and porn (both of which are better than Tang).

There was never a "we" that "had" the internet (unless one believes in said utopian rainbows), so "we" cannot "lose" it. it's just a medium for ideas, like books or democracy, although a darned good one, and frankly one that has caused more democratization of more ideas than anything since the printing press. Just because some power-hungry curmudgeons have figured out how to fat-finger their way into a few tweets that help win political office, it doesn't mean the internet wasn't a step forward for ideas overall. It's working, it's healthy, so forget this drama-dude.