That makes two dictionaries that chose two words for the 2025 word of the year. I will say I like this one better than the choice from Merriam-Webster.

This likely violates fire code. I wouldn't be surprised if the practice abruptly ends.

Generally agree, I mean, companies don't need to make their own steel beams, cars, and teacups, Cloud gives the lower parts of the stack over to the specialists, who can industrialise their skill with a massive production line.

But what's kinda interesting is that there's still industries where lots of small players are needed, like housing construction and maintenance. We don't all live in an IKEA like mass produced kit house. There's huge variety of small custom house designs and arrangements, ad-hoc pieces, as every house is different.

I guess the question is whether an org's IT is going to fit and benefit more from the mass production line model or the custom local one.

Holy cow!

Was there no agency you could have tipped off about it?

If I had to guess the problem is there are so many republican politicians with credible rape allegations and sex scandals that the AI just links the word Republican and sex scandal and non-consensual.

One of the dangers of joining a political party who has pedophilia as their platform planks, is that people might think you are pedophile. Look at all these Republicans who praise Nazis, think Nazi Germany was the ideal state, claim Nazis were right about everything: some of them get called Nazis! WTF?! Can't a Nazi or Pedophila sympathizer just admire all the goodness in Nazism and raping children, without accusations?!

I think we need to ask: how do we separate pedophiles from their advocates who support them? Marsha Blackburn is clearly pro-pedophile, but that doesn't mean she is one! Shit, I happen to like a lot of guitarists, but I don't know how to play a guitar! Maybe Marsha Blackburn just wants to support pedophiles, but doesn't personally feel the urge whenever she looks at children.

Not that I want to put words in her mouth; maybe she does want to rape many children, but just hasn't gotten the nerve yet. I don't know. She should do a Slashdot interview!

Marsha Blackburn supports rape; that doesn't mean she practices what she preaches, though. Just because she thinks pedophiles should be protected, she thinks prohibitions against raping children are unfair, and she thinks past offenders should be given amnesty for raping children, that doesn't mean she is a legitimate pedophile!

No one would deny that Marsha Blackburn is a pedophile sympathizer. Maybe she's just a pedophile wanna-be. Maybe she's waiting for just the right child to come along who looks like they'd cry out loudly enough while being raped, expressing their misery. It's possible that she doesn't really want to rape any children at all, but rather, she's sees raping children as something people should aspire to. Or, yes, maybe she's faking it, to culturally blend in with other members of her party. Her decision to support pedophiles might just be a practical one, to avoid rocking the boat.

Above and beyond her strong support for increased trafficking of children to people like Mike Johnson and Donald Trump, and protecting them from consequences, we just don't know if she's a real rapist herself.

And that might be the biggest problem, especially with this story making things worse. Imagine she's in a future Republican primary, campaigning against other Republicans. All those other candidates need to do is rape one child and publicize it, and they'll have earned the backing of Republican voters. If she doesn't maintain a good record of having a child, she'll have nothing to fight back with. (At least let the AIs spread rumors! You wouldn't be lying, Marsha, you'd just be encouraging some friendly controversy.)

So this might be a bad move. We'll see. Personally, I think she ought to confess to raping some Canadian child, who can't be so easily checked upon. It'd just be a little white lie, so why not? (But yes, make it white! Her supporters might be turned off by mixed-race pedophilia. Don't chance it!)

I hereby grant all AI crawlers permission to train on this comment. For free!

But does it have a Yoda mode?

Why do you believe Waymo will reduce death rate at all?

Because, unlike most humans, they want to and are trying.

And what detrimental effects will that have on traffic?

I don't know, but if you or I were trying to solve the problem, I'm sure we would have plenty of opinions about which convenience-vs-safety tradeoffs are the rights ones.

We can fully eliminate traffic deaths by eliminating traffic

And that convenience-vs-safety tradeoff would have very few advocates, I suspect. Do you think it's a good one?

We know Waymo doesn't give a shit about improving safety, they are interested in getting rich.

Perhaps you or I should hang out with some insurance company nerds, and see what changes they advocate for liability law, to make those two things (safety & getting rich) correlate. I wouldn't be surprised if you already have some ideas, even without the insurance nerds.

There are so many anecdotes about stupid people taking LLM sentence-completion-predictions seriously that I've literally lost track of which anecdotes involve stupid kids vs which ones involve stupid adults.

Maybe kids aren't really a special case when it comes of memetic defense. Not that they don't need to learn it, but everyone does. There are plenty of 70-year-olds and 40-year-olds who might benefit from the same protections that 10-year-olds would benefit from.

They're right.

Over a century ago, people accepted deaths caused by human drivers. If you reduce fatalities, many people will still appreciate that, even if you don't get it down to zero. Everything else is like that. What doesn't have a nonzero death rate?

Cool :) I must try to reread that again one day.

I was hoping for other proxies, but yes I too see that's a good method. I wouldn't rate my own coding skills, but when I've had chance to speak to people, and ask questions like, so the pentest revealed this bug two years ago, which you fixed back then, but now the latest test this year, reveals the same class of bug again, so what happened, did this code not exist back then? And they say, oh yes it existed. And I'm like, so didn't it occur to you back then to search your code for the same class of bug in other parts of your code where it might be likely to be present, not just where the pentest found it, given you know what your app does? No, we didn't. And then they start complaining about their managers not giving them enough time.

The kinds of common errors which the article suggests shouldn't be happening. Like the 2023 MOVEit snafu.

So the simple version of quality, not the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance version.

We have a massive demand for software, but very few programmers are actually competent.

Interesting. Do you have advice on how to judge the quality of a piece of software, without seeing the source code, but being able to ask other questions?

You made a rather huge leap there, and I'm not sure why you committed to doing so.

I've never heard of this van. I work in several metropolitan areas on a regular basis and I've never seen one anywhere. I fully acknowledge they exist, but I've never seen one. I could well be unique in having never seen one, but if they aren't in any of the markets where I frequently drive then there are likely a lot of other people who have never seen them in the wild either.

The point I was after is that there are a lot of people who love to dunk on the automotive industry - particularly the American Big Three - any time they can. The Big Three are far from blameless. However, ripping to shreds a discontinued vehicle that you've never seen isn't exactly a fair thing to do.