Then they'll find out the hard way that Steve was right.

Unlock all interactions? No. Unlocking a specific interaction? Maybe.

For common uses (like the public web), the most likely approach to decrypting a specific interaction is to break the RSA (cert-based) on the outside and then the Diffie-Hellman (ephemeral per-transaction) on the inside, then recover the symmetric encryption key to decrypt the rest of the conversation. But this is not trivial, and it requires more work than to just toss the transaction into the quantum computer.

The ephemeral layer is where things get harder. Even if you can derive the RSA key on a regular connection, you've got the first layer, but the DH layer is redone for each new connection. (Some sites don't use DH, or are vulnerable to downgrade attacks where DH isn't used, but DH is pretty widespread.) Every ephemeral negotiation has to be individually cracked. Tor uses DH or x25519 on all connections, so each has to be individually cracked. It is expected that breaking an individual 2048-bit RSA or DH encryption would take several hours if one had a quantum computer of sufficient power. Cracking 3072- or 4096-bit RSA/DH will take even longer, if it's even possible on the same systems. However, we appear to be a long way from such capabilities, and the NSA isn't likely to use it to break arbitrary Tor connection encryption, saving it instead for much more practical items. As soon as the NSA has practical quantum computing, it's going to have decades of backlog to go through just for the international signals, and getting anything moved up in line is going to need a damned good reason.

I own, but do not operate, a few IT companies that manage corporations in the $600MM-$1B receivables range.

Based on our own help desk ticket software, our clients have opened 40% fewer tickets since ChatGPT was rolled out to every desk and phone. 40%. I expect another 40% drop (total 80%) by next year as end users just manage things themselves.

I won't downsize as the tickets aren't really generating revenue as much as headaches. One of my engineers had a broken PDF file that took her 6 hours to fix, and the end user spent 6 days trying to fix it themselves with Ai.

But -- the basic stuff? Reboot your computer stuff? Email rejected because you mistyped a domain name stuff?

You don't need a human, and we would probably have outsource that stuff to India anyway next year if not for ChatGPT etc.

> Making Alexa is not THAAAAT hard

Last year, the WSJ reported that Amazon lost $25 billion on Alexa from 2017-2021, partially from selling devices below cost but mostly because of development costs. It seems like it's harder than you think.

hell, even when a human enters the data, from the business, into 'google', that data can be wrong...as I discovered just 3 days ago when a restaurant with "recently updated hours" said they should be open until 10pm...and were closed when I arrived at 8:45.

so yeah, if i'm investing in a trip to another freakin' country, damn right i'm gonna have every scheduled event or location double-checked by contacting a human at in the know some point in the process.

I spend quite a bit on Discord server services, but I'm out.

GFY, Discord and governments, for mandating this bullshit nonsense.

I also bought nice charging bricks. I don't need any more.

As a dev in a relatively large team (divided into sub-teams), the faster we make coding tools (even if it is just internal libraries to turn 20 lines of boilerplate into 1 line of code, to turn large if-else chains into declarative look-up systems), the faster the code comes out... ...and the more QA needs to happen to verify every thing is working to whatever our level of mission-critical is.

The code is not always the bottleneck (until you get to a big new feature or a big necessary rewrite). The process of QA and regression testing is, as well as the need to spread features out to avoid overwhelming the current user-base that are just trying to get their job done and hate it when something appears that breaks muscle memory. "Damn Engineers, always love to change things." - Dr. McCoy.

Of course, this presumes your management cares about such things. Maybe for internal projects they won't and that could be an outlet for vibe and 'speed to delivery' ahead of anything else. But customer-facing code has customer-facing concerns that slow things down a lot more than just how fast your devs can churn code or churn themselves.

Correct.

If you are not a tech person, right now from all the hype and news and bullshit, you would rightly assume that AI is an amazing revolution and you would barely have heard about its shortcomings.

Though that might've just been him thinking "stupid Europeans know only Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. I'll just say Moscow, close enough."

This. I've had to descend a mountain as the sun was going down once (got stuck at the top due to weather for some time, and when it let up enough for a safe descent, it was late). It's absolutely not fun, even when there's still some light. Had it been dark, I think I would've taken my chances staying at the top rather than going down.

That said, anyone not a complete idiot checks things like "time of last cable car" a) in person, b) at the day, c) at the location. Because even there is an official website that is well-maintained (and that's already two big if's) things might change at the location due to weather, workers being ill, no tourists that day or whatever.

Also, checking in person means at least one other person knows that you're up there.

Talking to people in public isnâ(TM)t harassment.

Talking to people on taxpayer funded grounds also isnâ(TM)t trespass.

Tax funded?

Not private property anymore.

AI is a tool. And like any tool its introduction creates proponents and enemies.

Some might say I'm a semi-professional writer. As in: I make money with things I write. From that perspective, I see both the AI slop and the benefits. I love that AI gives me an on-demand proof-reader. I don't expect it to be anywhere near a professional in that field. But if I want to quickly check a text I wrote for specific things, AI is great, because unlike me it hasn't been over that sentence 20 times already and still parses it completely.

As for AI writing - for the moment it's still pretty obvious, and it's mostly low-quality (unless some human has added their own editing).

The same way that the car, the computer, e-mail and thousands of other innovations have made some jobs obsolete, some jobs easier, and some jobs completely new, I don't see AI as a threat. And definitely not to my writing. Though good luck Amazon with the flood of AI-written garbage now clogging up your print-on-demand service.