It's a catch-22, and always has been.

Dictatorships are tyrannical no matter how intelligent the leaders are. And given the power structure they have, there is absolutely no way to ensure that the dictator even cares about the people at all.

On the other hand, most people are idiots. They are extremely vulnerable to fake facts and other forms of manipulation, so their voting power isn't actually a form of political power held by the people so much as held by the people who manipulate the people.

What we actually have in America is an oligarchy that pretends to be a constitutional republic. Yes, we vote, but regardless of how many people participate the small group of rich people get everything they want. This is the inescapable result of the general stupidity of the majority of people (not to mention general laziness, apathy, and the very real and pressing need to spend their time earning a living instead of studying up and staying on top of politics).

So we get ruled by elites no matter what we do. The blow is softened a bit in a democracy due to regular rotation of the publicly-visible power-holders, but even then, most of the power is held by un-elected, un-appointed, rich people who only care about the country inasmuch as they have to in order to protect their own wealth.

It does not need to be intelligent in order to qualify as "artificial intelligence." In this context, the word "artificial" means "fake." Like "artificial leather" which is not actually leather, or "artificial crab meat" which is not actually crab meat.

The phrase has been around a long time in the domain of computer science and has always been used to mean "that which imitates intelligence (without actually being intelligent)."

You are not alone in your distaste for the word use here. But you are also greatly outnumbered. The English language doesn't have a final authority on what words mean beyond popular use. And in popular use, the phrase "artificial intelligence" is a very broad term that refers to a wide variety of ways that computers do things that seem intelligent (even though they actually aren't).

So, your pleas for people to stop using the phrase this way fall on deaf ears. That ship sailed long ago. This is what the phrase means, and will continue to mean, no matter how much you disapprove.

Yes, it was supposed to be a joke. Meta-humor, specifically. I was denying that the article applied to me while clearly exemplifying exactly what the article was talking about, thematically linked to a common attribute of the Slashdot user base (arrogance about one's own intelligence).

Oh well. There is a reason I don't work as a professional comedian.

I already know for a fact that I am smarter than most of the human population.

It's just nice to have a conversation with someone smart enough to recognize that. Even if it is an AI.

I thought that what Oracle was really good at was trapping customers into oppressive contracts and using legal action to extract money.

This question comes up quite a lot, in this context and in other contexts. We like it because it makes us feel like industry leadership is being irrational and short-sited, and boy will they get theirs!

In reality, this isn't as much of a conundrum as it seems. As it stands right now, AI can't actually eliminate entry level programmers, despite the marketing hype. It might reduce the raw number of entry level positions in the industry, but not down to zero. So, the problem doesn't actually exist yet.

But hypothetically speaking, even if we did completely eliminate the need for entry level programmers industry-wide, here is the most likely way that would shake out:

First, the jobs go poof, people are laid off, unemployment rises, career transitions start happening, college enrollment in compsci drops significantly etc. Everyone thinks these are pre-shocks of a coming earthquake, but they are not.

After experienced programmers start retiring and demand for experienced programmers is on the rise:

1. the experienced programmers will be paid a lot to come out of retirement, even on short term contracts. And many of them will do this out of sheer boredom, since retirees universally learn that retirement ain't all it's cracked up to be.
2. businesses start looking to hire people with alternative experience, mainly open source contributions.
3. businesses apply significant political pressure to get more H1B visas for these positions, and succeed.
4. businesses can start hiring inexperienced programmers into experienced roles, almost always pairing them up with experienced mentors. THere is a productivity and quality loss due to this, but it also winds up producing enough experienced developers to keep things going.

And done.

Economic conditions change all the time, and people just adapt to them. Usually any kind of gloom-and-doom economic prediction is based on the belief that one specific thing will change while everything else in the economy is held constant. This assumption is never true.

"Google AI Studio" has a free tier that allows API access to the latest Gemini models for code generation. There are no ads when you use them through an API. Of course, you have to code or otherwise obtain a front-end that can do that.

The free tier is only good for an individual developer, and the use restrictions might be a bit too tight for devoted professional code development work. But if you are using it for professional work, then you can spring for a paid tier anyway.

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

(Score:X, Troll)

And yet, your imaginary friend still isn't real. ;)

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

And clearly God (who as we know, is a scalar field) is an AI. That's why there's so much "slop" in the Bible - factual errors, contradictions, different versions of the same text that heavily contradict each other, etc etc. It all makes so much more sense now!

At one point last week I pasted the first ~300 words or so of the King James Bible into an AI detector. It told me that over half of it was AI generated.

And seriously, considering some of the god-awful stuff passing peer review in "respectable" journals these days, like a paper in AIP Advances that claims God is a scalar field becoming a featured article, or a paper in Nature whose Figure 1 is an unusually-crappy AI image talking about "Runctitiononal Features", "Medical Fymblal", "1 Tol Line storee", etc... at the very least, getting a second opinion from an AI before approving a paper would be wise.

FYI, their statement about Iceland is wrong. BEV sales were:

2019: 1000
2020: 2723
2021: 3777
2022: 5850
2023: 9260
2024 (first year of the "kílómetragjald" and the loss of VAT-free purchases): 2913
2025: 5195

Does this look like the changes had no impact to anyone here? It's a simple equation: if you increase the cost advantage of EVs, you shift more people from ICEs to EVs, and if you decrease it, the opposite happens. If you add a new mileage tax, but don't add a new tax to ICE vehicles, then you're reducing the cost advantage. And Iceland's mileage tax was quite harsh.

The whole structure of it is nonsensical (they're working on improving it...), and the implementation was so damned buggy (it's among other things turned alerts on my inbox for government documents into spam, as they keep sending "kílómetragjald" notices, and you can't tell from the email (without taking the time to log in) whether it's kílómetragjald spam or something that actually matters). What I mean by the structure is that it's claimed to be about road maintenance, yet passenger cars on non-studded tyres do negligible road wear. Tax vehicles by axle weight to the fourth times mileage, make them pay for a sticker for the months they want to use studded tyres, and charge flat annual fees (scaled by vehicle cost) for non-maintenance costs. Otherwise, you're inserting severe distortion into the market - transferring money from those who aren't destroying the roads to subsidize those who are, and discouraging the people who aren't destroying the roads from driving to places they want to go (quality of life, economic stimulus, etc)

I expect several consequences of this, including:

1. Model collapse. Training LLMs on the output of other LLMs has been shown to lower the model's quality, and it gets worse with each iteration. So, the Internet has become less valuable as an LLM training data source, and this trend will continue, making it more difficult to train new models or improve existing ones.

2. Increased demand for guaranteed human-generated content. This is both from competition between LLM training businesses who need original sources to use as training data, AND from humans who want or need something that is not hallucination-polluted slop.

3. Increased incidence of humans submitting LLM generated slop AS human-generated content. We have already seen this happening in every place you might expect, with comical effect from catching people red-handed lying about this.

4. The bursting of the LLM bubble. Recently experts in the field have said that current training methods have already hit "peak AI" even from good data sources. The landscape continues to change rapidly so I don't know if that is true, but it is at least possible given what is known. An overall decrease in the availability of high quality training data will only make this worse. Then ensuing stagnation in LLM improvement will flatten out the demand curve for LLM services in general.

5. Profit! Especially for everyone who managed to eliminate a lot of human employees thanks to LLMs.

Sure do :) I can provide more if you want, but start there, as it's a good read. Indeed, blind people are much better at understanding the consequences of colours than they are at knowing what colours things are..