I'm in the same situation as you (embedded C and real-time Linux kernel programming), and last year I got handled exam results that were *very* obviously written by chatgpt. When I asked the university about what the policy about this was, the answer was "there is no policy about AI" so I was disgusted to have to give grade 'A' to ChatGPT. And this year there's been no policy change so I expect the same, and I can tell already the students are far from being as good as last year.

For most of my early life, Intel was about process engineering, not CPU engineering. They were usually a year ahead of other manufacturers so even if their CPU design was lacklustre they could win on the manufacturing process.

Then they lost the lead there and now their problems with CPU designs have caught up with them.

Intel sacking white men and replacing them with DIE hires was widely discussed over the last decade, along with predictions of the inevitable end result. Which is now clear to everyone.

That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

No-one I know on the right want to spy on everyone's phones.

It's a government thing, not a left/right thing. Governments want to spy on everything all the time because they're authoritarian scumbags, regardless of whether they claim to be left-wing or right-wing.

I mean, it's not a right-wing government pushing Digital ID in the UK. It's a left-wing Labour government who claim to be the socialist party of the working man and have been trying to force ID cards on the British people for the best part of thirty years now. Nor is a right-wing EU government pushing software to spy on every private message.

I think I'd rather be nuked than starved.

A couple of hundred years ago a big volcanic eruption threw masses of dust into the atmosphere and blocked out the sun to the point where there was famine over much of the planet because many food plants couldn't grow.

Now the tech bros want to do that artificially because they're so smart they know exactly how to control the weather.

They're going to kill us all.

That's what I just said.

My ISP in the US has had broken SSL on POP3/SMTP for a year. It just won't work so matter how many tickets I fill: all their certificates and protocols are outdated and the 'fix' is to disable SSL. In other words everything in the clear. Incompetence ? Or a clear design to 'open up' to outside listeners ?

No, actually theres plenty of studies. You have to look first if you want to know!

Look up "watching eye effect supermarket" in google scholar or your academic search engine of choice. Theres literally hundreds of studies.

Here's where the summary goes wrong:

Artificial Intelligence is in fact many kinds of technologies. People conflate LLMs with the whole thing because its the first kind of AI that an average person with no technical knowledge could use after a fashion.

But nobody is going to design a new rocket engine in ChatGPT. They're going to use some other kind of AI that work on problems on processes that the average person can't even conceive of -- like design optimization where there are potentially hundreds of parameters to tweak. Some of the underlying technology may have similarities -- like "neural nets" , which are just collections of mathematical matrices that encoded likelihoods underneath, not realistic models of biological neural systems. It shouldn't be surprising that a collection of matrices containing parameters describing weighted relations between features should have a wide variety of applications. That's just math; it's just sexier to call it "AI".

Too bad Australia's court hold zero sway over these social media companies and their fines mean nothing.

If they do business here, they have an office here, servers here and have legal liabilities here. Just like any business.

All the major social media companies dont just have offices here, they have datacenters, or major presences in data centers, here. More than that, they have clients here, and like any company that gets fined, if they dont pay those fines, the courts just *take* the money.

Don't be naive.

You speak with the bias of a person who has experienced a life of multiple hobbies and multiple possibilities and dismiss very legitimate concerns. For people who are actually addicted to shit like social media things can get very nasty indeed.

Thats who the legislation is for. Break the damn screen addiction.

...consider listening to One Person Found This Helpful", a BBC radio comedy show about absurd reviews for often even more absurd products. Surprisingly good show.

For anyone not from the UK...not sure if you can access it, but even if you can you're going to need to make your way through a full-on Birmingham accent. Godspeed, you brave intrepid souls.