Anyone reading this, please please do not finance a car's worth of money on some new gadget you're not even sure if you have a use for. I've had many friends do similar. Friends who took out tech loans from the university at 9% interest for a new gaming rig that was outdated in 3 years, and are still paying it back. Friends that would get behind on utility bills so they could get the brand new Gaming system. Just don't. Having entertainment and fun should be available for all, but do it with in your budget for heavens sake.

If you have 5k burning a hole in your pocket and you wouldn't' notice if it disappeared from your bank account, sure do it if thats what you enjoy.

It being on Discord does not inherently make it public. Many servers are public, but not all. However, even if it's not a public server, Discord is still party to the communication and may be compelled to release it. Alternatively, stuff like this can happen.

What makes you think you're in control?

If you get getting a CompSci degree just for the money -- don't. I have had many employees over the years and there is a direct correlation between people who don't really like to program (ie in it for the money) and getting yourself fired. Go find something you actually want to do for a career.

Then you dont know what dark matter is.

Dark matter isn't a theory. Its an observation. We see the gravitation effects of a huge amount of matter, but we dont know what it is, and we can't see it. Hence its "Dark". The whole point of "Dark Matter" is its a placeholder term until we understood what is causing that massive gravitational effect.

Thats the difference here. Tired light is a concept that directly contradicts the observational data. Dark matter is observational data looking for a theory to explain it.

In science we do data, and if the theory doesnt match the data, the theory is wrong. And tired light does not match the data.

C and its derivatives have enjoyed popularity because of the low-level access to hardware provided. That same functionality has also led to a huge number of security holes and exploits.

Other languages, many of which are already considered "safer" for development of critical software (e.g. Ada), already exist. However, most of them are relegated to niche markets, and efforts to expand their acceptance have been met by resistance. The cost barrier to entry for Ada, for example, is simply prohibitive for many development teams.

Perhaps more emphasis should be placed on the development process, instead of the specific language used for development. If, for example, teams creating critical software (and the term "critical" is left to the interpretation of the reader) were to follow the JPL "Power Of Ten" development rules, the specific language being used for development wouldn't matter. Take away avenues for safety and security issues to enter the code, instead of relying on the compiler to catch and flag those avenues.

That's as far as I go.

The counterargument is that if you're writing code before you're designing the solution, you're setting yourself up for trouble.

Why is it that every other engineering discipline designs their product first, then builds it, but software seems to have this idea of building it first?

Sure this is a reductionist observation, but my experience is that probably 80% of software problems are due to "write code first" instead of "think about it and design it first, then implement the design in code."

There's definitely a continuum of prototype vs design. Both a benefit and detriment of software is that it allows very cheap "prototyping" - the problem is the prototype is often then shipped as the product.

No other industry tends to ship prototypes to end customers, because prototypes are not robust.

I don't know why so many software folks - and software management in particular - are afraid of engineering discipline.

Because not keeping those records is an even bigger liability. If they did have records then at least some of the blame attaches to those who did the work. Without any records not only does all the blame attach to management but the lack of proper record keeping is more evidence of their incompetence.

So, we should be more like China... got it...

I've heard many people say this as if it's a proven fact. It isn't.

In many situations, a crappy first pass saves time.

For instance, machine translations save time for human translators. They use an LLM to do a first pass and then go through and correct the mistakes, saving 40-60% of the time it would take to translate the entire text directly.

The same is true for LLM coding. Tools like Copilot make blunders, but they often produce a good framework, and many sections are correct, saving about half the time a competent coder would need to write from scratch. LLMs can also help with writing unit tests.

The same will likely be true in show business. LLMs will write scripts and lyrics requiring touchups but less human effort. Generative AI is already having a big effect on CGI.

I know how this is going to be modded because uncomfortable truth is uncomfortable, but I got karma to burn so do your worst.

I can say about AI only what I had to say about unqualified offshore work: If you are threatened by something that does a shoddy job at what you do, there's something wrong on a different level.

Because either quality just doesn't matter whatsoever, or you're doing a shoddy job yourself so nothing of value is lost by handing it to someone doing a crappy job cheaper.

And considering how the writing in some of the more recent movies was, I cannot say that I'll expect a lot of quality loss if the task is taken over by some half-baked AI doing a mediocre, derivative job, probably just rehashing some of the hits of the past and mashing it together with other crap, adding a dash of contemporary "must have" (at least according to studios, because you have to cram in some ethnicities for that all important foreign market, because I would clearly only watch a movie if someone like me is in it...)...

And I fail to see the difference to the crap that is already produced by human writers.

So bluntly, if your job is threatened by something that does a crappy job at what it does, I think the problem is that you're not really doing a better job, or that nobody wants a better job done.

So blame the person currently holding that job for not doing a better job, or blame the customer for not demanding a better job. Your pick.

The can't wait to see all of the amazing things this AI will be able to accomplish. I plan on asking it to write a program to solve the halting problem. After that I'll have it tackle world hunger and after it knocks that one out, maybe an app to tell me whether or not a tie goes good with my outfit.

LLMs and Stable Diffusion are not blockchain. There is already clear and realized not anticipated commercial applications.

Even if the extent of it turns out to be, stock photo and marketing materials generation, basic customer service interactions, 'auto summary on steroids' for documents, e-mail threads, primer research, a search result aggregation; it has already proven to be useful. Just about every business larger than "Joe's Lawn and Power washing" and maybe even Joe is going to want to some.

Now is it going to completely alter the world they way some people think it is? I don't know. However a market bet against AI (general) vs a specific company or product family, would be like betting against Relation Database technology in the later 70s because the office will never be entirely paperless.