White House aides can even transport a globe without smashing it to bits. Good luck flying a rocket around the Earth and then around the Moon.

There is always negotiation around capital expenditures and head count at the places I've worked. It is tough to make the argument purely on long term savings alone, because it is so disruptive.
On the other hand, engineering managed to get Macbooks added to the list of approved systems even though they are more expensive to purchase and more complex to manage (difficult to image and tie into the corporate services). So it is possible to do things even when they are financially and logistically a less desirable option.

Easiest for engineering is to say we deploy Linux in the cloud, so might as well put Linux on our laptops. That works sometimes as an argument. Getting web based email and calendar makes the Linux path a little easier. But cyber security and employee monitoring is harder on Linux so IT doesn't like it.

Billionaires in the Epstein class already control the media. They own 90% of it. There is no reason for them to bother attacking their own infrastructure.

The tactics used in America for maintaining control are really simple. Control the media. Undermine education so that people do not learn critical thinking, used generic moral panics to keep people from voting in their economic interests, disrupt left wing and progressive get out the vote campaigns and actual effective political organization, and finally lots of lots of voter suppression done at the county level. New Hampshire just made it so that you can't use a student ID to vote and naturally the supreme Court said that's a-ok. And of course our entire drug policy was set up by Richard Nixon in order to attack progressives and the left wing.

So with all that already in place there's absolutely no need to do fancy shit disrupting the left wing like that. It's like the old comic about the guy with the 1024-bit encryption getting hit with a $2 wrench until he gives them the password.

When I ask the models that my company makes available to me to write something it will kind of sort of do it. But about half the time it will generate something that is completely wrong. I then have to debug it and then well I could have just written it myself.

It also takes a tremendous amount of effort to learn how to correctly prompt and again well, at that point why don't I just write it myself?

The programming isn't what takes forever it's getting all the business logic in place and explaining it to people. I spent hours explaining to management why something they wanted to do wouldn't work, implemented it, it didn't work, and I will have to reimplement a bunch of stuff now.

One thing AI will do it will let everyone be a code monkey. But those jobs were already in India so as an American I'm not that concerned.

On the other hand AI has convinced leadership that a shitload of things that can be automated that they for some reason didn't believe could be automated can now in fact be automated. So AI is devouring jobs indirectly. A bunch of jobs that could be automated or now in the process of automation and are just disappearing. It's why America is pushing 25% functional unemployment. We are basically in a 2008 style recession and just not talking about it

Admittedly I wasn't using a paid frontier model, but I've tried it a few times with very mixed results.

One attempt was to write some code for a microcontroller to do some tricky stuff with DMA and timers to generate a complex waveform. It failed miserably and couldn't seem to understand my implementation that did work, or debug it when I introduced a subtle bug.

Another attempt involved having to develop a system to automatically crop and rotate images to be upright and remove the border. It managed to remove the border reliably, but never got about about 30% of them upright. I provided it with sample, hand crafted output to compare against, and told it to keep iterating until it got it right, but it just couldn't figure out how to do it.

Ironically if I just uploaded the images to bog standard consumer AIs like Gemini and ChatGPT, they could reliably crop and rotate the images 100% of the time. I even suggested that it use the same image recognition systems as those were using, but it couldn't make that work either.

I used to hate long form writing because it hurt my hands, due to arthritis. When I learned to type I was suddenly freed from the pain and I started to enjoy it.

So while hand-written notes are a nice idea, they won't work for everyone. I think recording the screen is going to be the only option for some kids.

It seems to disproportionately affect people on the Autism spectrum. I've been accused of it more than once, and seen people accused when to me their text reads perfectly normally.

These detectors seem to be a load of crap.

From what I understand they're not exactly a nice company. Apparently they have a habit of stealing images and using their size to bully the photographers into silence.

But either way it sucks because it means more AI slop. We're already seeing these absolutely ridiculous and hideous restaurant menus all over the place. One thing I learned years ago good enough is always good enough.

Transform the micro plastics in my brain into slow release caffeine.

Hire up 5-10% more IT and technical writing staff to support and train your regular and engineering staff. You don't need ActiveDirectory, Exchange, and Windows for 90% of your team. Cost for support and licensing is a tiny fraction of Microsoft, etc. and you have more flexibility on when upgrades are forced on you with free or cheap support on a version fork going out to 5 years or more. There are handful of enterprise components that are not easily found in open source. Sometimes you can do without them, or only a certain group within the org needs them. Othertimes you can get contractors to build what you need and a small support staff to maintain it. Especially if you can leverage it as an enhancement to an existing open source project.

I don't think I want to live below a data center. With regular coolant leaks and loud ventilation fans and diesel generators turning on at peak energy times.

There are 640 acres in a square mile

[Sighs in metric]

That it can be mistaken for AI then well, shit man I'm sorry.

That said AI is fundamentally plagiarism on demand. This means that the same tools that have been developed for a long long time for detecting plagiarism will work just fine. The real problem is people are assholes and they will accuse people of using AI to write stuff and people will join in because people are assholes.

The solution is to start discouraging people from being assholes. But that is a big lift because behind every asshole is our competitive culture. We really like to turn absolutely fucking everything into a goddamn competition. Nobody can have any fun unless they are either making a shitload of money from it or they are the absolute best at it. It's especially bad here in America where puritanical bullshit means that anything you do that isn't inherently valuable is a moral failing on your part.

Basically fix the actual problems in society and dumb little problems like this go away. But that requires change that I don't think anyone wants to make. A cooperative society would be better for everyone except a handful of assholes but well here we are

Microsoft has probably the most illustrious history of bugs where just visiting a website or opening an email can get your system hacked, but you're right, this is not a problem unique to them.

These days, Lookout asks you before it loads any images from outside your organization...

Assuming there are 2028 elections. Let's see how he reacts to the mid-terms.

They probably have intel that China is making good progress on it's "before 2030" goal. They have all the parts needed either working or in late stages of development, and their plan is conservative and focused.