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Comment Re:They have to keep sending them up (Score 1) 108

Low latency AI edge computing. There's several military applications, such as directing drone swarms or even providing AI to individual drones.

Perhaps, but I suspect Starlink (etc) already fills most of that use-case, and for the rest, they'll want that compute to be physically located inside the drones themselves, because otherwise the drones will be susceptible to jamming or spoofing.

Comment Re:UBI was proposed in 1968 (Score 1) 206

Why would you think there won't be jobs AI "can't do"? Have you used AI lately? It can do little stuff nicely. But when you throw something complex at it, you have to hand-hold it and give it many follow-up prompts. This is no different than any other type of automation ever.

There will be jobs that AI can't do. How many? Enough to keep 5-10 billion humans employed? What makes you so sure there will be?

Clearly AI has progressed considerably over the last 5-10 years. It's anyone's guess how much further it will progress -- maybe it'll plateau right where it is now, or maybe it will keep becoming more powerful as better algorithms are discovered. I'm not qualified to predict that, and neither are you, but the AI people certainly seem bullish about it.

You actually think money actually "just appears"?

Sorry, I thought you would understand that I meant that the resources that money represents appear, once you've solved the automation problems that currently make mass-production difficult. That's why you can buy a pocket computer today for $300 that would have your cost you billions of dollars twenty years ago, if you could have obtained it at all.

I bet you'd have more interesting conversations if you made a good-faith effort to understand what the other person was saying, rather than just jumping straight to the part where you get to throw insults at them and tell them how dumb they are. Doesn't that get boring?

Comment Re:They have to keep sending them up (Score 4, Insightful) 108

Maybe they want us to believe that they will be a vertically integrated AI provider with data centers in space. I am highly doubtful about the latter; there certainly are business cases for having AI datacenters in space, but they are edge cases.

I have yet to hear of a remotely plausible business case for putting data centers into space. The only benefit is 24/7 solar power, but that benefit is more than offset by the cost of launching everything into orbit, plus the cost of keeping everything properly cooled, plus the cost of radiation-hardening everything, and finally the cost of maintaining hardware in space (or, more likely, the cost of periodically having to write off the entire investment and build and launch new replacement hardware).

Unless Musk is trying to corner the market for AI-generated kiddie-porn (or something similarly illegal that needs to be operated beyond the reach of Earthly authorities), his ground-based competitors will undercut his pricing by a factor of 100, and he therefore won't have a viable product to sell.

Comment Re:UBI was proposed in 1968 (Score 1) 206

But new categories of work will emerge, just as has happened in every past wave of automation.

Certainly new categories of work will emerge. The question is, will hiring and paying human beings be the most economically efficient way to fill those new positions, or will those jobs be done by AIs instead?

Previous waves of automation allowed people to move "up the food chain" and do jobs the machines still couldn't do, which was fine (at least, for the people capable of doing the new jobs), but if we get to the stage where there aren't many jobs left that the machines can't do, then we're out of luck -- it's unlikely that our tech-bro overlords are going to hire people simply on humanitarian grounds, if they can get an unquestioning machine to do the same work cheaper.

The third fantasy is that UBI is possible. It's just as possible as a perpetual motion machine, and for many of the same reasons. Money doesn't just appear without consequences and side effects.

I agree that UBI is unlikely, but only because the billionaires don't like sharing and therefore won't support it. The money does "just appear" when you have mass automation doing the work to make it appear, but it will go into Bezos' checking account, not to the general public.

Comment Re:Well duh (Score 1) 84

The theme parks are still packed, at least from what I've seen.

Yes, and that's the problem for Disney -- theme parks can only physically accept so many people per year, and they can't (easily) build more of them. So theme parks can't be more than a small amount of their total income; to really make the big money, the Mouse has to ship products that can and will be purchased by everyone. In practice, that means movies; ideally good movies, but at a minimum, popular movies.

Comment Re:Why is this surprising?? (Score 1) 120

But you still somehow perceive them as coming with an agenda that just doesn't exist.

No doubt Microsoft's agenda today is different from what it was 30 years ago, but it's still Microsoft's agenda. Microsoft can be relied upon to do what is good for Microsoft, and any dependency you form on their products can and will be used as leverage to extract money from you.

Comment Re:Greed and infrastructure do not mix (Score 1) 146

I'm very surprised it's legal here. I thought the electric companies were legally required to serve their customers reliably, and not solely when they found it desirable to do so -- that's the agreement they made in exchange for being a natural monopoly (natural because you can't economically run more than one set of electric lines to every household). Apparently I was wrong about that?

Comment Re:Brian Kernighan nailed this decades ago (Score 3, Interesting) 121

As astronaut Frank Borman put it, "a superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid situations which would require the use of his superior piloting skill".

The programmer's version of that would be "a superior programmer uses his superior judgement to avoid creating the bugs that would require the use of his superior debugging skill".

Comment Re:It stops the development of new knowledge too (Score 4, Insightful) 121

Could I have fixed this bug? Not even in my wildest dreams. Do I care how it was fixed? Oh no. No I don't. I just checked that the output of the LLM was reasonable.

The risk in this scenario is that after a few iterations of people applying AI-generated "black box" modifications, users start reporting that the ancient app is crashing on them now and then, and nobody has the first clue why, or how to fix it... and since the crash isn't readily reproducible, you can't even do a "git bisect" to figure out which commit introduced the regression. Now you're left with two unappetizing choices: either live with the instability forever, or roll back all of the "blind" commits to the last known-stable version and never touch the codebase again.

Comment Re:Closet Environmentalist? (Score 1) 293

Trump's actions are 100% Trump's actions. His had wasn't forced in the slightest

Trump's actions are 100% Trump's responsibility ("the buck stops here" is still part of the Presidential employment contract, even if Trump doesn't think so).

OTOH, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if Netanyahu played hardball to "encourage" Trump to help. It's one of the downsides of having a "colorful" sex life in your youth and then gaining political power later on -- too many people have solid evidence of your transgressions, and now motivation to use them to influence your decision-making.

So when Netanyahu phones Trump up and says "join my war, or else I'll release these Epstein videos of you having group sex with underage girls", does Trump do the principled thing and refuse? Or does he take the coward's way out, and allow Israel to dictate US policy in exchange for temporarily saving his own political skin? I think we know the answer to that.

Comment Re:Making China Great Again. (Score 2) 293

After the Cold War, I am convinced if we want no more girl schools blown to bits, every country should have nuclear weapons.

Is every country rational enough to never actually use them, and also technically and organizationally competent to keep them out of the hands of private groups (e.g. Al-Qaeda) who would steal them and use them for them own purposes?

If not, then the MAD doctrine won't work there. It's either principled leadership by the major powers, or nothing.

Comment Re:GitHub has been terrible for years (Score 5, Insightful) 82

The Git command line utility itself is also bloated nowadays.

Perhaps, but one of the nice properties of a command-line app is that the addition of features needn't slow down people who don't need those features.

E.g. git could add 300 more keywords, and as long as the basic "git clone", "git update", "git commit", and "git push" keep working, I won't be effected by that at all.

A GUI-based tool, OTOH, will find its user interface getting increasingly cluttered (and/or cryptic) proportional to the number of features that get shoehorned into it.

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