The warnings that AI could be the "great filter" that always take out advanced civilizations

I logged in to post for the first time in a VERY long time to point out how dumb this take is. The claim that civilizations regularly (the great filter theory requires the filter to be universal, absolute, and to have happened many many times) create some evil AI, which then kills everyone and then... what? Kills itself? Chooses not to expand? It's preposterous. Any aware general AI that kills off it's founding population is highly likely to expand across the universe, killing off everything else for the same reasons. And that's required to happen not just once, but every single time? Far more likely, if there were ANY truth to that myth, would be that we would be in a universe with hundreds, or thousands, of competing AIs, each attempting to exterminate all others. But we see no evidence of this. Which is why know it's horseshit.

Sir, you are a liar https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aph... The number of birds affected has increased every month through December. From 2 million in October to 5 million in December.

Our dev and DevOps teams use Agile so there's a ridiculous two week minimum delay for any fix since you have to add the JIRA issue to a new sprint before you can fix it.

That's not "Agile", that's Scrum - also within Scrum there are ways of providing hotfixes without terminating the sprint, and without waiting 2 weeks. Sounds like your Scrum Master needs some education. The Agile Manifesto literally contains "Responding to change over following a plan."

Furthermore if you have lots of issues, you may want to consider a different Agile process, like Kanban, which is better equipped to provide rapid turnarounds of hotfixes. You may even consider a separate team for support.

most of our developers are on four scrum teams, they have four stand-ups per day where they need to talk about what they've accomplished and what they commit to doing before the next stand-up. Actually getting work done has suffered since you need to do something superficial each day for four times each day.

Nope! You don't have Scrum teams. I don't know what you have, or why you call them Scrum, but it is NOT POSSIBLE to be on more than one Scrum team at the same time. By definition.

https://www.scrum-institute.or...

"I would like your advice about buying something new, in a very particular size, but I'm not going to tell you what size it is! Instead you will all have to individually Google it. Mwuahahahahahah!"

Good job editors... couldn't have looked it up yourself and added it? What the fuck then, do editors get paid for? I think between that and the declining quality of comments recently, I'm done with Slashdot. I used to say "I come for the comments" because the editing was so shit - but after yesterdays Google Home mini story where I read 14 highly-moderated comments and every one of them - every SINGLE ONE OF THEM - criticized either the technology or the people buying it as stupid or morons (when it's clearly fucking interesting new tech being used in interesting new ways) I can't say this site has any value for me anymore.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Why not just tax them when someone sells them? We have something called Capital Gains Tax in the UK - when you sell something you made a profit on, if that profit is above a small threshold, you have to pay a percentage of all the gains you made... if you didn't make a profit, no tax. This makes investment more attractive by removing some of the risk. In the USA do you have to pay tax on the estimated value of the shares every year or something?

95 times out of 100 these are all nothing. But you have to check them out.

No, no you really don't. *THAT* is the problem. If someone is bombing your plane with an intent to kill everyone, they aren't going to advertise it by changing their wifi SSID. It's totally preposterous. We don't need to overreact to terrorists, fuck them, react appropriately.

In London the Heathrow Express is £25 which is almost exactly $33. It takes either 15 or 21 minutes depending which part of the airport it is connecting to.

The alternative is £5 and takes around 50 minutes, but can actually get you more central.

It makes a profit - or at least it did a few years ago (67 million in fares, 60 million costs to run)

Why does it not say "sponsored content" or similar?

If it's running in Javascript, Kendo UI, it's client-side. Whoever was responsible for the server-side developing ALSO fucked up here - the server should *NOT* have trusted a client input without validating it. If it had been validated on the server, this would have been impossible. When the Kendo Grid returned values, the API or handler should have checked that those values were correct for the logged in user.

You are correct that a myriad of tools/frameworks makes security more difficult, but most companies still don't invest in security. It's difficult, not impossible.

H1-B is total crap and needs to be eliminated ASAP. Oh, but that lobbyist money from Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

Only ONE of those companies makes the top 10 H1B sponsors... and that is in TENTH place... the other 9 only have one "tech" company in them. The rest are "consultancies".

https://www.myvisajobs.com/Rep...

The companies you mentioned don't really care, and probably want Visa reform too.

> Why do people keep referring to viewing works created by others as "consuming" them? A work isn't "consumed", or used up, in the act of viewing it

Probably because we speak English, and that's the colloquial and accepted term for using content.

Language evolves, if you insist on living in the past, you only make yourself look stupid, not others.

Goldman Sachs and others like this because they can do business without being taxed or have the government snoop.

Err.... lulwut? That's complete rubbish.

Globalism is one-sided, and makes our country weaker in every possible way. The wealth flows from the richer country to the poorer, where it is wasted.

Posted from your PC or phone which costs around $600 instead of $5000 - well played sir!

whether or not you like your coffee black

Awesome, coffee machine and companies will know what to serve me without me having to interact with them. Convenient!

are you an aggressive driver

Good, all aggressive drivers should be identified, and their insurance premiums modified appropriately to try to create a safer environment for all.

do you look at other members of the opposite sex

Superb, it can recognise when I sneak a glance at a girl, and if she has done the same while I was looking away it can send us both an alert and we will be able to drive aggressively in her car to shop which will serve us with our favourite coffee without asking me or getting the name on the cup wrong!

This sounds bloody awesome, where do I sign up?

But seriously, there are tons of people claiming loads of "harm" is being done by ads, but other than in a tiny handful of specific outliers I don't see it... where is the harm that has actually happened? Because people were saying this back in the 90s, and it wasn't happening then. But they claimed it was "just around the corner" - but tech has moved on advertising and data collection are even more technologically capable and accurate... but THERE'S STILL NO COMMON HARM.

As soon as you inherit code written by someone else you will waste a lot of time to understand how it works - and if it's not strongly typed you can easily miss something that previous coders did introduce.

Absolutely agree. Code should be written more than anything to not fail (or to only fail gracefully), following this it should be written for readability. Using strong types provides a huge amount of semantic meaning - both to future you (or future other maintainer) and also to your compiler and IDE - this semantic meaning is invaluable.