Unless you have offstreet parking

The USA is so spread out that everyone needs to drive gasoline cars everywhere yet somehow so compact no one has a drive to charge an EV.

Computers did not, steam engine did not, cars did not.

I don't think you are right about that. They've all caused absolutely massive changes. Steam engines drove the industrial revolution.

lol oops trying to avoid the lameness filter which hates the Nahtzees. We all know who invented the modern highway!

Apparently slashdot doesn't like mention of the third empire, Nahtzees or Hartler.

It's ironic that you complain about the military while using the internet; which is based on the work done by the US military when it developed ARPANET sixty years ago.

And the web was invented by civilians working on basic science research.

Food preservation

People have been working on food preservation for millennia. Refrigeration via artificial means (i.e. not using natural ice) was invented by civilians (one cycle even invented by Einstein). Freeze drying apparently is very old, since you can do it in very cold climates using the weather. Modern freeze drying was invented by a civilian but it a heavily adopted by the military from near obscurity.

GPS: sure.

Radar: sure, the military put a lot of work in, but it didn't start there.

Nylon: nothing to do with the military
Epipens: autoinjectors or adrenaline? Autoinjectors predate military use and while they were basically the first major adopter, those ones are nothing like epipens.

And highways? You know who ELSE liked highways :) The modern highway (special intersections, separated carriageways, type restrictions) was a creation of the for the greater glory of the as something of a propaganda/self aggrandizement tool. For it to work well the dictator pushed for a "people's car", or in German, Volkswagen.

Superglue... kinda, but only kinda.

And duct tape, sure, but a lot of the heavy lifting, like pressure sensitive adhesives and tearable cloth tape was done in the civilian world. But that specific formulation with the plastic coating? OK sure.

Most of these things were initially developed without military funding. In some cases, like RADAR and GPS, the funding advanced them hugely in a short time. And in some cases it was the initial impetus for building them in America (interstates). Though in most cases this is a deeply inefficient way to go about it.

Yay another perpetual motion machine!

If you hand me a working reactionless thruster[*] I can hand you back a perpetual motion machine. If you don't believe in free energy then you cannot believe in reactionless drives either[+].

[*]more efficient than a photon rocket.

[+]Well for certain values of "you". There are some people here who will just screech invective when presented with basic physic, so it turns out a person can continue to believe hi angel'o'sphere

Do you think every CVE out there has a fired human associated with it? In order to have a sensible discussion about how LLMs relate to security relative to people you need to be realistic about people.

As the price of DRAM, SSD storage, electric power, and data center real estate rise, what prevents LLM service providers from suddenly raising their rates such that it's no longer less expensive than hiring a human? Compare what happened when Broadcom jacked up the price of VMware.

And what prevents programmers whose copyrighted programs have been included in the LLMs' training set from suing LLM service providers for copyright infringement on grounds that the output of the LLM is substantially similar to their programs, and the LLM is not following the license? I remember that demonstration where an LLM had effectively memorized the reciprocal square root routine from the GPL source code of Quake III Arena and failed to include the "appropriate copyright notice" mandated by the GNU GPL. Even permissive licenses, such as Apache 2, MIT, 3BSD, and zlib, require preservation of the copyright notice in derivative works. Doe v. GitHub, pending in the Northern District of California.

In Slashdot's home country, both copyright and radio transmission are regulated at the federal level. So what's the plan for to peterww and tepples to start to change the laissez-mourir policies popular among conservative members of the U.S. Congress? See "antisocialist", "extreme capitalism", and "laissez-mourir" in RMS's glossary.

I wouldn't be so sure of that momentum. Several countries in the European Union have implemented age gating through an application that runs only on an iPhone or a certified Android phone. An iPhone runs proprietary iOS, published by foreign monopolist Apple Inc. A certified Android phone runs proprietary Google Play Services, published by foreign monopolist Google LLC. The EU talks out both sides, regulating foreign "gatekeepers" on one side (the Digital Markets Act and provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to very large online platforms) and requiring use of services provided by said "gatekeepers" (provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to "protection" of minors).

What ID do Brits use if they use public transport instead of a motor vehicle?

Last I checked a few years ago, the United Kingdom offered no domestic non-driver ID. It offers only a driving licence, which requires access to a motor vehicle and probably paying someone to let the learner practice driving in their vehicle for some number of hours, or a passport, which is valid for international travel but expensive. If this has changed, let me know.

Yes, and?

Even if you tell a human programmer to make no mistakes, they'll still write security holes. Yeah no shit LLMs aren't perfect. Neither are humans.

LLMs will cheerfully write egregiously bad ones unless you tell it not to. I find that a bit strange.

I predict that 3 years from now, the current DRAM shortage will turn into a glut.

Depends on how long it takes for the new fabs to come online. As of right now, there's about the right amount of capacity to supply the pre AI bubble world with DRAM.

Unfortunately unsold stock will be less useful because it's the wrong type for many consumer things. Though NVidia could rerelease some of the Quadro cards as consumer ones to make use spare HBM.

Robotics dweebs also deserve it, especially if their creations are used to (1) turf people out of jobs or (2) kill people - i.e. military purposes.

Meh. Firstly, I believe one of my creations is used to kill people, or as an important part of devices that do. But it's also used in a ton of other things. It makes as much sense to say steel is a bad creation because it's used to make guns.

Secondly, I'm not a pacifist. If someone's trying to kill me, I firmly believe in killing them first and I also do not think there is any such thing a a fair fight. Likewise I do not think it is evil of Ukraine to massively develop their arms industry and methods of killing people when it's in service of not getting killed or ending up in the dominion of Putin.

And if the world is going to develop weapons I really don't want it to be the sole preserve of the kind of dictatorial scumbags who don't jut not have your ethics, but positively revel in not having them.

The next AI Winter will be spectacular

One thing I am 100% confident in is that the that the AI winter following the oncoming crash will be every bit as bad as the internet winter following the dotcom crash.

Which is to say: not.

For a lot of things it works way too well and is way too effective to disappear. Sure we won't get frontier model inference for 1/5th of the cost. Some of the "growth at all costs" behemoths might crash as hard as webvan. But you know, online shopping and deliveries didn't die with them.

I mean take my futurology prediction with as much or little salt as you choose. But I'll lord it over you if I'm right and you can lord it over me if I'm wrong. Isn't that the true point of the internet?

While LLMs will probably make that worse

Why though? I'm not saying LLMs will not write security holes, they definitely will if you don't very explicitly tell them not to. But even the nerfed public ones are not bad at spotting security holes compared to people. Most people are notoriously bad at this, but there have also been enough that a huge number of CVEs have been well documented. These are all in the training data and LLMs can absolutely spot these patterns. And they can do it without getting bored on software that was written before those CVEs were found anyway.

The "not innovating" claim every iterative phone release is also kinda silly, since the "slab of glass with some cameras" thing is largely a solved problem

That and also Apple has not had a record of being a particularly innovative company. What they've always been much better at is finding ideas that they can now implement well and polishing them. The iPhone wasn't a particularly innovative device, but prior devices sucked or were curiosities because the tech wasn't quite ready, and the software was too clunky.

And we all know about the iPod here. No wireless.Less space than a Nomad. Lame. And good gried those early devices had excrable UIs.