I think most reasonable people understand that politicians are fallible and can be shortsighted and make mistakes. This is part of being human and part of life in government which, at it's core, is just a huge risk management agency. That's not to say that honest mistakes don't carry weight - Bush Jr may have truly believed everything he claimed about Iraq prior to invading it, but it was still a fool's errand, built on a scaffold of lies, and one of the biggest wastes of resources and lives in US history. Bush should be excoriated for that mistake, even if it was honest.

The problem is when intent and motive undermine the attempt at honest governance. If a politician has ulterior motives, such as personal enrichment, or to gain political advantage over an opposing person or party, to save face in the light of a mistake, or any number of other human foibles and failings, that's when it becomes a valid point to make.

For the helium reserve, it seems to have been a victim of shortsighted attempts to reduce the deficit. The program had accumulated almost $2 billion to buy and store it, and some people thought it wasn't needed.

When it comes to Trump, many people don't trust his motives because he's shown repeatedly to do and say things that are dishonest or hide the true intent. It seems fair to ask who stands to benefit from this change in helium classification.

No thanks on the light-up Apple logo for me. I think it started with the Powerbook G3 (I had one, it was a great computer) and it was sort of obnoxious even then. I'm not paid to be a light-up billboard everywhere I go.

No thanks on the laptop touchscreen, either. I understand it on something like a Surface tablet -- almost -- but most of the time I used my Surface with a keyboard, like a regular laptop, and never touched the screen. I think ramming touchscreens down everybody's throats was just a gimmick Microsoft came up with, both to A.) convince everybody that Windows 8 worked equally well on laptops and tablets (it sure did); and B.) once again, everybody needed to go out and buy a new laptop, even though their current one worked and served their needs just fine.

So are we talking about just Servers or any PC that has UEFI... EG, every native Windows 11 install?!
I've got network boot turned off on my PCs (I think, I need to check now) so this is probably not a critical concern for Grandma and Grandpa's Windows PCs... maybe... There's not enough info to go on, here. But I can only presume all Wintel devices are potentially compromised? How about Macbooks? Phones of any flavor? You kind of HAVE to leave network boot on for them. Do any of them use some flavor of the UEFI compromised code?!

Well said. This is a very succinct way of describing the secondary effects for everyone around someone using AI to feel "more productive". Sending people massive emails you didn't even bother to read, creating huge design documents that are just dozens of meaningless pages and offer nothing of tangible value, or asking fellow developers to reviews 50,000 line code changes you didn't write (or read), etc.

I use AI at work for development and I know that the frontier models in a harness like Claude Code are more capable than many AI critics claim but I also see the results they create in a skeptical light. For a prediction chatbot they are surprisingly good at writing software, but also surprisingly bad compared to a decently skilled human. They can generate massive amounts of design documents and code in a very short time, and easily overwhelm humans trying to read, review, verify, and test the changes. The same thing is happening in other kinds work as well.

Drug use is an apt metaphor. The Dr Feelgood of this decade.

Wow, BIND, though? Do a quick search on "history of BIND vulnerabilities." Sure, people run all these tests on it now, and in the past, and the history has been there's been a lot of causes of concern.

Yeah, that's pretty old-fashioned. In my experience, it's barely done now. Kinda like how nobody writes JavaScript like it's Pascal anymore.

"Important for our species" ... how? Trust me, our species ain't going anywhere. There's nowhere to go.

Fake news. We have such a HIGH IQ president (he has taken and aced FOUR dementia tests!) that nobody is smarter than he is, so there's nothing to be afraid of.

Please go read the definition of "enshittification". It doesn't mean "anything I don't like."

The group that designs Firefox has made some very questionable decisions over the years, but enshittification of the browser is definitely not on the list.

So while everyone seems to agree that building server-side applications with things like Node and Python is wrong, foolish, and that "there are much better options" ... does anyone care to tell me what those options are?

I mean ... aren't a lot of server-side apps basically just playing catch ("I'm tossing you a ball, now you toss me a ball back") and in between there, it interacts with a database? You really don't think you can do that with Node or Python? Does e.g. Java really give you so much more reliability, maintainability, performance, etc?

Maybe. If speech is transcribed on the fly, then there is no recording that needs consent. Somebody at some point will sue and the court will establish a precedent.

Well, it wasn't Unix. But it was inspired by Minix, a widely-taught teaching operating system that Torvalds decided to make into a thing you could use every day.

You can run something like SmolLM-135M on an Esp32. It's super slow and it's a pretty crap model, but it probably outperforms GPT2 at some tasks. But some devices (like my tv) have an order of magnitude more compute power than that. Could an ai build a worm that could seek out hosts for it to run on? I still think the answer is no, but it's not as much of a "no" as it was a couple of years ago.

Who does that? A person dishing out abuse to an app that is designed to be helpful has some serious issues that surely carry over to their interactions with humans.