It's hard to keep one's kids safe on the internet. The little brats find ways of getting where they aren't supposed to be whenever you aren't around.

So, all parents have a natural incentive to make the Internet safer for kids. It makes things so much easier on them! And it aligns with their sense of decency too (you have so many other ways to get your hands on smut and violence and dangerous toys, you don't need all that on the internet too).

This does not mean that all parents push for legislation that winds up stifling freedom for adults. Some parents are very conscientious critical-thinkers who recognize that the word doesn't revolve around their kids. But a whole bunch aren't. The incentives to use the law to "clean up" the internet are just too strong. By and large, people respond to their incentives, so the result here is easily predicted.

They find political allies with governments that want greater ways of surveilling and controlling people, religious zealots who want to impose their religion on everyone, and even some large businesses that would like to shield themselves from potential liability risks.

So they will never stop pushing. Freedom requires "eternal vigilance", and etc.

These limits on government powers were the bait. Prior, current, and future erosion of those limits are the switch.

When humans attain power, they want more of it. It's how humans are wired. Every government in the world pushes for more power over its people whenever a motivating issue comes up, because humans run these governments. They don't care if some dusty old piece of paper says they can't, no matter how revered that piece of paper might be, they only care if some actual group of humans will stop them. So if they believe they can get away with any given power-grab, they will attempt it.

You specifically asked how much longer will The People tolerate it? My answer is: until it really hurts. If the power grab doesn't really harm a lot of people, then most people don't care about it, won't resist it, and the government will get away with it. There may be some particularly politically-active people who will make noise about it, but their shouting will get caught up in, and/or drowned out by, the ordinary shouting that always goes on between extreme liberals and extreme conservatives. So, nothing will come of it.

I literally just used Cursor to code some new features for an existing app.

The common boilerplate stuff, it nailed.

The complex algorithmic pieces that were specific to the business need: it couldn't get close. I had to code that by hand (which is, of course, what I am accustomed to anyway).

At one point I asked it to do too many things at once, and it ruined the code. I restored from a backup. The high level design, and even the "mid level" design, is all on me, because I must ask it to generate things one small step at a time or it loses its mind. I also have to test each step because it sometimes generated bugs and needed me to describe that for it to fix them. So it didn't save nearly as much time as advertised, because of this.

There were a few times when it absolutely could not fix a bug, despite trying several times, and I had to go in and manually fix it.

I had to break several code files out into separate files because they were too large for it to handle (it damaged them when it tried).

It generated no code comments at all, which was preferred because in prior experience the code comments it generated were humorously worthless. But I had to add comments in to make the reasons behind some of the methods clear.

The method and variable names it chose were commonly true but vague. And the vagueness made it much harder to read the code and understand what it was doing (let alone why it was doing it). I made manual adjustments in key points. There will surely be slowdowns and confusion in the future, though, when people or AI revisit this code and have trouble figuring it out, due to the vague naming.

When asked to refactor existing code, it often left a lot of duplicate code behind on an assumption that this was needed for backwards compatibility. I had to discover this myself and instigate the clean up.

So, my conclusion is that AI is useful for boilerplate tasks but the really important technical work is still on the programmer, including technical design and code clean up to make it maintainable. AI-friendly code projects have more but smaller files, and AI-generated projects are full of vague names everywhere making them hard to interpret, debug, and maintain. And of course you need a programmer who is competent in order to design the system well.

So, the future that I see is one in which programmers who are really competent at producing solutions (optionally using AI) will be hard to come by in an employment market awash with people who just used AI to do their homework, used it again to do entry level work, and therefore lack the technical competence to design well or manually code the bits that the AI cannot.

That's a nice narrative, but it's false.

You only see the positive aspects of liberal agendas, and the negative aspects of conservative agendas. That is what it means to be biased. You can't see what aspects of liberal agendas might be harmful or why conservatives are upset about it, nor the positive aspects of conservative agendas. You are, yourself, an extremist, and as such you cannot think objectively on the issue.

It IS true that there are some specific conservatives who are rich and powerful, and they seek to consolidate their wealth and power just like all rich and powerful people do (regardless of political agenda). This does not mean that such efforts are supported by the wider conservative community. In fact, most conservatives are at the poor end of the spectrum and hate the enormous wealth gap just as much as anyone else (though they aren't interested in swapping that out for an even greater evil of communism).

The ugly truth is that nearly all the actual political power in the USA is held by a small group of extremely wealthy people, mostly bank moguls, who consistently get every piece of legislation they support passed, and every piece of legislation they oppose squelched. They steer the country in ways that strengthen their power, with no loyalty to either political party. The enraged argument and civil disharmony caused by the extremes of liberals and conservatives shouting at each other distract us all from this core issue, which is exactly the way they want it. So long as the extreme voices, like yours, continue to dominate the discussion and drown out the moderates, the situation will continue exactly as it is now.

People have been leaving ever since the pandemic normalized remote work. Many other parts of the world are a whole heaping lot cheaper to live in than the USA and just as nice or nicer in various ways. So, people in a position to be able to remote work have high incentive to bolt, and the tech that supports remote work is here to stay (unlike Trump).

If you are looking for political motivation to leave, though, that door swings both ways. There is a conservative culture in the country that thinks liberals have attained far too much power and are ruining it, and fully expect a huge liberal pushback in the very near future. And there is a liberal culture in this country that (much like you) sees the Trump administration as the harbinger of the end times. The extremists on both sides can't abide each others' existence, and they make a lot of noise about it, so that friction is probably also driving some departures on both sides.

If they are not outright trying to replace their staff with AI, it is only because they believe AI isn't ready yet.

Nothing would please them more than being able to fire their entire staff and just command a virtual AI assistant to run their entire business for them, while they keep all that salary-money for themselves instead. This is 100% their goal.

Any issues about poverty or not having anyone who can buy their products or what-not are political matters that will be solved in political forums, so they absolutely will NOT waste a penny more than they need to on human labor.

More realistically, they believe that using AI means "getting more work done faster." They take that as gospel truth with no qualifiers.

So, if you aren't using AI then clearly you are wasting company time and money, and hence shouldn't be promoted and maybe should be "transitioned out."

But they are making the obvious mistake of turning a metric into a goal. Employees will game the system. People will "engage with AI" to hit their numbers without using it in a useful way that saves time, especially if they are working on projects which, due to the specifics of the project, AI can't help with.

So, all this will really do is eliminate the honest and talented employees in favor of ones who can't succeed without AI (due to lack of talent and knowledge), and/or are willing to use it deceptively to advance their position.

Are those the kind of people you want working for you? For big corporations, yes, since those are the kind of people who are most similar to corporate leadership in terms of talent and ethics.

Slashdot has made it clear that they are not content with the money that can be made from the tame, well-behaved ads that ad blockers allow through, and they must impose obnoxious adds on us that ruin our reading experience and expose us to risks of malware.

I have noticed that any time they manage to skirt AdBlock Plus, after a few days AdBlock Plus blocks their trick again. It's a cat-and-mouse game I suppose.

The simple truth is none of us need Slashdot. This site just aggregates news from other sites. We can simply browse the original sources. Or even browse Slashdot in a broken state where we can't post comments. It might deny our egos an opportunity to feel like we just put someone else in their place, but honestly, that's an experience we can live without.

Lawsuits are flying from unauthorized use of copyrighted works to train the LLMs, communities are uniting to block data center construction, audiences are fiercely rejecting AI-generated content in various forms of media, prestigious law firms are getting slapped-down by judges for using AI-generated hallucinations in their court filings, students are using it to cheat on homework, creative workers of all varieties hate it for the threat it poses to their job security, and the world is drowning in slop.

It is easy to see why people would be interested in a fund like this. And just as easy to see why people would believe that AI is doomed and the AI bubble is bound to pop catastrophically sometime soon. I previously predicted a bubble pop myself.

But there is a flip side. AI has been usefully applied in many places across many industries. When it is not unwisely applied in ways that make hallucinations harmful, it can actually do valuable work. So, AI is here to stay.

There might be a market adjustment, and it might even happen this year, but I don't think the global economic meltdown from the biggest bubble-pop ever is actually going to happen. Though over-valued, the big tech companies that are dominating the SnP500 right now are actually delivering something useful, so even if they sink a bit, they will not crash and burn.

Well, OpenAI might, but that's mainly because it has been outclassed by its competitors and has no real business plan, as was reported this very day right here on Slashdot. Others will survive, though.

If you are building solutions in the Microsoft Azure Cloud, it is very easy to get immediate access to GPT models to power your AI pipelines (whatever they may be). Very affordable, too.

By contrast, you cannot gain access to the Gemini models, and there is a big hill to climb to gain access to Claude. I don't know about Meta's models, I never checked.

My point being, this is a bit of a vendor lock in that makes use of GPT models the path of least resistance for many businesses that are building AI powered solutions. Maybe that will help. Though I think not for long.

GPT models are weaksauce compared to Gemini and Claude. They have been very far surpassed by these. Businesses that really need the power of these other models can use Google Vertex and integrate that with their Azure cloud, or set up an Anthropic account and just beam the web requests right over. Anthropic is problematic in that it doesn't allow you to ensure that data never leaves specific global regions (which many people need for legal reasons), but Google Vertex sure does.

So, I think that advantage that OpenAI currently has will not last long.

It is sad to see an innovator lose out, but that is also how things normally go. We tell ourselves feel-good stories about how copyright law or patent law can protect the small innovator against the huge corporations, but that isn't how things play out in realty. By hook or by crook, the major players wind up leveraging what they have to get control over the shiny new thing, and that's how the cookie crumbles.

A common complaint that arises when discussing pollution is "we ordinary people cannot do anything to significantly reduce pollution. It's all on the big corporations!"

Well, here is something you CAN do: eat lab-grown meat instead of regular meat. It hugely reduces the pollution for which you are financially responsible.

So here is a new opportunity for environmentalists to soul-search. How devoted are you? Are you ready to put your money where your mouth is (so to speak)?

how governments around the world continue to push the narrative that they are servants of the people

When they bother to push this false narrative at all, they usually go with utilitarianism. They maintain that a lot of people benefit a lot from the presence of the data centers, and that outweighs the few people who suffer a little from increased utility costs.

They could also go with "rich people are people too, and they are obviously more important than poor people, so serving the interests of rich people IS serving the interests of the people." Though saying that sort of thing out loud tends to reduce their level of voter support, so the smart ones avoid it.

Maybe "programmers" come in different tiers, and AI can only replace the lower tiers. Like, programmers who can only implement simple generic code when given clear instructions (but cannot design solutions themselves and cannot debug very well) would be the bottom tier, and perhaps AI will be able to completely replace them, but still not able to replace higher tier programmers.

If we make some more distinctions:

Mid-tier: can independently design and implement business solutions using existing tools and frameworks.
Upper-tier: can build and optimize the frameworks, tools, operating systems, etc. that other developers can use
Master-tier: can implement and improve upon AI systems.

Hypothetically speaking, someday we might be able to produce AI that can replace lower-upper tier programmers without being capable of replacing Master-tier programmers. Then there would still be work for humans in the field, but not very much. The majority of what humans are doing now could be automated, without necessarily creating a self-evolving system that will ascend to godhood.

I think it is interesting that you got a troll mod, given the popularity of such notions as "sharing is caring" here on slashdot.

It may be that we are progressing into a copyright-free world, and are just beginning to feel the growing pains that come with that adjustment.

It is popularly believed that copyright benefits the independent creator since it gives them legal protection against big corporations who would violate that copyright, but this has been repeatedly disproved, especially recently with big-and-rich corporations helping themselves to everything they see on the Internet to train their AI, and getting away with it.

But even before that, the majority of copyright licenses have been held by a small conglomerate of rich elites, and NOT by the creators who create the works. In order to have a prayer at making money off your talents, you have to sign those rights away. But now that we have other mega-rich people that see a real path to riches from flagrant disregard of copyright law, we are set to watch a clash of titans over the issue.

The one thing that won't influence the outcome at all will be the opinions that the majority of people hold on the issue, since the majority of people are too poor to matter.

I also wonder if their new definition of "best developers" is "developers who rely entirely on LLMs for coding."

With that semantic shift in place, they can hire new cheap greenies who rely entirely on LLMs because they can't code, and who do nothing but cause trouble for the actual competent developers who are manually fixing everything they break, and spin it to sound like progress.