"Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder" -- Bender.

Microsoft isn't trying to convince me (nor the demographic I represent) to use Windows. They know we are a lost cause. They would have to completely stop spying on us and give us control over our own systems, not to mention supporting old hardware instead of creating the ecological death-waves of e-waste as they do now.

Not a chance.

Many roles can't work from home, given the nature of the role. So, they get a free pass. That makes it even more important for those of us who can work from home to do so (and for employers to allow and encourage this).

I am happy about renewed interest and political pressure in favor of working from home. Such events help to persuade business leaders who still (selfishly and ignorantly) insist that people should work from an office even when their role does not require it.

Of course, I would never wish for something like the Iran conflict in order to create this political pressure. It would be much better if public awareness and acceptance of the environmental consequences of widespread business travel (including driving to work every day) would create the necessary political pressure.

But, that's not the world we live in, unfortunately.

Greed isn't unique to the upper class. They are just better at it than most, and that is why they are the "upper class."

Hierarchies of power have existed since before humans did. This is simply how pack-animals self-organize (humans included). The same goes for "economic slavery" which, not too long ago, was implemented as actual slavery. The difference being: you are free to quit your job and find a different one with a different boss if you want (and there are a lot of things your boss is no longer allowed to do to you).

So none of this is new and none of it is going anywhere.

We saw what happened to areas where the residents drove police out like this. Vandalism, looting, shootings, etc. Store shelves cleared out by criminals. It very quickly became unlivable until the police reclaimed it.

So, yes, we need police. And we need to hold the police accountable when they harm us.

"Artificial" can also mean "fake," as per the quote from the dictionary that I posted in response to an AC on this thread.

Nope, I am still not guilty. Let's check out a dictionary for guidance.

artificial intelligence:
the capability of computer systems or algorithms to imitate intelligent human behavior

Did you catch that? This definition uses the word "imitate." An imitation of something is not a real version of something. Imitation is fakery. "Fake" is an accurate description. And no actual intelligence is required to meet this definition.

That's why I specifically said "in this context" the word artificial means "fake." It doesn't mean "fake" in other contexts, but it does here. Incidentally, again from the same dictionary:

artificial:
3a: not being, showing, or resembling sincere or spontaneous behavior : fake
b: imitation, sham

So, that is a common meaning for the word artificial, you just have to scroll down a tiny bit to find it on the page.

Apparently, you also have no idea how the English language works.

Words are defined by popular use, not some technical authority. And, based on that, what we have now qualifies as "AI". So, AI does, in fact, exist.

You are trying to impose some rule that eliminates the popular broad and fuzzy definition of AI and replaces it with greater stringency, as would better be captured by such words as "machine intelligence" or "synthetic intelligence." But, seeing as how you don't get to control the English language, your efforts fail.

To put it directly, in this context "artificial" means "fake". AI is "fake intelligence." It is not actually intelligent. And, it does not need to actually be intelligent in order to qualify as "AI".

Do the velociraptors have feathers?

Just curious.

Incidentally, professional critic reviews tell me nothing about how enjoyable something will be. They are mostly based on erudite ideals about what constitutes high art, rather than what people enjoy watching.

Audience reviews on rotten tomatoes aren't much better, given the amount of botting that goes on (including and especially botting paid for by the big studios).

...that the Flying Spaghetti Monster isn't watching you right now, judging you for your disbelief, and preparing to drown you in Ragu in the afterlife?

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.