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.

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.