I thought that the tech giants where united in demanding higher computer literacy among graduates (you know, to pull salaries down for IT work). These people have plenty of money with which to bribe the government, so, it doesn't stand to reason that the government would reject their concerns out of a desire to keep people stupid.

My first thought was that this had more to do with recent stories we have been reading about how cell phones are super-distracting to kids, and are even being banned in the classroom in some places. Obviously (to you and me) there are other devices that might benefit from wifi hotspots, but I could understand why someone might reason "cellphones are bad for education, they are out, and along with them the things that would enable the Internet to also be a distraction."

The reasoning might be flawed, but I am still not seeing evidence that "the cruelty is the point."

(For clarity, I certainly think most of our leaders have the moral profile necessary to pass laws for the sake of cruelty, but they don't have much in the way of incentives to do so, in this case).

Well, these futuristic geniuses should have just started growing babies in vats. The babies can be raised by robots before given their own estate. Problem solved.

Zuckerberg aside, this is already happening right now. People are falling in love with chatbots running on their phones. We have seen articles about precisely this. Similar with people using ChatGPT as a therapist and so on.

Maybe this is stupid. Maybe it's wrong, disconnected from reality, harmful, the worst thing ever, we-are-all-doomed-OMG! Doesn't matter. It's happening.

These LLMs are not what people want "AI" to be and everyone here on Slashdot knows this. They don't understand, don't think, certainly don't feel or empathize, can't even reason clearly, can easily hallucinate and sometimes be jailbroken, and are ultimately utterly unreliable. These are all facts. But that isn't stopping people from falling in love with them (and saying so), using them as therapists, councilors, and even falling into delusions of grandeur because of them (see recent slashdot articles about ChatGPT-inspired-psychosis).

The basic claim here isn't a prediction about some distant future. Its a simple near-term prediction that a current trend will continue.

The world is a strange place, and becoming stranger by the moment. But the people who are disconnected from reality are the ones who don't think this is happening.

Probably because they are a much smaller market.

If they win any sizeable market share, their prices will go right up.

It's natural enough for employers to want to replace workers with automation. Workers cost money that they would rather keep. There isn't any intrinsic moral sin with this, but the consequences are problematic for those of us who depend on our jobs to survive (you know, basically everyone).

Fortunately, workers are a large voting demographic so when the problems get bad there will be high interest in political action that, one way or another, preserves our livelihoods. So, more than a few politicians will swoop right in with campaign promises along those lines. It will probably be a bit painful during the hash-out period, but, the phrase "growing pains" exist for a reason.

Anyway I agree that we need more trust-busting and similar legal action all-around. The phenomenon of wealthy controllers being greedy and depriving people of livelihoods or greatly reducing quality of life has been going on since the invention of wealth, and certainly hasn't needed the help of AI. So, we should be doing that anyway, and I am hopeful that the introduction of AI might serve as a catalyst that brings much more political pressure to bear on making this happen.

"We are treating our people with care and respect.."

Sure would be nice if they treated their customers the same way. I don't buy EA games due to their penchant for DRM that breaks the game at the tiniest internet connectivity hiccup.

Neither. It will replace the working man.

The notion of earning one's wealth, however weak it is today, will become non-existent. Those born into wealth will be able to utilize AI and property to maintain and further their wealth. Those born without it will be relegated to a life of menial labor doing whatever it is that has yet to be automated in a cost-effective way.

It doesn't have to be like this. The productive capacity to give everyone a high standard of living with plenty of free time will totally be sitting right in the palms of our hands. But we won't utilize it that way because doing so would violate human nature. We evolved from pack animals and have instincts that only work well in small tribe environments. Hundred-million-resident nations are only possible by means of technological advancements which have accumulated over a mere few thousand years. Our physical evolution has not had nearly enough time to catch up, and breeding trends are clearly pushing us in the opposite direction anyway.

If our thinking machines don't become independent and take over, we will just use them to wipe ourselves out (slowly and painfully).

Of course I cannot see the future any better than anyone else. But another thing I remember about the .com bubble burst is that the Slashdot community was extremely pessimistic. The majority of posts insisted that this is how it was going to be "from now on." They saw no way that things would ever improve for software developers (or tech workers in general) and life was just going to be horrible for everyone from now on, forever.

And they were wrong. And all the negativity they posted was self-reinforcing and probably drove people to depression. All on pure speculation.

You are speculating just as much as I am.

Be that as it may, if anyone dislikes their tech job and has an opportunity to jump ship for a better job, it makes sense to do so. I don't think it makes any sense at all to stay at a poor job in hopes that the economy will swing back. The company will not appreciate (nor reward) your loyalty. On the contrary, your employer (whoever you may be) has an opportunity right now to earn your loyalty by treating you well. If they don't do that, they don't deserve you, neither now nor in the future.

The tech job market soured after the .com bubble burst as well. That was early 2000s. How many people here remember how bad it was? Unemployed tech workers everywhere. Very few jobs. Many jobs posted requiring 60+ hours, every tech skill that ever existed, offering paltry salaries, and some offering no salary at all (for real; they were listed as opportunities for people to develop or maintain their skills through volunteer work while between jobs).

Many people exited the industry during that period, because it sucked. And then the market shifted, and the tables turned, once again. Suddenly there was huge demand for tech work, and the market was barren because so many people re-skilled and so few kids got degrees in it. For that reason, and only for that reason, conditions improved, hours reduced, salaries rose, and so on.

The same thing souring is happening now due in part to the economic consequence of the high interest rates (which were used to fight inflation). As planned, those caused mass layoffs in the the tech sector and mass reduction in open positions. We are exactly where the federal reserve intended to put us (on its economic strategy to reduce inflation by reducing wealth throughout the working classes, including white-collar).

Of course we also have AI now, and other factors I am not thinking of. That is being hashed-out. But even so, history suggests that the pendulum will swing again. It will take a few years of course, but when it happens there will be soaring demand for highly-skilled tech workers but not for junior level workers (since AI can handle that), and there won't be very many because so many of them retired or exited the industry, so few kids picked it as a major, and nobody could get the necessary experience because all those positions are taken by AI.

Aside: I want to point out that "reducing headcount while making record profits" is standard operating procedure. Young generations always have the naive expectation that a profitable business should be happy to have a high headcount and pay all those workers all that money because they have plenty. Some even consider it something of a moral obligation. Well, that's not how the world works. Headcount is reduced whenever the company feels like it can heap more work on fewer people and still get it done. They LIKE it when all their employees are overworked. They consider that optimal. They push for it whenever they can. AI will not reduce anyone's workload; it will increase everyone's workload because they can do more now by using it, so the company will just cut more people and dump their work on your plate.

Intel is requiring employees to be in the office 4 days a week. That will surely fix this problem.

(Note: this is sarcasm)

"Having too much work and not enough time to do it" is not some happenstance artifact of our current state of technology, and it absolutely will not be "solved" by having teams of AI agents.

This state is deliberately manufactured by leadership, who deliberately assign deadlines that are unreasonably short. This is their way of getting the most out of their employees. Overwork them! Any employee who has plenty of time to get all their work done obviously has too little work to do, so assign more. DUH!

So, if AI agents actually succeed in improving worker productivity, we will just get more work to fill the gap. Doing more work MEANS making more money (for leadership), so that will be the demand. There will never be a point where leadership says "hey, I am making plenty of money. Let's slack off and let people work less and chill out more." Even if someone tried, they would either get sued by their shareholders for failing in their fiduciary duty, or just crushed by their competitors who keep their people busy.

So, these AI agents will be tried-out, and if they improve productivity they will be used, and our workloads will only increase such that we have no choice but to use these things in order to have a prayer of having enough free time to eat dinner and get a full night of sleep.

The linked article is very light on details. I did a little searching around and it appears that one does, in fact, need root in order to set up io_uring, though it can also be done with sudo, and it looks like it is possible to set things up so it can subsequently be used for specific operations without root (though I am unsure about that).

Apparently this isn't actually news, as the library has been under criticism for this sort of thing for a while. Some distributions, such as Ubuntu, don't use it by default, so you would have to go out of your way to set that up in those cases.

Though my knowledge here is only as good as what I found in a few blog posts as I was searching around, so please feel free to correct me.

Businesses sure have an incentive to encourage use of dependencies: it saves them a lot of money and gets their product to market sooner. They don't want to pay programmers a fortune to build something that has already been built, especially when they can just use it for free.

There ARE long term consequences of course. Inherited bugs, inherited security vulnerabilities, and you have to wait for someone else to fix it on their schedule. You have to keep updating the packages either way and sometimes that breaks stuff in your project that you now must re-code. Once in a while a package will go out-of-support and you have to find a replacement and re-code a bunch of stuff to fit the replacement, etc. Some people are more concerned about these long-term consequences than others.

Further, some "software developers" really can't do much more than simple scripting. They can't solve hard problems. So they are especially eager to grab at ready-made solutions and just write a little code to glue them together (or just as an AI to do even that bit for them). They have a natural incentive to encourage this as the correct way to develop software, and look with distain upon any who would challenge this (since they can't succeed if they have to build anything truly complex themselves).

On the flip side, the hardcore software developers want to get their creative game on with every task. They get outright bored just using other people's solutions because it makes everything too easy. They want to feel challenged and so they want to code everything themselves, and just-as-naturally look down on anyone who disagrees. And of course they expect their employers should be happy to pay them top dollar for all this creativity, even if it is ultimately reinventing the wheel.

So, its a polarizing issue, with pros and cons on both sides.

You have to do your research and make sure the packages you are importing are legit. This is true whether or not the package was recommended by an AI.

I guess sloth IS a risk. Vibe coders may get into the habit of just trusting whatever the LLM churns out. Could be a problem. But either way, it's still on you.

What's your definition of "good answer?"

Is it:

1. Testable, falsifiable, objective, unbiased, well-supported by abundant evidence, free of logical fallacies

or

2. Seems to fit the question, makes us feel good.