Indeed, it is absolutely true that our government lies to us. A lot.

Of course, that still doesn't mean that intelligent space-aliens exist, let alone have ever visited our planet. We still need compelling evidence in favor of the claim, which we don't have, before the claim becomes believable.

"Life finds a way!"

All the animals that eat mosquitoes eat other things too. Maybe we don't wipe mosquitoes out "all at once." We can just cull their numbers. Give everything time to adapt. Obliterate them once the time is right.

It would probably help to figure out why other insect populations are collapsing, and turn that around, so the alternative food sources will be available.

Mosquitoes are a blight upon creation! The little bastards have no right to exist! Of course there will be consequences but....you know....

The hardest choices require the strongest wills. There will always be those that are unable to accept what can be. Once it's done, we can finally rest and watch the sun rise on a grateful universe.

Pretty sure it's not really up to them, legally.

In a fair and just world, you would be right. In this world, however, the super-rich are beholden to a different set of rules than the rest of us, and something like AI is just too interesting to allow pesky laws to get in the way (especially laws that are, by and large, only protecting copyrights held by the not-so-rich).

Nothing that "improves developer productivity" benefits developers. It just raises expectations, so you wind up working just-as-hard-or-harder, but now utterly dependent on a new tool.

In fact, it makes things harder on developers because they cannot get into their zone and let the code flow out naturally. As the poster said, you have to keep operating within this broken rhythm of telling the AI what to generate (finding the right balance of detail to give) and then code-reviewing it and fixing everything it got wrong.

This makes things worse for end-users too, who have to deal with the higher bug count because of it.

It only makes things better for employers, who can now squeeze harder to get more for less.

There is no stopping it though. All we can do is pick a strategy for adapting to it.

Your analogy doesn't make sense.

Apple customers are not being asked to allow other people to share their devices, nor to share the space in which those devices are being used. Nor is Apple being asked to offer its own product at a lower price.

Apple is being asked to allow their customers to use third party components, should their customers choose to do so. Their customers remain free to avoid all such third-party tools, and stick with a purely-Apple setup, if they choose.

Opening this up will not harm pure-Apple users in any way. It will only give them more options that they can freely ignore.

The Apple brand includes the idea that the security and privacy of its products and services are higher than rivals. Whether this is true or not doesn't matter; this is how Apple bills itself out and this is believed by many Apple users.

Well, it's pretty clear that if Apple starts handing over low-level control to non-Apple providers, it can't keep those promises. Any kind of privacy guarantee Apple might make is null the instant some third party can get at the user data. Same goes for security. That is how I understand their argument, at least, without looking any deeper into it than the article summary.

It is outright obvious that Apple would prefer that customers buy everything from it, and nothing from its competitors, so of course they are going to say whatever they think they need to say to protect this (whether it's true or not). Equally obvious is the fact that most people would prefer to have the choice. So, rather than say "we can't do that because of security and privacy," they should just have some disclosures that state that their promises do not extend to the use if third party components.

Apple still won't like that, but it seems reasonable to me. The alternative is a level of vendor lock-in that is harmful to consumers.

As a thought experiment, suppose we coded a simulation that builds a model of a planet's gravitational field based on its mass and shape. Then, we input very detailed data of the mass and shape of the planet earth, and it builds a model of the earth's gravitational field in its memory.

Have we just "uploaded the earth's gravitational field?" No, and the question is clearly silly.

Similarly, building a simulation of a brain isn't the same as "uploading one's mind." The very concept of "uploading the mind" is just as silly.

Though I suppose religious types who believe in the concrete reality of a "soul" might imagine that it makes sense to "upload" it to a computer simulation. But, all kinds of strange things make sense to religious types.

Monopolism and cartel behavior tend to drive costs way up. It's a case where corporate freedom needs to be restricted in order to ensure individual freedom (or, more directly, an individual's ability to earn a livable wage without grinding to death).

So I don't think any position of the form "it's expensive here because we are so great" really makes sense. It's expensive here because our government isn't enforcing its laws (specifically, the ones designed to bust trusts and punish anticompetitive behavior).

A sane response to hyper-inflation would have included precisely that (trust busting) as well as reducing government spending and other measures, but we focused almost exclusively on raising interest rates with the intention of putting people out of work (which can fight inflation, but brings obvious side effects that everyone other than the super-wealthy hate).

One must practice a skill in order to master it.

However, grading homework is stupid. One's homework is a terrible measure of how well one has mastered the coursework.

Young students need to be pushed into doing their homework because they naturally lack self-discipline. So, some kind of incentive and feedback-to-parents mechanism is necessary to make sure this happens. Young-adult students, on the other hand, should have the necessary self-discipline at that point, and should be able to self-motivate to do their homework. In that case, the homework itself should not be used as a measure of how well the student has mastered the material. It just doesn't make sense for that purpose. Students do homework to practice, and teachers might grade some of it to give the students feedback and correction, but that is it. This homework grade should have zero impact on the passing of the course.

An objective test performed by a testing organization that has zero financial incentive to inflate grades (which is to say, not the school that teaches the course) should be used to asses how well the student has mastered the material. And the tests should be performed under monitored conditions so that AI use will not be possible (nor any other form of cheating).

Problem solved.

Not once you understand the Golden Rule: he who has the gold, rules.

Marketing from Big Tech on AI has had a repeated theme of "AI will make your job easier by saving you time." This applies to software developers as well as other roles that involve computer use.

This is perfect marketing in fact. It is something that people (in general) desire, and that sounds plausible. But this narrative leaves out a critical and ubiquitous detail: employers do not grant more time off once goals are met. "Saving time" for an employee does not mean that they will have more free time at work. It means that the employer will demand more work be done in the same amount of time, putting you right back in the overworked state you were in before.

This isn't some quirk of modern culture either. It's just human nature. Employers have direct financial incentive to utilize productivity gains for their own profit. Any business that says "hey, my team gets twice as much done in the same time now! I will just let them work four hour days from now on, for the same pay!" will be utterly destroyed by a competitor that says "I will cut costs by reducing staff and run circles around the competition by demanding even more from the staff that remain!" That's just business.

So, whether you like AI or not, inasmuch as it improves productivity, you are going to be required to use it (and to churn out work at the same pace as everyone else who uses it) eventually. Those who refuse to use it will just find themselves unemployed.

Unless it doesn't actually work of course. If it's all a great big farce and businesses that embrace it get crushed by those that don't, then AI-dislikers have nothing to worry about.

It's a very simple scenario that has been written-about a LOT in science fiction. Give an AI conflicting instructions and watch all the crazy things it does.

It is still an interesting problem and an amusing real-world example of it. But it is not the big AI panic that the article author makes it out to be.

The problem of properly prioritizing instructions is non-trivial, and becomes more complicated the more sophisticated the instructions are. Neural networks (like, you know, our own brains) use something much more akin to a heuristic than a rule system to determine how to behave. It makes for very rapid decision-making that is right "most of the time" but sometimes quite wrong. This is good enough for survival, though not good enough in every situation, which creates plenty of drama for us. Codifying these heuristic as a rules-based system quickly sends you on a spiral of ever growing complexity from ever more complex statements of context dependencies and exceptions.

So, I predict that this problem will never truly be solved. It hasn't been solved in humans and it won't be solved in machines. We will never have a machine that will always just know what all its priorities should be and always arrive at the right conclusion when given conflicting orders. And that isn't a terrible thing, since humans are the same way, and we manage.

Snarkily pointing out others' mistakes (and adding a bit of insult) is SUCH a popular activity on Slashdot that we have posts that bait people into doing this responded-to by posts that appear to be doing this only to further bait similar responses, just to try to trick posters into making mistakes that we can all point at and laugh.

I'm guilty too. Slashdot can really bring out our pettiness.

This very-visible move is just another marketing technique. "See how many expensive programmers we were able to let go by using our products? Just imagine how many expensive programmers YOU can let go by using our products! Send your money our way!"

And it will certainly work in the short run. Many will buy into the hype, and Microsoft will profit greatly from it. More than enough to quietly hire from the now-sizable pool of unemployed programmers once they are needed to work on the next important thing.

Microsoft is too rich to suffer real consequences of anything unwise they may do.

You are not the only one.