More importantly: Capitalism is an ECONOMY and market system. It is NOT a blueprint for a society. You can run your commerce and trade as capitalism, when you run your SOCIETY along capitalism principles you end up... essentially with the USA.

This is the part that is constantly forgotten. As a society, we have values that are not represented well within capitalism. But for some reason, we dumb shits think that we can treat everything as a market and apply capitalism to it and that will magically solve problems. But in education, just as one random example, the goal of it all is educated adults as output. It is not maximizing profit. Same for the prison system, the healthcare system and two dozen others.

It's greed, pure and simple.

Making a good product is possible. KEEPING making good products for decades is hard. Even more importantly: You will have hits and misses. Which, for a quarterly-result-bonus oriented manager is a no-no. Subscription models mean plannable revenue streams. Then all you need to do is negotiate your bonus package so that the already existing subscriptions will provide and you're home free and can already order your 2nd yacht.

First of all, they did shoot down several aircraft. They also hit some that were stationed at airbases across the region.

We had air superiority in Afghanistan for 20 years. And Vietnam before that.

Being able to make the enemy's thing on the ground explode can help you win, that's true. But when they have millions of things on the ground, and you only have ten thousand explosions, the math doesn't work. Let's say you take out 10% of their capability, how do you deal with the other 90%?

Moreover, your explosions are not all powerful. Some things will be underground. Other things will be hidden or camouflaged. You're bombs (and the intel that guided them) are not perfect. Your actual kill rate could be only 10%. So taking that into account, if you destroyed 1% of their capabilities, which they will rebuild in 3 months, what did you actually accomplish?

The definition of winning is not landing some hits. It's to achieve your goals. Of course you can be obtuse and argue that exploding things is the goal, but let's be real, the goal should not be a participation trophy. It should be something that benefits your side.

We have not accomplished any of those in Vietnam or Afghanistan, and probably won't in Iran either.

Which is, of course, nonsense. Nothing stops you from making a copy of encrypted data. What sucks is that for a backup, you likely can't do incremental.

In your case it might simply be that there was not enough of this kind of tasks in the training data.

I agree in general, but not with this strong phrasing. I've let AI build a good amount of non-trivial code. But my consistent experience is that it works best when guided by an experienced coder who can correct it, and when implementing well-known algorithms rather than coming up with novel solutions.

Example: I let it write up a quadtree implementation in a language for which there was no ready solution online. It took 2-3 correcting prompts to get a good result. I could've done it myself but it would've likely taken a few hours to get it all right instead of the half or so hour it took with AI. The important part for me was that there's nothing unknown in how to implement a quadtree. All the AI needs to do is take the 100s of existing implementations and translate them into a different language.

True but too simplified. The Luddites had an entirely different motivation: The fact that factories now employed women and children at very low rates meant that the men lost their status in the family as bread winners and head of household. That was a major social disruption, which we don't have with AI.

I'd compare it more to teamsters or wagoners when cars became common. Your job is threatened by a different way of doing the same thing, a way to which your skills don't cleanly transition. Some choose to pick up the new tech, some want the old ways to persist.

In the end, coachmen became chauffeurs, because rich people prefer to be driven around oder driving themselves, no matter if it's a horse or an engine doing the pulling. But much fewer teamsters and wagoners became truck drivers.

BOTH of them? :-)

The exact scenario we warned about when the discussions about this "responsible disclosure" nonsense started. Someone needs a reminder that letting you know your software sucks is a courtesy, not something you can demand.

The CIA has been doing nothing but making everything it touches turn to shit since the cold war. Just wipe the slate clean and start over.

"Who would have thought that school buses would be turned into the mass surveillance state?,"

As soon as they heard about the cameras? EVERYBODY.

Yeah, their slaughtering of possibly tens of thousands of protesters was clearly a sign of upcoming concessions.

Dictators lose when they make concessions. They stay in power when they double down. That's the hard lesson of a hundred years or so of dipshits becoming big boss by military coup or revolution. Those who put absolutely every penny into propaganda and oppression tend to hang on to power the longest.

And given what the IRGC and the regime have done to the Iranian people and how much they're loved in the rest of the world, staying in power is literally a life-or-death matter for them. The day the regime falls, we'll see all the Ayatollahs and minions hanging from trees.

We likely won't.

They made it very clear that they are monitoring and restricting Internet access, and the fact that even during an active war they went on to sentence and hang protesters makes it abundantly clear what will happen to anyone sharing information with the world that they'd rather not see on the world news.

One of the most toxic aspects of the broader linux community is a refusal to ever actually provide proper documentation or even fixes for tons of things and instead simply demanding people search through decades of obscure forum threads and mailing lists. This could force ubuntu to actually get its shit together.

I've never seen generators on cell towers, and the batteries last a few hours. They're meant to cover the occasional western world power outage, not a major one.