it's Slashdot.

There is no reason bitcoin can't slide back to being worth a dollar a coin. There no guarantee of value behind it. You can argue about whether fiat money is any better once the US went off the gold standard, but there is still a bit of irreplaceable value there; "the full faith and credit" means you can use it to transact business with the government, both by contracting to do public works for which the government pays you, and paying taxes and fees which are used to perform government functions and give you tokens such as licenses which show that you've contributed your share. Money's very liquidity for these purposes is a source of value, even if you can't redeem your picture of a President for precious metal. By contrast, Bitcoin literally isn't worth anything unless you can find someone (for some reason the phrase "bigger fool" comes to mind) to trade you something for it that does have value.

Just.

Drive.

alter ego George Costanza work at Meta?

only outlaws will have weed-free landscaping?

Wait a minute, they showed the Artemis crew a story about a guy who is drugged and kidnapped by his space agency and wakes up 11 light-years from home with the rest of his crew dead to bolster their spirits?

Wasn't Freeman Dyson at least skeptical of ever bigger and better particle accelerators as reaching diminishing returns on the amount of physics knowledge gleened per dollar spent.

Forget Freeman Dyson. Hasn't anyone taken ECON 101 as a college freshman and remember "diminishing marginal returns." And forget the harm to the environment, isn't the outragious electric bill a sign of more and more resources thrown at something to "scale it up" without considering where the scaling law levels off?

What is the revenue model? Selling what you disclose to the AI?

Or will anything beyond the most brain-dead AI be a big monthly subscription?

Will your employer insist that you not use their paid-for AI for personal use in the way of Cyber Monday that you weren't supposed to use your work Internet to purchase your Christmas presents but people did this anyway?

Or will AI gradually become useless owing to who pays the most coin to train the neural networks a certain way, becoming useless like Web search?

...on its face as it boots up?

It may not be as much as we need or hope for, but I still about fell out of my chair laughing. Now I can make things shitty without even getting up!

The Heliocentric Theory had a problem with a negative result for the parallax of stars. Think of it as the Michelson-Morley result of its day.

This is why Tycho Brahe rejected the Copernican interpretation, the best observational astronomer of his day--he couldn't measure any shift in stellar positions as the Earth went around the Sun. No one had the imagination that the nearest stars were so freakin' far away.

The problem here is that developers can take responsibility for the action while AI can not. Humans do make mistakes and that's ok; best practice is not to just can employees for messing up. Once is a mistake. Twice is an HR event. When someone does something dumb we forgive but we also insist that meaningful steps are taken to prevent that problem in the future. AI can't really take those steps because AI can't be accountable for "don't do it again." Taking down production because you dropped a table once is forgivable. Taking it down twice for the same reason is a different matter.

The developer can be accountable. And if HR fails to hold them to account for it, HR is accountable. And if HR isn't held accountable, leadership is. And if leadership isn't held accountable, the board is. And if the board isn't held accountable, the stockholders have some hard decisions to make. And if they choose not to make them than it wasn't really that big a deal, was it?

But with an AI the option is "we stop using AI" or "we live with the result."

Everyone is so excited about not having to pay software engineers to write code that they've forgotten what engineers actually do. It's less common in the software world but go find a civil engineer or an electrical engineer or an aerospace engineer and follow them around for a week.

At some point, there's going to be a document in front of them laying out how something is going to be built and they're going to be asked to approve it. And when they do that they're taking responsibility for the design. If it falls down, if it catches on fire, or if it crashes into the mountains and kills people, they're the name on the form saying that won't happen. They're responsible.

Claude 4.5 Opus is very impressive, but if it writes a software application that kills people it can't take responsibility. It can't be punished. It can't even really be sued.

I just don't see how we, as a society, can trust fundamentally unaccountable entities to build systems that can do real harm if they go wrong. I suppose the alternative is that Anthropic accepts full legal liability for everything its models do. Their unwillingness to make that move tells you all you probably need to know about their own internal confidence in those models.

There are other large horse body parts.

I started using Google Gemini to evaluate applications of transfer students for credit for specified courses at my university.

What a person in my role is supposed to do is email faculty colleagues teaching the course in question, but good luck with that. A faculty member wants such requests to just go away. Even if you know the contents of a course you have taught for years, how do you know that Cow College's offering is anywhere close?

The AI not only has a lot to say on how equivalent a pair of courses, if it is just making stuff up, I don't see how it can be worse than what my colleagues say.

Maybe if I don't call attention to what I am doing, no one will notice the difference. Maybe it is an improvement. A grad student turned in a form and left out which courses they wanted credit for. It came to me but requesting an undergrad-level course, and this topic is in the "wheelhouse" of the student's PhD advisor who approved. I sent it back that my "research" indicates that the course taken at MIT is advanced-graduate level at our Cow College and suggested an advanced grad level course here that according to the AI is a "great match."

I sent this back to the student--is the student going to complain?