He surpassed him as far we know before that, but then he rescinded Obama's EO requiring notifying The People of drone strikes.

I thought you were talking about interest, not reality.

It seems the intent of my original post was not clear.

Yes I know Libre Office exists, it's the one I use at home. My point was that Big Tech is "all in" on AI across the board, driven by an obvious eagerness to eliminate human software developers from the creation process. They see only the money they can save.

But the consequences of actually achieving such a goal would undermine their own business models. The reason why they would no longer need programmers is the same reason why no one would need their products.

We are still nowhere near that point yet, despite the enthusiasm that they are trying to drum up with stories like this one. Their agents can create a C compiler. Well today I asked cursor to move several methods from a file that had gotten too big out to a separate class, making the methods public and static in the process, and updating references. This entire operation involved a grand total of two code files and barely any "thinking."

It started generating powershell scripts to do batch operations on the files and screwed that up, wiping them out entirely, then tried to retrieve copies from git which wasn't set up for this project, and started showing inner text generation about trying to reconstruct the files just from the content in the chat history, when I stopped it. I had the whole thing backed up because I am no fool and also the Cursor interface gave me an undo button which worked.

So, these AI that are so capable they can create C compilers can't even move a handful of methods from one file to another, without destroying the whole thing.

AI is nowhere near ready to replace us.

Why wouldn't they be?

Most romance novels are little more than mad libs which were already filled in for you. They are generated by hacks using writing software that does most of the job. There is little to no loss of quality if software does the whole job.

Simp harder for the corporations spying on you

When will 16 AI agents be able to code me up a Word processor with features equivalent to Microsoft Word?

Because once they can do that, people can stop buying Office and just vibe up their own versions. So long as the agents can implement standard file formats, the differences in implementations won't matter.

An interesting future is being teased here; one in which the only tech giants remaining will be the makers of AI, and everyone else will just vibe up all the software they now pay through the nose to get.

Right, Obama was only approving murders without due process in other countries.

The US government is the biggest problem. Any adversary we're importing products from is also a problem.

If you're concerned about your government having info on you, you should be concerned that they would be able to buy it from another entity which got it from your foreign adversary, or even directly. Why not charge your adversary for partial information on their own citizens?

Consumer ignorance is always a good bet.

The Pi folks fuck up bigly on approximately every design. I've been watching casually since I had the raspi model A with the shitfest USB that all the fanboy clowns defended to the death even though it made the device completely worthless for any USB traffic heavy applications. They especially half-ass the power supply section of the board almost every time, which is very very bad since if that doesn't work right, nothing else does either.

And people DO like AI, when it is directly serving their needs. AI-powered apps are popular in all markets where they appear. People like asking them questions and getting answers more quickly than if they went spelunking through search results on the Internet. People like chatting with chatbots, and especially people like generating silly art using prompts. This stuff is all over the place!

But people DON'T like paying full price for content that should be high-quality, but is in fact cheap AI slop. Slop is fine as a hobby, but not as a consumer product. All industry leaders WANT people to like this, and will do absolutely everything they can to convince us to like this (including outright forcing it on us whenever they can), because of all the jobs they will be able to cut. But it doesn't change the fact that people still don't like it.

And they don't like losing their jobs to AI either. And they also don't like the impact on electricity bills and environmental quality.

So, as usual, the situation is more complex than "people don't like it." And because of this, something as simple as an advertising push doesn't indicate a bubble pop.

There has never been any point in history, including pre-recorded history, during which humans acted in a fair and reasonable fashion as a group.

Those in power (whether their power be derived from wealth or political influence) are held to a different standard from everyone else. It has always been this way. It was this way when we were hunter-gatherers living in forests and caves. It was this way before we even qualified as humans.

This is not a quirk of culture or circumstance. This is a property of human behavior. More fundamentally than that, this is a property of pack-animal behavior.

So, you can expect to see such injustice continue into the foreseeable future.

LFP batteries are pretty easy to come by. Power banks are getting easier. You do have to do careful research with the small power banks, as they seem to want to obscure the battery technology whether they use LFPs or not. I looked at a pack at Costco which could have been almost anything but turned out to be LiPo, I had to go to the manufacturer's website to figure out which product lines used which chemistry.

The pack I keep in my car is a LFP I got from Harbor Freight on sale for about $65 some few years ago now. (3 or more, don't recall exactly.) It's still working well. I've used it to jump start several vehicles including a small diesel and a V8 pickup.

We recently-ish got an ecoflow delta 2 for about half price, it seems OK. Haven't hardly used it. Like most of these devices it has a built in solar charge controller, and I've got a panel which can be connected to it. I expect it to come in handy in the next outage. It has an 1800W inverter so it can run pretty much anything in the house... for a little while.

If ghostscript has access to everything you're printing, then a hole in it could potentially be used to exfiltrate any of that information. Unless every gs process is run with process separation, which TBF is a thing that you could do, that's a real risk.