Ah, well, with a huge screen I imagine it might matter more, yeah :)

That's another thing I've never got into. Our living room and bedroom are small-ish, or medium-ish at most; I really can't imagine using a huge TV screen in them. I never really understood the whole "cover your wall with a TV screen" thing :D

really? does USA have a dictator running the place for 25 years, regardless of the rules? Who even appoints State governors, maybe mayors even? Court judges who rubberstamp decisions sent down from him? An actual oppressive apparatus designed to jail anyone and torture and murder? A population poor enough that an offer of a couple of thousand dollars a month is enough for them to go die in a pointless war, where theft and rape and murder and torture is not only for the enemy but is a common tool to force the own military to go forward? There us more, I can do this all day.

Finding an internship isn't easy, though.

I've wondered about that, too.

It's not a paradise either, so you should have known there was something wrong with that phrase.

(Fun fact: the Soviet Union never claimed to be communist. They claimed they were working towards that goal, well aware that they hadn't achieved it. The goal? A world where man does not exploit man. It's still a worthy goal)

Which absurdity are you thinking of? (Because it's not like the non-communist world lacks absurdity).

I am sympathetic to creators (including Google) who are harmed by new technology.

But where is the harm? I don't see anywhere in the article where Google even alleges harm was caused.

That's probably true.

They take search engine output and return it in JSON format picture here. Apparently some AI companies recently started using their API to get a lot of search results from Google.

I've done @100 interviews with newly graduated compsci majors. It's very rough because many are just barely able (or not able) to contain their frustration. Some have left the interview in tears. They exclaim "I wasn't taught any of this!"

They pretty much fall into two camps: the ones who were taught trendy skills and the ones taught academic skills. The trendy coders used to be the ones who only learned Java, but lately it's morphed into Rust, Swift, Go, and Python. The academic coders learned three dialects of ML (Haskell, OCaML, etc..) and some form or other of LISP.

The trouble is that they often have had only one or two classes about algorithms and design patterns. Additionally, many have never studied Assembly, C, or C++, which are the most common languages I encounter as a (30+ year) professional coder and what we use extensively on both new and existing projects. Our vendors publish their APIs in these languages, as well. I will admit I do see Python gaining ground professionally as "AI" projects are generally nearly exclusively started in Python and currently inescapable. However, AI tools have yet to really push out any need for coders, but perhaps you could argue increase efficiency from AI has lowered our needs (I wouldn't say that's true). We have a number of AI-enabled IDEs, now. However, we all intermittently use them now as we've learned they cost us in bugs and logic errors about as much as they save us in prototyping time. They are only well-suited for a certain bandpass of tasks. We still hire new coders, but it's a slog, because they rarely have any notable experience or projects. They learned languages and coding practices simply useless to us and without some impressive problem solving or algorithm knowledge, you're toast. Next candidate, please.

I'd be angry/frustrated, too, if I was taught what some of these kids were taught and turned loose on the world expecting a high paying job.

For example:

Yesterday I get an email from Home Depot saying my refrigerator is going to be delivered next week. But it isn't my refrigerator. It belongs to someone whose phone number is one digit off of mine and got entered wrong at the store.

Not fraud, not malfeasance, just stupidity in having one manual data entry step with no validation in the critical path.

Don't know how the white house website does their livestream, but it wouldn't surprise me if copy-pasting a link into a form was in the critical path. And if Joe FormerIntern was watching this livestream at the same time and had the wrong link in the system copy buffer...well there you go.

This world is upside down, where getting plentyful cheap stuff is considered to be a problem, where tariffs will make something great again. It is like living among amoeba brained monkeys.

Doing all of this is completely unnecessary. First design your game so that the server never trusts the client. Don't give it more information than the human player could themselves see and never rely on any calculations from the client. That's still insufficient though, so it's necessary for the server to collect and analyze the data it receives from the client. Anything that frequently operates outside of the thresholds of human ability is cheating. Cheat programs are still programs and operate algorithmically and can be identifiable in that way.

There's also the matter of what to do with the cheaters. You can ban them out right, but that's just information to the people selling the cheats. They can do A/B testing to detect the detection methods. I think that a better solution is to quarantine them so they only ever play other cheaters. Anyone falsely labeled will lose horribly in this environment and will be washed out of it. Everyone else will only be inconveniencing people as awful as they themselves are. None of it requires users to install or run invasive code on their own machines.

It's actually bad at this sort of thing. You can ask an LLM to write a 5 paragraph essay about the Gettysburg Address and to give you the program code to perform a word count and it will give you responses that are experts would agree are correct or otherwise good. However the same AI that delivered each if asked to count the number of words in the five paragraph essay it generated will be wrong. The current AIs posses that kind of advanced technology giving the appearance of magic, but it's just a very clever trick. There's very clearly something missing and even if we can't define what that is, once you understand what to look for it becomes apparent that the tools are limited in much the same way an Eliza bot is despite how it once managed to convince many people that it was human despite being a few hundred lines of code.

You don't test something by walking down the golden path where everything works out perfectly. Instead you consider ways to break it and show that it doesn't work. If you want to convince me something is intelligent it had better damned we'll be able to take two pieces of knowledge it has and make logical connections between them. If you're not testing well or hard enough you're only pulling the wool over your own eyes.

Over what time period? If I told you that if you give me $100 now, I'll give you $300 in 10 years, that's a fairly good deal if you think I have a good chance of delivering on that or enough other income sources to squeeze if that investment goes sideways. It's the same idea here only in the billions of dollars as opposed to the hundreds.

Microsoft investors either put up with this same shit the last several dozen times the company stuck a lot of money into some dubious but potentially profitable proposition or they sold their shares to someone else who would. Some of it pans out and a lot of it doesn't. The tech industry is the sort of place where one winner more than covers dozens of losers.

All of these companies get filtered through a further layer of a market that treats them in the same way that they treat AI. Microsoft, Oracle, and any other company you can buy shares of are just an investment that may or may not pay off. Staring directly into it will drive you mad, but somehow it works better on average than anything else we've come up with. It's not just companies that believe that AI will pay off, but larger humanity as well, at least to a certain degree best measured by willingness to invest in the companies investing in AI.

If you think all of that is utterly wrong and stupid then you should start shorting the stocks of the companies investing in AI. If you're right, you'll make money from doing so. If you're wrong you'll lose money. Whether you care about making money or not, this is a useful exercise for you to reflect upon how much you really believe your own position. As a wise man once said, "Put your money where your mouth is."