You're right, and I thought about this about a half hour after making this assertion. Of course, I'll have to crack the book and learn whatever new thing displaces Rust, or whatever.

They can certainly write code, but the code they write will be "their code", and I will at best be reviewing it for them. It won't be "my code" because I didn't write it.

I currently use qwen 3.8 27b on a system with a couple of RTX 3060s that I bought on ebay for personal coding projects. I've been a firmware engineer professionally for a couple of decades, and I recently wanted to branch into mobile app development. Last year, I bought a book on React to learn cross-platform app dev. But, last month I built this pieced-together system for local AI and have come to the conclusion that I will never need to learn a new programming language again. This lil' bastard does everthing!

And, professionally, my employer pays for a top-tier subscription that's able to code, run command line tools, build and install firmware, and even connect to a logic analyzer and debug data lines.

Yes, "AI bots" can write most of your code, if you're able to clearly explain what's needed in your planning and action prompts. And, beyond that, AI can examine an existing code base, very clearly explain its function, and provide recommendations for refactors and other improvements.

At this point, it hasn't replaced me as an engineer, but it's definitely augmented my abilities it in a way that "paired programming" and other stupid Agile-touchy-feely methodologies never could.

I don't know if you're a russian bot or some deluded idiot, but it amuses me to do a breakdown of your post.

NATO turned what was originally intended to be a mostly peaceful show of force like the temporary invasion of Georgia into a war of attrition.

First of all the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Georgia involved a few hundred dead in the first two days, and another 5000+ civilians killed in the ethnic cleansing after that, all for a land-grab to seize control of territory covering half of Georgia's coastline that Putin wanted.

Secondly, the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Ukraine involved hundreds dead, ballistic and cruise missile attacks on all of Ukraine's largest cities, and Putin publicly admitting the goal of overthrowing the Ukrainian government... and that's just within the first 36 hours. Within two and a half months Russian officials began admitting the intent to permanently annex parts of Ukraine, proceeding with a constitutional amendment a few months later claiming to annex vast territories that Russian had not remotely taken control of, and which Russia is not remotely capable of capturing. Donetsk alone has a population of over a million, two million if you include the metro-area. Russia spent months and many thousand of lives to capture, and later lose, villages in the range of low tens of thousands.

Remember WWI when the lines were pretty much static for years and then suddenly it was all over?

Yes, I remember. As I recall it wasn't exactly "sudden". As I recall... Russian casualties were around five million killed, wounded, or captured, the Russian economy was collapsing, Russia was running out of food, and Russian literally lost it's own capital to civilian rebellion. A few months later the Russian government collapsed and surrendered vast territories including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Poland and Ukraine to Germany and its allies (known as the Central Powers). Right about that point the U.S. joined the war reinvigorating the Allied Powers. Germany&friends knew they couldn't win a protracted war. They attempted a quick win, and, in short, they failed. The Allied powers steadily beat them down, with the allies eventually breaking through the lines and progressively liberating territory. With the Allies steadily advancing and the war obviously lost, German forces began rebelling and Germany surrendered.

That's what's happening here. Russia has most of Donbas plus a buffer zone in some other regions that directly border Russia. Ukraine is throwing men at the front lines for Russia to kill but is running out. Territory held is largely irrelevant compared to the number of men killed and weapons destroyed.

So much to unpack there, but it's amusing how you cite "territory held is largely irrelevant" given that the tide has turned and Ukrainians are now the ones breaking through lines and liberating territory from Russian occupation. It's not much yet, but all the map trackers show the reversal. Russia is now officially loosing more territory than they gain. Russia WAS slowly gaining small bits of land, largely through sending meat waves of untrained ill equipped soldiers at Ukrainian lines until the Ukrainians ran out of ammo and had to fall back. However now 7 out of 10 Russians killed are killed by drones. The "no man's land" between the two sides is now many kilometers wide. Any Russian trying to advance gets hit by a drone. Russia has also losing on average 1 air defense system every day, and rapidly depleting. Russian supply lines are getting pummeled by drones. Russian refineries are getting pummeled by drones, with progressively worsening fuel shortages for both the military and for the increasingly rebellious population. Cheap advanced Ukrainian drones are taking out expensive crappy Russian drones, including Russian's new jet-drones. Practically every country on earth is asking Ukraine for their military drone tech, the Russians can't remotely match it. Russian's economy is also fucked, but that topic pretty needs a separate book to cover.

Interesting side notes on weapons destroyed. Russia is destroying it's aircraft almost as fast as Ukraine is, between incompetence and maintenance failures and friendly fire shooting down their own aircraft. Also the nation that is the biggest donor of tanks to Ukraine is... Russia. Ukraine captured countless Russian tanks intact because the Russian military is so abysmal incompetent and corrupt. And as I mentioned, Russian air defense units are depleting. The war is now approaching 5 years, longer than the entirety of WW1. Ukraine is a small fraction of Russia's size, and Russian is literally losing and headed towards another soviet-union-style collapse. The biggest shock to the world of this entire war is just how worthless Putin has made Russian military, through systemic corruption and systemic incompetence.

Polls show the Ukrainian population isn't interested in surrendering. They are defending their homes. It's simple, the war will end when all the soldiers go home. When Russian soldiers go back to their homes in Russia, and when Ukrainian soldiers go back to their homes in the currently occupied parts of Ukraine. Although that's not likely to happen until Putin either expires or is overthrown. Not only is he fanatical enough to drive his country to collapse in the attempt, he knows if he did end the war in failure he'd get killed or overthrown for it.

Anyway, pointless reply to a bot or a useful idiot. But maybe some random passer-by will find some bits interesting. I don't know about the rest of the world, but mainstream US news rarely mentions the Ukraine war anymore, and certainly not in any detail.

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It's not as important as you might think. If the concern is humanity being able to survive the loss of Earth's biosphere, then the enabling technology to accomplish that is recreating an independently sustainable human-compatible biosphere elsewhere -- which is not something that Starship, on its own, will be able to do within the next 20 years, even if it could place human beings on Mars. So if the Giant Space Asteroid comes for us, we'll be just as doomed with Starship as without it -- the Mars colonists would starve to death a few months after the Earth resupply ships stopped arriving.

Assuming all goes well, I agree. OTOH, returning old equipment back into service after it had been written off is a little risky, don't you think?

It's perfectly possible to build a machine that will incapacitate a human at close range; all of the world's militaries have been doing it for years.

It's also possible to deliberately dial down the machine's combat effectiveness to the point where a fight against a human might not be a foregone conclusion.

OTOH, having done the latter, what have we learned? That we can design and build a robot that we nerfed just enough that it usually loses in hand-to-hand combat?

As they say, what's remarkable isn't that the dog plays a good game of poker; it's that the dog is able to play poker at all.

Yeah, remote assistance. That's different from the drone pilot driver scenario you alluded to.

Those are both for remote assistance, and neither are "overseas". Uh, nice try?

Right. So, for this to work, each car has to relay several video feeds to a central station, which then route to this "overseas" location. This would add seconds of latency. Then, these "overseas" taxi drivers monitor each car's video feeds simultaneously (maybe with a headset?), and perform steering, acceleration and breaking actions on a mock setup. This control data gets routed back to each individual car, which adds seconds more latency.

Do you really think this is how it works?

Expensive gimmick? Definitely. Appeasement? Who needs appeasement?

As methods for by suicide-by-wealth go, it's classier than drugs, and more accessible than a carbon-fiber submarine. I predict we'll see some pretty spectacular Youtube videos of people making themselves (and their car) two-dimensional.

I wonder how the performance of 2 networked 512GB Mac Studios would compare to the performance of a (hypothetical) single Mac Studio with 1TB of RAM?

My intuition says that the network linking the two machines would be a bottleneck, but I don't know if that's a minor performance problem or a major one.

I didn't know either, but I do know what JPEG is, and I have a pretty good idea about what XL might mean, so I was able to suss out that it might be a new and improved lossy-compressed image format.

Of course, approaching the problem rationally like that doesn't provide me an opportunity to make childish insults, but that's just one of the downsides of being a grown-up that I'll have to live with.