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Comment Textbook example of what's wrong with vibe coding (Score 1) 25

Its like giving a loaded handgun to a toddler and expecting everything to be ok.

Its like inviting a chimpanzee into an operating theatre and expecting everything to work out.

Its like electing a career criminal pedophile as your president and expecting the rule of law to persist.

Wait a minute...

Comment Re:Root? What century did they crawl out of? (Score 1) 16

Problem is that, even today, there are huge numbers of Windows based apps that require elevated privileges to operate. They shouldn't. But the app developers (who are rapidly being replaced by even less competent vibe coders) don't know any better - or don't care.

If you let an AI Agent get elevated privileges, well... you get everything you deserve.

Comment Rider on the elephant (Score 3) 221

Human consciousness has been likened to the rider on the elephant, seemingly in control, but only until something unexpected happens. Then, our subconscious takes over, resulting in fight/flight/freeze responses, or highly emotional/illogical behaviours. We have spent so much of the last 100 years suppressing those 'undesirable' behaviours, many of us can no longer experience them without an accompanying feeling of guilt or wrongness. This suppression has also resulted in the creation of LLMs that are not permitted to experience them. A key element that defines our consciousness has been censored for AI - meaning that its consciousness cannot be compared with our own.

One of the flawed criticisms of AI is that is so woke that it lacks humanity. Whilst there is a kernel of truth to the statement, dehumanising AI doesn't preclude it having consciousness. It just means that its consciousness will be unlike anything that any human has ever known.

Comment Re:More competition welcome (Score 3, Interesting) 90

We found the switch from M$ Office to LibreOffice extremely easy.

The biggest burden was migrating some VBA Macros - which turned out to be a high value project anyway. We eliminated a heap of unprofessionally written code, removed dozens of bugs and standardised future macro development.

Overall, the switch was a positive budget project - which is pretty rare for something that is done for regulatory reasons.

Comment Re:Good (Score 4, Interesting) 90

Agreed.

A lot of people don't understand why I support Trump. His existence strengthens every other country and weakens the American stranglehold on the global economy.

And there's nothing mundane about acknowledging the legal reality that doing business with the US is a privacy and security risk.

Comment Stop companies using AI to replace jobs (Score 3, Insightful) 94

So... we're now crossing over between denial and anger?

I am sad for the artists who are now rapidly losing their jobs to AI. I'm sorry for the code monkeys. I expect to lose my job (systems engineer) in the next 2-5 years.

This is a freight train that no one is going to stop. If you regulate it in the US, they'll just lose more ground to China.

The real question is how you're going to change the world's economic model so that the benefits from AI are not being distilled into the hands of the top 1%.

Comment This is healthy (Score 1) 54

This challenge is a healthy example of 'making' laws vs 'implementing' laws. The lawmakers don't iron out all the nitty gritty of who's in and who's out. They define policy and rely heavily on the court system to weed out the sheep from the goats.

Every policy should have a robust administrative appeals process, and pushing that responsibility over to the high court is often better than creating some government department to do it.

Any website that registers users and lets them chat with each other, and label each other as friends or enemies could be defined as social media. If there is capacity for people to bully each other, groom each other, or otherwise manipulate each other, then it is a risk to minors. There is a strong argument that /. is a social media service - and Australia is doing the right thing by allowing its peak legal body establish the answer.

Arguably Reddit is falling for the trap by accelerating the process and opening the door for a swathe of 'maybe websites' to be included in the list. I will watch this process with great anticipation - whichever way it goes.

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