Don't worry, We won't be leading shit by the end of the 21st century. No amount of effort can undo the damage we've done to ourselves.

It's what a majority of people voted for. If numerous warnings and his previous term weren't informative enough, then maybe some of us should stay away from the ballot box.

Fairly reasonable things to be bitching about.

it's on par with contemporary "hoverboards"

I'd pay more if it had SFP instead of Gigabit Ethernet. Being able to patch into random optical connectors I find would make such a device rather ... useful.

Well as long as federal agents can't walk into the White House or Capitol building to nab criminals.

All these AI layoffs will be hiring people back in a year ... at a lower wage.

It's all about capitalists versus labor, and trimming payroll costs in the short term while potentially renegotiating wages in a position of advantage.

Plain old gravity. Just not certain if the elementary particles in the standard model are the source.

Knowledge is hard won in science. And it takes quite a bit of intellectual honesty to admin we don't know what something is. Dark matter is the label for phenomenon we can measure but we don't understand. It will be renamed when we do understand its nature.

It's all about the Pentiums

Employees, personnel, workers, labor. But the later two would be admitting who does the actual work around here.

door-to-door public transport is a great way to have traffic jams and make personal transportation an expensive privilege that makes some key people a lot of money. Worse for individuals than leasing a vehicle in terms of cost and control.

I brought two of my neglected fruit trees back to production. I'll be doing some grafts for the others next next.
I found out that I need a lot more deer proof fence to make a go at growing tomatoes and kale. Very little survived these hoofed vermin.

100% agree with you. And I think the companies that figure out that you could take the same number of employees but have them using better tools are going to be the winners in the long wrong. Using AI to be more productive, shortening development cycles, etc is kind of the point, but real metrics and cost-benefit analysis needs to be done continually in any company adopting new technology. If it's not paying off, then don't do it. And I firmly believe that cutting large number of staff is the wrong optimization, being smaller is the opposite of growth. And in this industry, growth is success (in multiple dimensions)

Yea, there is a huge lack of understanding of what it's for. It's not a search engine or a program launcher. But on the other hand you can ask it (Glean, copilot, whatever) something like "Look for internal docs on XYZ and summarize. Note any discrepancies between sources. And cite your sources."

I find LLMs useful to make a workflow for doing some task. Like instead of asking it to generate tables, I have it generate a script that generates tables. Because I have on MANY occasions seen Claude Opus and others spit out tables of data with subtle errors in it. And while I usually have success when I ask it to review the tables it just generated, it has been much better at reviewing a small script's correctness than large tables of data.

Luckily I didn't claim it was replacing software engineers. Although it is a huge force multiplier for us. Docs, execution roadmaps, code reviews, security audits, benchmarking, trouble shooting, and writing boiler plate code. I think a good portion of my peers have been already using this tech for the last 2 years. We would have stopped using it if it didn't work at all, and it seems to be improving all the time.

For non software engineering jobs, which I think is where we're near the break even point on full employee replacement. Getting a system that can usefully answer help desk does exist, but it is expensive to run. Offering a inferior experience with a much cheaper AI is already possible and being done today.

Practically speaking. Getting one experience QA engineer to direct an army of agents at directed and ad hoc testing is already happening. So those entry level QA jobs that many of us used to get our foot in the door into the software industry are not going to be available (sending those jobs over seas already made them an unreliable route for most of us in the West)