I was actually in college in the 1990s, but yes, a middle schooler today with python on a raspberry pi and a pretty simple GPS module could do this.

I didn't say it wasn't abhorrent or alarming. I'm presenting the scenario that this task of "defend this three dimensional coordinate box" doesn't require AI.

Yes, it did. The beacon signals weren't that good back then, neither were the sensors. I had the same problem in the fake robot battles I was involved in.

The answer turned out to be a solution not from Defense industries, but from Genie Garage Door Openers.

The robot doesn't care. The robot's job isn't foreign policy. The robot's job is "here's a box defined by this coordinate cloud, defend it"

Like I said, I programmed it for a fighting robot back in the 1990s. It ain't that complex, and with today's drone factory ships, the Navy can now output this level of AI in killbots at a rate of 10,000 a day.

Kill decisions are simple in comparison: Stay within your predefined geofence, kill anything that moves that isn't transmitting Friend beacon. We don't need AI for that, I coded a form of it in both Basic and Forth back in the 1990s.

And if they don't, some other startup will.

Or time literacy. Permanent!=3 years

Having resisted the vim plugins in IDEs for several years, I don't think you can get around just as easily without, and certainly not in a web browser text box. Simple editors (and even Notepad++) don't do things like selecting/changing text within brackets, deleting/copying/modifying text until the next comma (or semicolon, etc), navigation/action to the next sentence or the start of this sentence, and quick and easy repeated actions. That's not to mention the capabilities I don't use every day, like multiple copy buffers and macros.

Don't be so sure that Republicans aren't Communists and Democrats aren't Fascists.

And apparently "Faster than ever before" is limited to a data set less than 4 centuries old out of 4.5 billion. It's science reporting like this that makes people distrust science.

It's also continually ironic that the companies that used the world's knowledge without compensation to train their models are complaining when another company uses their models to train models (though they almost certainly are paying for the privilege).

And the total number of layoffs of American tech workers in 2022-2025 was in the hundreds of thousands.

Far fewer after October 1 when you basically needed to pay an extra full year's salary to hire an H-1b over a citizen.