I agree, but I also have to point out that depending on what priorities you have while voting, there aren't always any good options. Let's say you identify as a "worker" (unskilled) and you don't get too involved in the social politics and your biggest concern is that everything costs more and you don't feel like you'll ever afford a house. That's your biggest priority - a good paying job and cost of living. Historically, that's a pretty common priority issue. It's pretty easy to sell you on the idea that two reasons for this problem are that all the good paying jobs were shipped overseas during the globalization push (which is true) and that whatever basic labor jobs are left, that immigration tends to push down wages for those jobs (which is true to a first approximation, anyway). Traditionally this person would vote Democrat, the party that's supposed to stick up for the little guy, like him. But it's pretty easy to convince this guy that the ("neo-Liberal") Democrats are pro-immigration, and of course the Republicans have traditionally been pro-immigration. And on globalization, both parties are pro-free-trade. Mostly this just pisses him off and he sits home on voting day, not feeling like either one represents his interest. Now when the Republicans surprise-elect a guy who starts talking about tariffs and building a wall, and at the same time the Democrats are spending a lot of time talking about things that aren't his priority, I don't think it's surprising when that guy goes and votes Republican. You and I see Trump for the danger he is to the systems of the country, but that guy isn't even aware of what those systems are or how they work, and if he is aware, he thinks those systems are rigged against him. We're all coming at this with our own lived experience, and from that guy's point of view, Trump looks like the only candidate representing his priority interests after literally decades of feeling those interests were ignored. It's not enough that Trump is bad for ideological reasons. The Democrats need to offer this group something tangible that they really want. They want to own a house, and be able to afford to have BBQs and see ballgames and save up for a boat they can take down to the lake. And they know their grandparents lived that dream.

It turns out Everyone is Lying to you for Money.

What we're decrying is late-stage web 2.0 and we don't actually think web 3.0 can deliver on any of its promises. We just want web 1.0 back. I.e. an internet where you had to be fairly technically literate to be able to add your voice to the chorus.

"Hmm, your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter." - Homer (Simpson)

When I give programming questions in an interview, I always say, "you can write the solution in any language you feel comfortable in" because the point is just to confirm that they know how a computer works, and can simulate the local state of the computer in their mind. "The variable is initialized with 0, and then after the first loop it contains 3," etc. I also usually ask them a question that involves figuring out the volume of a cylindrical tank, and I say "pretend I'm google if you need to look something up", not because I want to know that they can use Google, but because I want to know if they grasp the concept that volume is base times height. There are a surprising number of people who apply for programming jobs who have zero spatial sense, and certain aspects of this job require it. Heck, I interviewed a graduate of an electrical engineering program who couldn't convert an answer from A to mA. You can't just not ask technical questions in interviews. A surprising number of people get through life without a solid understanding of how the world works within the confines of their own field.

Many of your victims won't be able to say anything even if the files aren't decrypted -- this case is a good example, since the company in question couldn't admit publicly that they were paying ransoms.

A little searching shows that scams (beyond the base "pay to decrypt") are very common. You're dealing with criminals. If you pay a ransom, they now know that you have money that you're willing to pay, and they're going to do whatever they can to get more of it.

They were invited to join at the end of the cold war, and they kinda did, or at least they made advances in that direction. But I think Russia just didn't have the institutions in place to be able to follow through, and China did just enough to gain some advantage from free market reforms without also implementing the social freedoms that we thought would inevitably go along with it. You're talking about a society (Russia) where their cultural belief could be summed up as "endless suffering" and another society (China) where it's very low-trust. It was our folly to think you could build a western-like liberal democracy on top of non-western ideas.

I don't think we've used Airbnb, but we've used VRBO many times and they *always* require you to clean the place and take out the trash when you leave. Was this not a standard thing in Airbnb?

That's a pretty non-nuanced view of history. The reason that we had so much explosive growth in the west since the end of WW2 was because the US setup a system of international alliances and a rules-based world order with the goal of containing Russia and China. The sheer number of people who were lifted out of poverty over the last century specifically because of that is mind-boggling. But of course the game is still the game, and countries are still maneuvering to gain the best position, and that includes the US. No, the US is not a saint, but we can't forget that their actions during and after WW2 definitely made them and their allies the "good guys", at least until the end of the cold war, and I would argue even through the first gulf war, where the US military actually stopped the invasion of Iraq specifically because they didn't want to exceed the UN mandate. The thing is, we got used to it. We believed it was the new normal. Fukayama wrote a book called The End of History, and people believed it. He was wrong. But the reason he was proven wrong was specifically because Russia and China refused to see the obvious benefit of a rules-based world order, and refused to get their house in order. Russia's government is essentially run like the mafia, and China manipulates its currency, corrupted the WHO, and both of them installed a dictator for life. And when the American people became disillusioned, they elected their own leader in the image of Putin and Xi. That's how we got where we are now. I'm over-simplifying, for sure, but "US bad too" has never been an adequate explanation.

I'm certainly not sold on the idea that "government controls AI technology" is better than "bunch of silicon valley bros control AI technology". I don't trust either of them. I would absolutely rather have private development with more strict regulatory oversight, which at least keeps things relatively public and gives voters at least some say. The more groups involved in overseeing what goes on, the better. I get that red tape is out of vogue recently, but I suspect that's only a temporary thing.

I've only used Claude code for a matter of weeks at work. While it's supposed to stay contained in the folder you point it at, I've noticed that it has no problem *looking* outside that folder, and even acting outside that folder if you gave it implied permission. In one case it used the connection string from the application source code it was working on, and the fact that my windows account had read-only access to some tables in the production database, to connect to the database and query tables in order to answer a question it had about the potential ramifications of a code change. The problem is that while we're OK with this particular source code leaving the premises, we're not ok with data from a production database going offsite. In this case it wasn't sensitive data, but after that incident I only run Claude Code from a VM under a user with minimal permissions. Clearly it would have been prudent to do that from the start, but let this be a warning to anyone else who just downloaded Claude Code, turned off the "use my data to train future models" and gave it a go... it will *not* keep itself inside the folder you give it. Put it in a sandbox. I heard a similar story this week from an IT friend who said devs at his company were using Cursor.ai and it was doing scans of the network drives, so they did the same thing and moved it all to VMs.

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and in this case, given what I've seen people do with AI, and given my own experience with Claude Code (Opus and Fable models), the normal human inclination to trust it's probably right and click OK is by far the most likely explanation. And remember that frontier models have grown increasingly better over the last year, and one of the newest improvements is that the reasoning models use two models in an adversarial mode where the second model checks and challenges the output of the first. The timeline of the events in Iran probably indicate that this was an older AI model without those newer advances. I can totally believe this story. When consumers were expected to keep their hands on the wheel of self-driving cars, I absolutely knew they wouldn't, and when humans are told to check the conclusions of AI, they mostly just click OK. I do actually look at the code that Claude generates before it goes into our codebase, and I can tell you, the desire to just skim read is real.

And he knows this is the "only hypervisor bug left" because...he hasn't been able to find another one yet?

This smells like some dude saying "AI is better than me at my hobby, so I'm taking my ball and going home!"

As they've been telling us software developers who are being asked to adapt to probably the most rapid transformation of any career that's ever been seen... "it's ok to take a moment to grieve." I was spending most of my time writing code up until about the middle of August, and then I realized that Fable was finally good enough to work on the rather large code base that I work on, and now I write less than 5% of the new code, and I'm pushing out new features at probably 3 times as fast as I was before, while now spending almost all my time creating and reviewing specifications, reading code, updating documentation, reviewing software architecture, and making bigger plans. It's jarring, exhilarating, and humbling at the same time. It's gonna take a minute for us to adjust. And yes, things are still changing fast. Software development has embraced this. It's coming for 3D CAD software and mechanical engineers next. There's been pushback within the more creative arts, like graphic design, writing, and making videos, and I totally understand that. Those industries will grapple with it in different ways than we have in the engineering space. And we won't lose all the creative stuff. As someone recently said to me, "we still ride horses, but we don't ride them to work."

... did Slashdot become a god damned commie circle jerk?