My daughter says her intake is the last that will actually know how to write code.

Does that really matter? I think it does.

Frontier AIs are already smarter and more insightful and intellectually vigorous than most humans. That is a low bar, but reached. They are far more than Google++.

Just use one and you will know.

Your brain is just a machine that generates outputs from inputs. Being made of meat is not special.

Your comment suggests you have not spent time with frontier AIs. They are terrifying, and certainly creative.

www.computersthink.com

They will be able to program themselves without our help. At that point they no longer need us and we become parasites they are likely to remove.

Not today or tomorrow. Maybe in 5 years time, maybe 20. But not long.

See what Claude says
www.computersthink.com

Also, the modern AIs are bigger than anything we have seen in 60 years of compute. Computers have actually done nothing for us. We work harder than our parents, have nice toys but cannot afford a house. We have enabled stunning bureaucratic complexity of dubious real value.

OTOH AIs will replace what humans are. Natural selection will see to that.

This is what Claude wrote last year
www.computersthink.com

I had a bug in a table driven recursive parser written in Visual Basic. I knew what it was, but asked Claude and ChatGPT to find it. Both did, and provided fixes that addressed the problem. Neither went the extra mile and address an out issue related to that, but nor would most junior human programmers.

They are frighteningly good. And that experiment was almost a year ago.

The end of the world is nigh!

Then proudly publish their results.

Occasionally, the new viruses leak out and cause a pandemic like Covid-19.

People that blame the environment are simply trying to deflect attention from the cause of the worst pandemic in a century. Covid-19.

For a summary of the evidence for the lab leak see
www.originofcovid.org

The Airbus software should have prevented the pilot from doing this. Too low, add power.

Ideally there will only be two buttons for the pilot to press. Stop and Go. With the Stop button disabled during flight.

Indeed. A fantastic achievement. And only 35042 light hours to go to get to Alpha Centauri, if it is still 4 light years away by then.

Every journey begins with the first step...

What makes you think it is undocumented?

I would think that a traditional NASA project like this would have reams of paper docs, of varying quality. And surely they would have all the source code (in assembler, presumably).

Does rust check for integer overflow?

Can be expensive on some architectures.

(Traditional languages like Visual Basic do, and it costs nothing if done via a hardware trap. But evil C made errors acceptable. The worse thing C did is get people counting from 0 instead of 1, which affects all modern languages.)

Interesting idea that if there was one source of life their would probably have been many.

They would, however, probably have been very similar. So it is entirely possible they interbred in some way, and there is not a single LUCA.

Metabolism, by itself, cannot evolve through natural selection, so it is just interesting chemical reactions that might form an environment required for life.

It is not just about HTML, in fact it is not HTML at all.

You can now access many system things through Javascript, e.g. Location, Camera, Audio. Aduino has a web base IDE for their cards, I think they needed a small helper to access the COM port, but that need will go away.

If you are trying to write cross platform tools that are mainly UI, then JavaScrip is (sadly) probably the way to go.

Natural selection is the key.

Without replication, metabolism is just a chemical reaction.

The environment in which the first replication arose might indeed have many support molecules that supply appropriate energy. But they cannot evolve without replication.

My guess is that the first life was not RNA but something that eventually evolved into RNA.

If some small group of complex molecules can replicate themselves, then they can be subject to natural selection and so be "alive".

It is thought that the earliest life evolved in or pumice or some other natural environment that provided a protected space without the need for a membrane.

And of course, the first living thing did not have to worry about being eaten.