Compare this to what you would have said last year.

Somehow "cheap weapons able to target civilians, but not those well protected" doesn't make me feel happier. And such weapon are clearly only useful for attack, not defense.

Well, arguing from the derivation of the word is just silly, but:
https://founders.archives.gov/...
clearly shows that some of them agreed with that point of view. Hamilton, however, was only one side. Others interpreted it differently.

Actually, all that literally means is that you can carry them. It doesn't say anything about ownership or control.

Calling that a deterrent is whitewashing it. A hypersonic missile is an attack weapon unless it is specifically an anti-missile missile. It's most highly useful in first strike situations.

Actually, it's one thing to announce, it's another to manufacture at scale. If this is real, it will be a severe threat in 5 years, perhaps a bit less.

What's the range? I really doubt that this is the new MAD, but it does add a new and exciting amount of uncertainty, and increase the advantage of attack over defense.

"Well regulated" is not well defined. It definitely didn't originally mean "government approved"...or at least it didn't mean that to everyone who put their signature to it.

You're being practical, not logical. Logically the 2nd amendment implies that the right to own arms should not be restricted. AFAIK, it's never been interpreted that way by the courts.

There are lots of other places where the clear logical meaning of the US Constitution is always ignored. Often for very sound reasons.

This happens also in LOTS of other parts of the legal system. If an AI ever starts interpreting and enforcing the laws in a literal fashion nearly everyone is going to be hurt. (Sometimes the laws were even written with the intent of selective enforcement, but often I believe people just didn't notice that they implied things that weren't intended.)

What I want is a Yosarian mode.

When I switched off MSWindows, what I wanted was Windows 95b compatibility. It never showed up. It still hasn't. I've intentionally avoided later versions because of terms in the licensing.

These days the only things that haven't showed up on Linux, or had better replacements are a few music programs (more my wife's field than mine) and a few games...that I may have lost the CDs for.

While that's the hype, it's not going to be the reality.

Yes, what they are doing has a market.

Yes, it will absolutely allow many of the masses to do what programmers have been able to do for ages. It will change the market, the cheese will move, but it won't destroy the marketplace for programmers.

I think work in graphics design is probably the best parallel. People freaked out in the 1980s when home computers could make banners and flyers. As the software advanced, you got more and more people doing Word Art, and enormous clipart catalogs let office secretaries make good looking office flyers, creative garage sale fliers, church bingo night announcements, and much more. LLMs let people continue to create this type of thing, and print-on-demand services let them send their creations out to make custom stickers and such. But most critically, NONE OF THOSE PEOPLE were hiring graphics designers for those jobs before. It enabled the masses to do some of what graphics designers do, but when it comes to real ad campaigns and professional marketing, companies know investing a few hundred dollars will bring in a few hundred people from the community, investing many thousands or millions are essential for large regional or national campaigns, those jobs continue to get the professionals.

More people making vibe-coded websites that satisfy their specific needs? Great. They weren't hiring a team of programmers for software development before, and they're not hiring a team of programmers after. Executives that claim they'll cut costs by 90% by firing all the professional programmers are in the hype, they either don't understand the work being done or are playing the field. They may do well in their quarterly financial statements, but a couple years down the line the company won't have anything of value remaining. The CEO will be long gone, sold his options, collected his golden parachute, and moved on to the next company to be restructured. Investors will have gutted and sold everything of value from the company by that point as well, they'll take the hype bubble, milk it, then dump what remains in an asset fire sale. The companies that continue making great things and not seeking the bubbles will continue to create good value, leveraging the tools where appropriate but still hiring skilled workers to create products with lasting value.

There will always be changes in who is the winner and who is the winner this quarter. Certainly plenty of profit-seeking investors care only about those quarterly results, not the products and services on offer. There are companies that will grow and companies that will die, nothing new is there. It's good that more people will be able to have more custom program options, just like WordArt and clipart collections allowed people to easily make their own fliers. Those who want a specific vision in marketing can start with "here's my interpretation from an image generator, but I want it done better." Similarly when a small business needs a team of developers to build a program, the customer can also bring in what tried and failed and what they want to see differently, and they come back with a better bid being able to reference what the client generated using AI as a starting reference for building the professionally-built items.

It sounds as if MS is aiming to turn OpenAI into a wholly owned subsidiary. They're both so horrible that I'm not sure whether that would be good or bad.

However I don't remember the Florida experiment reporting dangerous amounts of heavy metals. That's going to need to be considered.

OTOH, when used as soil for growing plants, it would be being continually exposed to moisture and atmosphere.