The difference between a Senior Developer and a Junior Developer is that a Senior will admit when they have no clue about what you're asking.

Experts have no problem with saying "I don't know."

The reason we trust senior developers is that they have a proven track record, and also will tell you when something is new and they don't know it (although rare), and then they go and try to figure it out if they can. If they cant figure it out they will still tell you they cant fix it.

AI doesn't know whether its telling the truth or not. It doesn't know what it doesn't know. I just has training data that tells it which answer is likely correct.
Fundamentally it doesn't have the ability to know its own limitations, no training data can fix that. Judgement and Wisdom comes from experience, experience comes from the consequences of getting it wrong. AI faces no consequences for its answers as such it will never have real Judgement or Experience, it can only borrow the experience of others through training data.

For Humans lying about what you know generally only happens when you're in a dysfunctional job environment that punishes honesty or you lied to get the job you have and you're not qualified. Also not knowing or misunderstanding is very different than making shit up.

Part of the reason AI cant really bring work savings on anything non-trivial is if I need to sign off on something I really need to check and understand everything AI tells me, line by line (which in many cases takes as long or longer than writing it myself). If I'm not doing that I shouldn't be trusted to sign off on stuff. Bluntly this means AI agents running against production is an absolute no go (Just ask Lemkin: https://www.zdnet.com/article/... ). Automation code written by AI, verified and signed off by a human admin can be run against prod, but only after being tested against dev / test.

Humans are pretty good at recognizing when they are dealing with something new or unknown (or at least smart enough to not try random sh!t), where we suck is predictable repetitive stuff, and keeping large data sets in our brains.

Hallucinations are "training data gaps" (if we're nice) or at worst trying random answers from known training data when dealing with something new or uncertain, rather than say "I don't have a clue".

Bluntly I think in _some_ situations AI and humans can complement each other, when used responsibly and as a tool in a constrained solution space.

When you're ready to have AI sign off on your medical treatments and drug orders or any other matter of safety without a human in the loop let me know... (then we can either admit AI might be ready or commit you to the asylum).

This smells like other objectives...
Seems to me there are corporations / people that want to limit / restrict access to 3D printing in general...
I could see bunch of anti "right to repair" guys thinking... maybe if we tap into this ghost gun thing we can get all these cheap 3D printers off the streets and rather than repairing stuff people will have to buy new stuff.

Its right up there with age gates... verifying user age at the OS level... ( https://www.eff.org/issues/age... (EFF resources) )

Think of the Children!!!

Rights and freedoms are eroded slowly and one at at time. This has _nothing_ to do with gun safety and everything with interfering with your rights to do what you want with your printer.

Given many of these printers run on open firmware, and open hardware, one arduino download later and any cert problem is solved.

This is western Capitalists trying to blame the Chinese for the fact they sold us out.

The sad reality is that the west has stopped investing in new tech and innovation.

It started with outsourcing the manufacturing of non essential parts... that could be made at lower cost in Asia (aka more profit for the Capitalists).
As the Chinese learned how to do this with coaching and investment by those same western capitalists they figured out how they could do more complex things.
At this point the greedy western Capitalists outsourced the manufacture of critical and essential parts to China.
After this they found out they could no longer find the talent they needed to design hard to manufacture or material / technology specific harder to make components in North America (as those skills are built during the intereaction of designers with manufacturing).
Again the Chinese had progressed and invested in training engineers etc... at this point the logical _profitable_ last step was to move some of the design and sub-assemblies to China.

Frankly the capitalists sold our asses and hand our tech to the Chinese. They were just hungry and willing to work harder and as such easier to exploit for profit.

The Capitalists now realize they no longer control the process and the Chinese have them by the balls. At this point they are worried what the rest of us will do to them when we finally figure out how badly they screwed us, so they are trying to blame the Chinese a possibly start a war to bomb the Chinese back into the stone age.

Capitalists will sell you the rope you hang them with.

Make no mistake about this. This is all about "MBA" strategic choices and quarterly thinking that lead us to this dependence and lack of investment in research, innovation and education. Reality is even in the past many of the best and brightest have come from outside of North America. At the time we still recognized that and took care to integrate those people and make them part of our society. Now with restrictive immigration those people will go else where as well.

You don't need to look far to figure out who has sold you out. Just look who the billionaires are that aren't paying their fair share of taxes either.

There's a much deeper potential Ethical Holly Shit here, this is a big can of worms being opened. That of synthetic (read "made up") with unverifiable claims to credibility, through AI and a real data set.

The reason medical data is needed in research is to _verify_ the effectiveness of treatments, drugs, or patterns that are later ultimately used to justify treatment plans or decisions about what medicines to legalize, prescribe and use.

Feeding real data to AI and then asking it to "make up a data set that's the same" breaks the link between real hard data collected by physicians and clinicians, which is _verifiable_ and _trustable_. There is no way aside from repeating the work with real data sets to verify that the data in the "synthetic data" set is representative of the real world.

If this synthetic data set is used to make decisions, there will be a significant risk that can be introduced in the AI process, as 1) there is no verification possible and 2) the potential to "ask AI" to "help clean up the data" raises potentials for either open abuse, or accidental skewing of the data. Even non malicious but hopeful AI prompts may cause the AI to deliver the results the researcher or pharmaceutical company "wants to find".

That could lead to incorrect results or desired or not which would lead to bad decisions about patient treatment or diagnosis potentially leading to wasted money at best and patient harm at worst.

Ethically, I think this is standing unroped on a slippery slope uphill of a cliff...

but he'll happily take "investors" and help with his crypto coin $Trump.

Transactional presidents are so much easier to deal with if you're a billionaire crypto bro...

It's also convenient if you could use a pardon.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone...

As a licensed Engineer in North America, who also has a Business degree, having working both in Canada and in Europe, as well as having exposure to China through travel...

Engineering as a profession has the same recognition as law and medicine in Europe... In China, Engineering is neck in neck with Medicine. In North America and in the UK engineers are looked down on by other professionals and management.

When I worked in Europe as an Engineer in tech companies Management was made up of Engineers that had worked there way up, many of them had Phds in Engineering. Engineers in society have good paying jobs and its a desired profession.

Decisions were made not just based on quarterly financials, but with leaders that understood innovation, value, and technology as well as the financials at the table.
Planning and R&D in Germany where I worked and in China have budgets and time frames of years if not decades. Companies compete not on cost but on quality and innovation.

I think North America is being left behind at the moment in a number of areas, and will continue to do so until it starts thinking long term again and investing in science and engineering talent and projects.

This David Mayer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

He certainly is well enough positioned to perhaps have someone working to make sure he's forgotten.

Anyone facing this issue where they work? What have you looked at?

(fingers crossed first post).

Tell him to go to apply to university in Germany. It's free including for foreign nationals, and they often provide a stipend to cover cost of living.

Hard to believe but, Germany does this as they get the best and brightest, and have figured out that if just 1/2 stay 5 years the contributions they make to the Germany Economy pay back the cost of education.

https://www.studying-in-german...

We also need people to know if ChatGPT is giving us correct answers or just stating authoritative BS.

  Reality is were going to start seeing more and more AI produced BS that sounds right. I expect "working with AI" will mean knowing when and how to know the AI response is full of errors.

Combine this with humans laziness and inability to gauge risk we'll be seeing "death by AI answer" soon.

I'm also curious what will happen to the internet once Special interest groups, Scammers and Spammers will start using AI to scam people... I think we'll have an even bigger problem where many people will have trouble telling "truth" from "BS".

I think there's a very real chance the internet will get overwhelmed with AI generated content... the questions will be will they be correct or not...
I may very well be a big change the question is will it be for the better?

Anyone working in automation or with AI+automation knows if you can succeed "at scale" you can "fail at scale"...and knowing the difference if you've succeed or failed may be hard in some cases, in which case laziness will likely trump caution.

Google, Facebook etc... are rent taking privacy violating parasites

When corporations seek to undermine democratic created laws there need to be questions.

Frankly they have far to much influence already with "custom search results".

There are good alternatives...

Where you aren't the product...
eg: https://duckduckgo.com/
eg: https://www.signal.org/

That said I'm still working to reduce my dependence on "free" isn't "free" apps / sites, as they are pervasive...

If you thought code was hard to get working before, wait until it starts "fixing" itself while you're trying to update it.

It's kind of like trying to clean up a toy room with a bunch of 4 year old kids loose, running around taking toys off the shelf again...

Good luck... especially if you're working with hardware drivers etc....If the code gets out of the sandbox or starts coding disallowed values it could literally get your hardware to "commit suicide"...

The real problem is much more terrifying.

The reason the Chinese are catching up is because the US has slowed or even ceased to innovate in a number of areas. There are too many MBAs, accountants and lawyers in charge who don't understand what is needed to support innovation and invention.

All of this blocking exports is really just misusing government for international competition in business. In addition to that capitalism has lead them to seek cheaper sources and even helped transition tech to Asia where cheap labour can produce the products. Realistically the only way to compete in tech is to continue to innovate. That requires long term strategic spending on R&D and product development. If your business model for competing has become to outsource to lower costs and litigate (patents / copyright) or lobby for protected markets then its only a matter of time before someone comes up with a disruptive technology and puts you out of business.

Much of the recent innovation in the US corporate world has all been about "rent taking", turning products into subscription services and turning customers into products (advertising, eg google and facebook). Amazon is basically rent taking for building an online catalog and delivery service (which brings some value), but there's limited or no invention there.

Greed and self enrichment has taken precedence over investing in the future for many US companies and share holders. The resulting loss of capability and talent has also hamstrung the US. Realistically you cant even produce complex products like the iPhone in the US anymore as the know how for manufacturing no longer exists here, you cant hire engineers that know what to do.

The Chinese on the other hand have people working hard to understand the technology, a strong focus on engineering, and considerable number of scientists and engineers in leadership roles. There are long term strategies for technical development and innovation. Unless the US seeks to change this its simply a case of the fact that accountants and lawyers will never and cannot out innovate scientists and engineers.

Frankly I expect the Chinese to copy stuff. This is nothing new. The US space program was built based on stolen tech (V2) and poached German engineers. The US is just crying because this time they are not doing the stealing but getting robbed instead.

The solution is real investment in R&D and innovation. Something quarterly Capitalist thinking is unlikely to do enough of, and government in the US is captive to the Military Industrial Complex (which is about finding excuses to turn US tax dollars into private profit) and isn't spending much money on real research.

There are some small exceptions... but the reality is in the west one needs to look to Europe (mainly Germany) for leadership in innovation at this point. I don't see it coming out of the US.

The Capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with.

Optimizing only for "profit" (a nicer word for greed or self interest), has left resilience by the way side, along with solidarity with the rest of humanity, sustainability and common human decency.

Its time to realize when you accept the market on faith... and neglect the other variables that drive history its only a matter of time before you're on the losing side of history.

Climate change, COVID-19 and other large unforeseen challenges will test the resilience of not only our supply chain, but also our infrastructure and values. Many key factors to succeed in these challenging times do not show up in current accounting balance sheets, and blind faith in the market to solve all problems is just that: Blind. We are capable of so much more than self-interest / greed. We should not let the greed of a few define us as a society.

As long as Americans worship the almighty dollar / wealth as the highest achievement, they will remain unprepared for the real world, and truly be poor.

You can pry my passwords from my cold dead hands... wait

You cant.

Maybe that's the point...

I need to retain control of 1) access 2) separation of parties / websites etc 3) not tide to anything that cant be reset / thrown away (eg no biometrics) 4) transferable to those I trust (in emergency or death). any other form of authentication that does not include those features is a no go.

The real reason the big players are all pushing MFA is that they want device IDs so they can combine data an create profiles for tracking for commercial purposes. (Which can and will be misused by other actors).

I get constant security warnings from google on "new device logins" as some of my devices rotate mac addresses.

Don't for a moment think the big players care one iota about your privacy. They only care if you walk away from their service, and its the one lever (along with laws) we have to change their behaviour. Most recent changes have come as a result of European privacy legislation.

Passwords will be around for a long time. So learn how to use them and manage them properly.. anything else is just giving up control to someone else.
I treat them as my legal signature (and so do the courts BTW), unless its a throw away account.

The answer for the password problem is a good password manager (with secure backups).

Next.