In your case it might simply be that there was not enough of this kind of tasks in the training data.

I agree in general, but not with this strong phrasing. I've let AI build a good amount of non-trivial code. But my consistent experience is that it works best when guided by an experienced coder who can correct it, and when implementing well-known algorithms rather than coming up with novel solutions.

Example: I let it write up a quadtree implementation in a language for which there was no ready solution online. It took 2-3 correcting prompts to get a good result. I could've done it myself but it would've likely taken a few hours to get it all right instead of the half or so hour it took with AI. The important part for me was that there's nothing unknown in how to implement a quadtree. All the AI needs to do is take the 100s of existing implementations and translate them into a different language.

True but too simplified. The Luddites had an entirely different motivation: The fact that factories now employed women and children at very low rates meant that the men lost their status in the family as bread winners and head of household. That was a major social disruption, which we don't have with AI.

I'd compare it more to teamsters or wagoners when cars became common. Your job is threatened by a different way of doing the same thing, a way to which your skills don't cleanly transition. Some choose to pick up the new tech, some want the old ways to persist.

In the end, coachmen became chauffeurs, because rich people prefer to be driven around oder driving themselves, no matter if it's a horse or an engine doing the pulling. But much fewer teamsters and wagoners became truck drivers.

I am reminded of some source code for a company-specific program that I saw in the late 1990s. I don't remember why I was perusing it, as I was in IT and absolutely not a developer. But I remember being tickled at one of the comments before a block of code. It was something like, "I have no idea why or how the following code works. But every time someone tries to change it, everything breaks, so please don't touch it."

BOTH of them? :-)

Everyone knows that 10x engineers validate inputs and carefully manage dependencies; so clearly there's no risk of unexpected behavior.

It seems worth noting that one of the items in Wyden's rather pointed inquiry is the fact that the feasibility of doing this is known to have been demonstrated for the DoD by outside people familiar with it at least as early as 2016; so while this is the first confirmed case of adversarial use it's the outcome of at least a decade of just ignoring the problem; and a significantly longer period of failing to reasonably anticipate the problem. It's not like there's No Such Agency you could ask about "how could you spy on someone with the internet even?" if you wanted to know how well or poorly readily available information matched a nation state signals intelligence apparatus.

Purely as a matter of cellphones being expensive and somewhat tepidly capable in the before times I assume that there was a period within living memory when merely telling people not to Gordon Gekko on their DynaTAC where the russians can hear you was good enough; but that would have clearly and rapidly been getting less true for at least a quarter century.

The whole 'responsible disclosure' preaching and the not-terribly-subtle threats seem particularly bad given that there's an entire industry of actively more dangerous people who are not only treated as legal but actively courted by state agents and cops(and often even less savory customers, though they tend to be cagey about those); the ones who actively seek to keep vulnerabilities quiet so that they can continue to sell exploit tools and services based on them. Throwing zero days on github isn't ideal vs. getting them fixed; but it gets them fixed faster than if Cellebrite wants to hang on to a bitlocker bypass or Trenchant, and L3Harris Technologies Company, wants to keep selling 'network investigative techniques' that can bypass default windows defender configurations or whatever the situation is.

From the outside it's hard to know whether MS actually mistreated the researcher badly enough to justify their displeasure(the consensus appears to be that MSRC was never the best to deal with and has actively gone downhill; but this person's position seems significantly angrier than average) or whether they are perhaps wound a little tight; but implying that their legal status is the same as people actively running attacks against user systems is blatantly false and totally ignores the class of researchers who do actively run attacks while being treated as respectable.

It's a particularly bad look when at least Facebook got into a public legal fight with the NSO group over their nerd-merc work against their users; not like that actually solved the problem of attacks on cellphones; but it was an all-too-rare case of industry pushing back against the 'respectable' arms dealers; and not one that MS has an analog to.

The exact scenario we warned about when the discussions about this "responsible disclosure" nonsense started. Someone needs a reminder that letting you know your software sucks is a courtesy, not something you can demand.

We'll all pretend that nuclear-tipped VCs will remain cool-headed and cooperative when the AI debts start to go sour.

I'm not an expert on rebuilding massively exploded launch infrastructure; but I have a suspicion that a 2026-2029 plan is now going to involve less Blue Origin than previously believed.

That's not the reason that both bombs were dropped. They were dropped because the military saw them as just another tool in the toolbox, just like the bombs dropped on all the other cities that continued to be dropped on other cities until the surrender. Truman ended the military's control of atomic bombs after Nagasaki, when the USAAF was preparing to use a third bomb, establishing civilian control of atomic weapons. Firebombing continued, though, right up to Kumagaya, Akita, and Osaka getting hit in the 24 hours prior to Hirohito taking to the airwaves.

The agreement expired in 2030. It did not authorize Iran to pursue nuclear weapons at that time. There's a difference.

The agreement was the best available at the time. Diplomacy sometimes requires taking a temporary win, and it usually means that neither side gets everything they want. The hope was that Iran would find that they would not want or need to develop nuclear weapons. If they did go down that path, there were penalties for doing so. Future negotiations were planned to modify or extend the agreement as it got closer to the expiration date.

That's how such agreements work. Every arms treaty signed between the US and USSR had an expiration date. The expiration date was not an agreement that at the end, both sides would immediately rearm. They were meant to establish a new normal and a baseline for future negotiations, and that's what happened. Over time, the arsenals were negotiated down from tens of thousands per side to a few thousand per side, with only a fraction of them deployed or even deployable. The last one expired a few months ago, but neither side is racing to add to their deployed warhead count.

There is no way to outright prevent Iran from developing a nuclear warhead without occupying the country and removing its entire current government. That is hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and an even worse look for the US than it has right now. Negotiating a deal like the JCPOA is the best option available. But every time Trump starts to talk about a deal and details start to leak out, they look a lot worse than the JCPOA. Trump is incompetent, he started a war that even Republicans are turning against, and he's arguably left Iran in a better place than it was before. Iran now knows that they can cut off the Strait of Hormuz, and no one can or will do anything about it. Worse, Trump has stated that he would be OK with Iran charging transit fees. If that starts, everyone else who controls a waterway that is otherwise internationally accessible is going to charge them, too. Indonesia and Malaysia would be the top two who could affect global trade, and while both have said that they would not, it's hard to say what future governments would do if they came under budget stress and had a precedent to point to.

Yeah, their slaughtering of possibly tens of thousands of protesters was clearly a sign of upcoming concessions.

Dictators lose when they make concessions. They stay in power when they double down. That's the hard lesson of a hundred years or so of dipshits becoming big boss by military coup or revolution. Those who put absolutely every penny into propaganda and oppression tend to hang on to power the longest.

And given what the IRGC and the regime have done to the Iranian people and how much they're loved in the rest of the world, staying in power is literally a life-or-death matter for them. The day the regime falls, we'll see all the Ayatollahs and minions hanging from trees.

We likely won't.

They made it very clear that they are monitoring and restricting Internet access, and the fact that even during an active war they went on to sentence and hang protesters makes it abundantly clear what will happen to anyone sharing information with the world that they'd rather not see on the world news.