The robots are coming. I'm not talking about the toys, I'm talking about the real robots that can do everything a human can do, but better, and cheaper. And I do mean everything. From mining coal, to taking tickets at the movie theater, from fighting wars to flipping burgers, from building houses to building more robots, from doing your taxes to running your business enterprises. Literally every job from janitor to CEO is in jeopardy. NEAR TERM jeopardy. Like as in the next two to three decades, at most. The technology to create human-capable robots is no longer a pipe dream, it's now become a pure function of time, training and money, a.k.a. inevitable, and soon. Once the transition begins, short of a Butlerian jihad, it doesn't end. The entire concept of "an economy" is nearing it's conclusion. So everything we can do now to begin softening the blow on society, the more successful we're going to be moving into this new world which nobody seems to be planning for.

but computer programing is doing just fine. Sure you can vibe-code a really low quality product, but try vibe-maintaining it while the customer you promised 99.999%-uptime-or-their-money-back is on the phone.

AI content is awful. It's only interesting and watchable when you've seen it for the first time. After watching enough of it you begin to notice how it's all the EXACT same thing. And then after a bit more, it starts to feel like nails on a chalkboard. And then after watching a bit more, it feels like nails in your skull. The instant I recognize something as AI content, I unsubscribe.

I'm cancelling Netflix. It had a good run, but there's nothing even remotely watchable anymore. I'm only finishing Stranger Things just to finish it, not because it's actually interesting anymore.

Random YouTubers are making better content on their webcams and capture cards than I've seen on any streaming service in years. I've seen better video essays and speedrun documentaries than multimillion dollar projects.

All these noisy payloads emitting radiation we're about to start sending up are for our moon base, not for any kind of space weapons, we promise.

I don't know a single person who still works in an office. Maybe we're all extra special? Or maybe because paying for office space and forcing and international team to all fly into a single city to work less effectively is a non-starter.

We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

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Give me a thick-ass phone with a month-long battery life and a derpy potato camera.

If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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never. Long after this pantsload of a nickel and dime shakedown fails miserably, I will continue to remember that Volkswagen is the kind of company who would even consider attempting to cheat its own customers for what amounts to pocket change, so I won't be even approaching a dealership. Thanks for letting me know because I previously had been thinking of Volkswagen as trustworthy. I'm glad I've learned before I made a huge mistake.

Hamming distance is the term you're looking for.

I was going to post a very similar comment: these people are not coders but they are project managers, and they are "employing" AI as their coding employees.

The thing is - there's "nobody" to take credit for the work, so the manager gets credit for something they didn't do. So it's definitely a skill and is work, but it isn't "coding" at all.

It's an interesting world - the AI is an extremely inexpensive employee and has enough skill to displace increasingly higher-skill tiers of actual software engineering and programming.

If I was running these hackathons, I would disallow AI or I would allow people to hire "code-as-a-service" people. Those seem functionally equivalent activities, just with AI being vastly easier to manage the logistics and you don't have to pay employment taxes or benefits to the AI.

It's no wonder there is so much tension about the many uses of AI - instead of hiring people to do work, it's another instance of paying to use a machine to do work at a price point lower than paying people.

The important distinction though is if this was a "preventable" failure that is due to something the engineering community already knows but was just omitted or done carelessly, or if the failure was indeed due to some new physics or unique application.

But just saying "hey we learned that this didn't work" is only useful if you learned a new thing that didn't work - if instead you had a structural failure because you didn't employ known best practices... that's wasteful.

I don't think we know enough at this point to know which case of learning this is. Hopefully it is truly new learning and not just "oh whoops we forgot to inspect those welds."