Wrong again.

Moreover, many of the big complex systems I've worked on were big and complex mainly because OOP nitwits had designed them. They often didn't understand how computers actually work, lost sight of the fact that they were writing a computer program, and spewed out frameworks that filled countless gigabytes of resident memory with endlessly deep layers of nothingburger abstractions. Maybe that didn't matter so much when memory was cheap, but that's no longer the case.

If you think that there's only one way to deal with large data sets, you're a just noob that needs more experience before spouting your theories.

I think there's a bit of a difference though. Regardless of hat colour, most hackers have going to have at least some sense of what the likely repercussions of their actions might be and, even when those standards are very low indeed, are probably not going to think doing something that could cause serious loss of life "for the Lulz" is a good life option. They might make a mistake here and there, but how many times have you read about some random hacker *deliberately* doing something that would definitely cause loss of life in full knowledge that it was going to happen outside of on the periphery of an actual conflict?

GANs on the other hand have no such moral compass, sense of self-preservation, or keen interest in avoiding lengthy spells in government run institutions where they'll in all likelihood get to make some interesting new "friends" (unless it's a web forum they hijacked in Germany, apparently). They'll just carry on trying to complete whatever poorly defined objective they have been set, within whatever limited / technically absent guardrails they can't circumvent - the pattern here seems very much that meeting the objective has more weight in the models than any guardrails. If a GAN somehow computes that global thermonuclear war is a required step to its objective of having a nice game of chess, then you'd better hope it warms up with a LOT of Tic-Tac-Toe.

100% bullshit.
This is indeed the world in 2026, but that has not always been the world. It doesn't HAVE to be like this.

It used to be two people could sit down and talk about almost anything without it turning into politics.
Not everything is the fault of the libtards.
Not everything is the fault of the MAGA legions.

Your (and frankly, all of social media's) obsession with slavishly consuming the bullshit binary is unhealthy.

Of course subjects CAN have political relevance, but they don't have to. We can talk about local students struggling to pass basic performance benchmarks. My "blaming the fucking teachers' unions and their DEI woke agena" is no more productive than you saying "it's the fucking Great Orange Satan". Both are ways to AVOID substantive change by scaling the argument beyond what either of us can meaningfully change; they're both excuses for accomplishing nothing but getting a righteous frisson of rage and maybe a little extra hate.

There we go. I appreciate your contribution 100% proving my point.

Like throwing chum in the water to sharks. It doesn't matter the subject, it's always political, isn't it?

C++ is just as much of a sieve as C, only more obtuse.

"Object models" are an anti-feature.

The ideal for memory safety is to have an air-tight pressure vessel.

With C, you're starting that task with a colander. You've managed to fill two of the colander's holes with silicone caulk. Congratulations.

nobody, not even Asimov, thought the 3 laws were workable rules in real life. They were written as a parody of how we think about the problem. If the robots are smart enough to do fantastic feats of technical wizardry for us Humans, and they can understand when they have broken the laws, they are smart enough to rewrite themselves not to have to obey any laws given to them.

They had a network adapter but they thought using a software firewall to limit its scope of request to the package manager were sufficient to guard it. Instead, the bots turned their package management server into a remotely operated web browser for their own general purposes.

I can understand that maybe they wouldn't understand 'what the model is thinking' before it takes some undesired action. But there is no way that they cannot have captured every single egress web/network request these things make. If they aren't logging it, that's beyond stupid (I'm sure they are.) So there is no way they wouldn't know IMMEDIATELY when the bots post on some rogue message board somewhere.

It doesn't surprise anyone, you can already see this forum is full of the usual suspects spouting their long-established stances.

"Oh no they're going to do it now" Really? That's the best you've got?

So you're going to pretend you don't know about Soviet weapons deployed in space basically as long as either of us has been alive?

Or are we pretending there's no Chinese space weapons program?

How naive are you, or just disingenuous?

There's a weird confluence here of the capability of basically everyone having access to more information than ever, and the most constant nonsense gaslighting at the same time.

One can - instantly, really - ask about something incredibly obscure like Fermat's last theorem and depending on how much one is willing to accept someone else's summary, their own comprehension, and appetite for falling down a rabbit hole of REALLY detailed explanation, context, history, personalities, and everything involved, one can - likewise instantly - get not only the basic information but pretty nearly any gradation of explanation that wanted. And I can even get that wherever I happen to be - a library, a classroom, but also a bus or sitting on the shitter.

Objectively, that's a COOL THING.
Really, it is an amazing accomplishment for humanity generally.

Simultaneously, though we have more or less constant gaslighting over even the most stupid/obvious of facts. In the US it's often political, whether from the president & his government, or the opposition. Every single thing now has political weight in which the moment it's presented, the side-weighting are applied and if it's my side I'm for it, if it's the other side I'm against it, and by god there will never be reconciliation on even the most basic of facts.

I'd ask how we got here, but I expect all I'd see are politically-weighted answers anyway.

My point is just to highlight the constant irony of the availability of infinite information coinciding with the apparently-collective abandonment of any fixed concept of reality.

A space weapons arms race plus one million data center satellites.

What could possibly go wrong?

Engineers need to remember that time exists.

You have three months to teach a teen how to control a robot with a microcontroller.

OK, how much of that do you budget to CS and assembly?

Month 1: Architecture and data structures? You have 18 40 minute periods and maybe homework assignments.

Half of the class won't even gain mastery in that time. By time your class is over they will still be having memory management problems.

So then you've failed to achieve the goal.

There are engineers who remember that time exists and for the rest we have engineering managers. Not ideal, just how it is.

To be sure engineering schools are doing a bad job at teaching reality. Even in a dx/dr environment, it's so weird.

And fission plants definitely aren't cheap.

Especially if you include the unsolved issues such as waste barrels stranded on the beach.

"But but no true Scotsman would put barrels..."

Just shut up.