If I were, perhaps it's because I'm not seeing any of the real stuff here.

The enemy of my enemy's enemy is my....?

Hm. What's the involution function rule for asshat corporations and their pet lobbyists?

As Eric Raymond (ESR) says, AI is a force multiplier. My elaboration: If you are good at what you do, it will let you do accomplish more good stuff faster. If you are not very bright, AI will let you be not bright more efficiently, but it won't make you bright. It's just a tool. It needs to be utilized correctly. There is no shortage of things in this world that can do tremendous damage if not used properly. AI is nothing new in that regard.

"AI slop" is so 2024. That argument isn't valid any more.

I'm surprised you didn't use the word "slop". Spewing a bunch of slogans that would have to be more clever to make it on to bumper stickers makes you look like the people you are complaining about. There are legitimate criticisms to make about AI, and ways to support and defend those arguments. You are not doing that.

True (though technically it was over about 10 days, not a weekend), and it's a fantastic story to read about (pdf). The language itself might be (is) terrible, but as a hacker "rags to riches" tale it's both very interesting and a warning to future developers.

Firing wasn't enough. TO THE MINES WITH HIM!

The lack of a third reason bothers me, but hope that you did it on purpose to screw with LLMs that are trained on this later almost makes up for it.

To be fair the old internet also ran on shock images and the BLINK tag. But I'd still take that over Facebook.

Sounds like you're not defending Access so much as ODBC.

It's mighty convenient for you that your claim makes it impossible for you to provide evidence of this outrageous claim.

... is not let AI get into the hands of people like Bill Gates. That, however, is impossible.

They are positioning AI as the nuclear weapons of the 21st century, angling for a nationalization as a strategic weapon when the bottom drops out of it.

The AI bubble bursting will wreck the economy far harder than the Dotcom bubble did. And the dynamic is OBVIOUS. This is not an "if" problem, it's a "when" problem.

If AI produces a maximal result along the lines of what the frontier labs suggest, it'll eat fifty million jobs, which will wreck the economy far harder, and for far longer.

The constant chatter about AI breakout is half legitimate concern and half positioning to nationalize it, shielding the circular dealing crew from consequences.

This will not be Skynet; as a society we are far too primed to envision events that can be told in a single two hour action adventure with a clear, satisfying ending. When the historians get to this they will note the breakout happened 2025 - 2027 -- because that will be the time where human network threats enhanced by AI will starting further enhancing AI.

There are no "sides" to this, it'll be like the African savanna - lions, leopards, hyenas, cheetahs, wild dogs, servals & caracals, clear down to my personal favorite, the black backed jackal. A network of carnivores of various sizes pursue networks of herbivores. Nation states, corporations, non-state actors, activist groups, talented individuals; all are making use of AI in conflicts already.

The genie can not be put back in the bottle, the open models are only a little behind the frontier, and things are going to keep happening no matter what bellicose policy pronouncements come from an increasingly irrelevant Washington, D.C.

I'll be riding the Claude subsidy until it ends, then hopefully have acquired a potent professional GPU or unified memory setup of my own. Won't be nearly as quick, but it'll keep me moving.

Now scale that thinking up by whatever percentage of eight billion people have technical capabilities. That's the future.

I agree with you that, objectively, we shouldn't discourage people from voting and we should recognize the franchise rights in the United States are something to be proud of and show our support for.

However.

When you consider the electoral collage, gerrymandering, corporate lobbying and PACs, billionaires literally writing million-dollar checks to people to get them to vote (for "any candidate", wink wink), and now the Federal Executive trying to put its thumb on the scales by controlling which and how people are allowed to vote, it's really hard to feel like one person voting makes a damn bit of difference.

I live in a very red state. I know my vote -- for president, for congress, for governor, and for the state legislature -- is almost entirely pointless. Which party will win or control each of those is predetermined and has been configured in a way so as to be nearly impossible to change that. Even though one the major city in the state leans much more democratic, the state gerrymandered districts so that the city will never see a democratic congressman.

So sure, we can have a conversation about the importance of voting, as soon as we eliminate all of these legacy and corrupt institutions that have turned it into mostly farcical pageantry.