I agree, but I often wonder how many developers vastly overstate the complicated-ness of what they need to write.

My own experience with leveraging LLMs has been one of an efficiency boost. As I have around 15 years of software architecture and development experience, I have yet to come across an instance where an AI is used to do something I can't do, and instead is used to do something that I could have otherwise done myself, albeit much more slowly.

This has had a great effect on my workflow. I am still able to do high-level architectural planning, determine use-cases and usability parameters, etc. When I have those pieces figured out, I can use an LLM (in this instance Claude Sonnet or Opus 4.6) to do the actual generation of code, which I can then review and correct as I see fit. I have not (and will never) used an LLM as a replacement for my "higher brain functioning", but when it comes to the "code-monkey" aspects of my work, it does them far faster than I can (and typically with a healthy respect for naming conventions, code patterns, etc.). I still get to enjoy the fun critical-thinking-laden aspects of my job, but the simple "regurgitation of learned code words" is offloaded to an all-too-willing counterpart.

Yes, that's generally how scientific progress and discovery works. All of the things you mentioned were not well-understood in their time, thus the uses were flawed. I noticed that you didn't include things like MRIs, antibiotics, vaccines, or any other "poorly understood initially" type of technology that has had a resoundingly positive impact on human society. I understand caution, but from my reading (aka skimming) of TFA, it doesn't seem like this group of researchers is planning to rapidly monetize this discovery. Is it not enough that the discovery itself is fascinating? Who is to say that this research won't lead to medical therapies that help people REGAIN their sense of smell after it is lost by some other means?

Something tells me you didn't have the best relationship with said neighbor to begin with. No judgement towards you on my part, but it seems a bit extreme to suggest that 24/7 citizen-enabled corporate surveillance is a good thing because a dumb teenager did a dumb teenager thing and his parents didn't want to take responsibility towards a neighbor they probably didn't like in the first place.

If you really are interested in having surveillance around your house (which I completely understand), you could look into one of the many brands that doesn't rely exclusively on a cloud-based service (and also with a TOS that basically guarantees that your footage will be used for one of many potentially nefarious purposes).

Regardless, the trend is upward, and for good reason.

Make all of the snarky comments that you like, this is a frightening canary around the realities of de-generative AI and the new "economies" it is creating. I despise Big Tech as much as the next guy, but at least content creators and businesses saw SOME slice of the advertising-revenue pie. Now these troves of data are going to be used to train AI models and the downstream creators will never see a cent of return (and worse, their infrastructure will be hammered into oblivion by these ruthless crawlers).

The democratization of information is an incredibly valuable tool for a well-functioning society, but de-genAI is hardly that. It is a consolidation of information into a small cadre of for-profit (or soon to be for-profit) entities that will have a chilling effect on the ability of people to sustain themselves with bringing new or interesting ideas to the world.

It is easy to laugh at the downfall of the "Education Industry" and all of its shady financial motivations, but this is merely the first of many dominos to fall. How many are left before information on the web is either paywalled or accessed exclusively through an AI chatbot?

Nothing will eliminate that like the embrace of (de)generative AI!

Toothpaste I can understand, but lets hope our dependency on oil ends sooner than later. After all, we already know that oil itself is certainly not going to last forever.

One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison

My favorite quote around the Doomsday Clock has always been from Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen:

This is why I use Telegram and why I've prodded my family to adopt it as well. There are obviously things about it that are somewhat alarming to me (closed-source and non-federated server software, a creator who is becoming more of a diva every day, an increasing promotion of crypto scammery, etc), but it is by far the most user-friendly messaging platform available that isn't owned by a tech megacorp.

If I have something secret to send, I can use PGP to encrypt the message and then send it over literally any channel without issue. What I (and more importantly my family) want in our day to day conversations is decent security, decent privacy, and convenience.
(This is not an advertisement or endorsement of Telegram, ymmv, etc)

This is the funniest contrarian take I've seen today. I could easily respond with "gotta discredit any reference to global warming somehow". Would you have rather they said "accelerates local sea level rise from some unnamed phenomenon"? Are you disagreeing with the measurable fact that the sea level has risen as a direct result of rising temperatures, or are you simply bothered by the term "global warming" because you view any reference to it as some plot to sell you something or get someone elected?

I can't imagine being naive enough to believe this.

The idea of a "distributed web" sounds great to me, but I fail to see why we need blockchains to accomplish this. Wouldn't self-hosting content utilizing traditional protocols be sufficient? There seems to be a chasm of middle-ground between "everything on the web is hosted by AWS" and "everything you access is part of a distributed ledger that is owned by no-one".

We have to hear about it twice!