AI disclosure: yes, I used an AI as a drafting assistant. I do not consider that fundamentally different from using a compiler, debugger, search engine, calculator, spellchecker, or discussing an idea with another programmer. The argument is mine. The responsibility for it is mine. Judge the reasoning, not the tool.

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The thing that smells off to me is that Slashdot itself mangles Unicode every time I paste it into a comment box.

So I'm reluctant to accept the implicit premise that software written entirely by humans has already conquered all the easy problems and that AI-generated code must therefore clear some uniquely high bar before we acknowledge it may be useful.

Perhaps the 15% figure is exaggerated. Self-reported numbers often are.

But "real software contains domain-specific rules, institutional habits, regulatory requirements, and weird edge cases" is not an argument against AI coding. It's a description of software. Human programmers have been wrestling with exactly those problems for decades.

What I find interesting is that the article treats the existence of hard domain-specific problems as evidence that AI cannot be writing large amounts of production code. Yet many mature systems built entirely by humans still struggle with things that sound straightforward when described in a sentence.

Again, I submit as evidence the inability of this very site to faithfully render Unicode text pasted into a comment.

The benchmark is not perfection. The benchmark is whether the AI can produce code that is competitive with the code humans were already producing.

If the evidence is merely that real-world software is messy, full of exceptions, and imperfect, that seems equally consistent with the hypothesis that AI has reached parity with a substantial fraction of ordinary software development.

AI disclosure: yes, I used an AI [Copilot] as a drafting assistant. I do not see that as fundamentally different from using spellcheck, a search engine, a calculator, a compiler, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, or discussing an idea with another person. The argument is mine. The responsibility for it is mine. Judge the reasoning, not the tool.

You're conflating social acceptance with correctness.

"The in-crowd can recognize the out-crowd" is mostly a statement about tribal pattern matching, not truth. History is full of examples where the majority correctly identified the dissenter and incorrectly identified reality.

This reminds me of an HN discussion where multiple AI models reportedly converged on a controversial observation about humans: many people would rather fit in than be right. Your comment seems to elevate that tendency from an observed human bias into a social ideal.

If the objective is social survival, conformity matters. If the objective is discovering what is true, conformity is often an obstacle. Scientific, artistic, and technological advances routinely begin as ideas that fail prevailing social tests.

Also, the writing argument feels circular. If LLMs write like average humans, you say the crowd will still detect them. At that point you're no longer evaluating writing quality. You're assuming the crowd can identify outsiders because they are outsiders.

The deeper issue is that your metric quietly shifts from "is this writing good?" to "does this writing belong to our tribe?" Those are different questions.

Herd recognition may be real. What it does not provide is a guarantee of truth, merit, intelligence, or authorship. Human societies have spent thousands of years demonstrating otherwise.

AI disclosure: The underlying opinions are mine. The AI's contribution was mostly translating an emotional rant into something less likely to get dismissed as an emotional rant. If that's cheating, then so is spell-check.

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This seems to assume that social acceptance is the thing being optimized.

Why should it be?

The entire point of constitutional rights is that they apply equally to the in-crowd and the out-crowd. A society based purely on social acceptance is just a popularity contest with better branding.

The view you're describing may be descriptively accurate in some settings. Groups often enforce norms through informal ostracism. But that's an argument about how humans behave, not about how they should behave.

If someone's argument is wrong, show why it's wrong. If someone's writing is bad, criticize the writing. "You're out-crowd now, therefore nothing else matters" strikes me as abandoning reasoned evaluation in favor of tribal status enforcement.

AI disclosure: The underlying opinions are mine. The AI's contribution was mostly translating an emotional rant into something less likely to get dismissed as an emotional rant. If that's cheating, then so is spell-check.

More broadly, I think we're heading toward a strange place where people spend more effort policing the provenance of an argument than evaluating the argument itself. If the reasoning is wrong, it should be wrong because the logic is faulty. If it's right, it should be right because the logic is sound. Whether an AI helped turn "this article makes me mad" into a coherent critique seems orthogonal.

Slashdot has traditionally been a "show me the source code" community. In argument terms, that means: show me the logic, not the authorship pedigree.

There are 640 acres in a square mile

[Sighs in metric]

Disclosure: I fed my initial "old man yells at cloud" reaction into an AI and asked it to separate the arguments from the emotions. The result is below. Feel free to blame either of us.

Every open-source governance problem is increasingly being described as a funding problem. Sometimes it is. But before concluding PHP needs more money, I'd like to know why a language used by so much of the Internet can't attract enough contributors under its current structure. Funding may be the symptom rather than the cause.

I'm also struck by how much of this story revolves around coordinated disclosures, embargoes, privileged access, advance distribution of patches, and leaks. Open source originally leaned heavily on transparency, yet modern security practice often seems to move toward security through obscurity. The irony is that this very episode is largely about how difficult that secrecy proved to maintain.

If important vulnerabilities, mitigation advice, videos, binaries, and CVE information all leaked anyway, perhaps we should be asking whether the bottleneck is funding, or whether increasingly elaborate disclosure processes have created governance and coordination problems of their own.

The proper response to being in an area where datacentres are crowding in is "lobby your elected officials to increase property taxes and not give out tax increment financing deals". Tax everything, and tax it well. They'll stop building new datacentres in your area, and the ones that are there will (unless they were given a long-term sweetheart deal beyond your already-low tax rates) start being cash cows for your area.

Really, you don't see any difference between Elon Musk and, say, John Stankey? Is John Stankey actively transforming the US into an autocratic fascist-adjacent state?

Would you buy from a company called Plantations Inc which proudly advertises that all of its products are made by daily-whipped slaves? Are there no limits to how self-focused you are in your consumption?

It's one thing to say "this particular issue isn't mine, so I'm only going to think amount myself". It's an entirely different issue to have no moral bounds.

This headline sounds like something you'd hear coming from a news report on a TV in the background near the start of a horror movie.

If the visible light emitted is exactly the same intensity, color, and pattern as the background behing you, yes, you'd be very nearly invisible.

Only from one direction, though (unless the background is nearly featureless).

The problem is not overall capacity. It's that they're all crowding into the same areas. Most places in the US (let alone the world) have nobody building datacentres anywhere near them. They all want to go into the places with not merely cheap power, but cheap property taxes and other incentives. Some places will tax everything, down to the servers themselves, whereas some will only tax the land and the building shell, not even the power interconnects or cooling systems.

When everyone wants to rush into the same place, it overtaxes the local grid; they have to build not just more generation, but power lines, substations, etc. And all of this has to go through permitting. There's no real limit to how much generation can be built, but none of the datacentre operations want to wait, because they're all worried about missing out on the opportunity. Hence the reason that they try to come up with stopgaps, like installing their own generators, or... this approach.

ECL MV1 / Lambda is 3,5 miles from the Googleplex. And 10-12 miles further to the southeast, Santa Clara is one of the densest datacentre hubs on Earth.

If you care about where they actually live, and distances to datacentres:

Sundar Pichai: Los Altos Hills, CA: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-6mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub (CoreSite SV9, Vantage, Colovore), 9-11 miles

Larry Page: Palo Alto, Ca: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 4-5mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 10-12mi.

Sergey Brin: Los Altos Hills / Bay Area: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-7mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 9-12mi

Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind CEO): North London, UK: London Docklands Hub (Telehouse / Equinix), 7-9mi; Slough Data Center Hub (Equinix, Yondr), 18-20mi

I don't know about you, but they're all way closer to datacentres than I am.

"all those "saved" watthours will get sucked up by their subscribers' homes. Then what, shut down the datacenter until things get warm again?"

Why assume the saved watt-hours just disappear? If local residential demand absorbs them, Google can still buy power from elsewhere. The interesting economic question is why Google finds it cheaper to pay consumers to curtail usage than to acquire additional supply through the grid. That suggests congestion, transmission limits, [price gouging, psychological noise,] or peak pricing are the real bottlenecks, not total electricity production.

Is he too lazy?