If you have more subscriptions than you can remember, you have bigger problems than AI can solve.

I have exactly two monthly subscriptions: Internet access, and my newspaper subscription. I think I can manage to remember those...

"Sam Altman wet his pants thinking of how he can use your personal financial information. So did all the algorithmic pricing bros!!!!"

Every exam I took in university was supervised. And while I did graduate quite a while ago, it wasn't 133 years ago.

I think there's a big difference between calculators and AI. Calculators made doing arithmetic much easier. But arithmetic is just rote; there's no creativity involved. If you are asked for the product of 59 * 74, you're going to get 4366 if you do it correctly, whether you do it in your head, on paper, or with a calculator. And if you do without a calculator, you're still going to follow a rote algorithm.

Software development is different. Writing a piece of software requires creativity, IMO, for all but the most trivial of programs. Give three different expert programmers the same spec and you'll almost certainly get three quite different but correct programs. Outsourcing creativity is very different from outsourcing rote, deterministic algorithmic processing. Creativity is regarded as what makes us human (or it used to be, anyway) and I for one don't want to outsource that. That's why I don't use AI for anything, and why I'm happy I retired from paid software development three years ago.

I maintain a few hobby projects, one quite actively, and I do not allow AI anywhere near them. I get to express my creativity and not care about managers demanding I use AI.

I still remember how to use a slide rule (for multiplication, anyway...) even though I haven't actually used one in decades.

It's all just logarithms. Logarithms turn multiplication into addition.

I retired from software development in 2023. My mantra is:

I'm so glad I retired when I did. I'm so glad I retired when I did. I'm so glad I retired when I did....

I guess I'm lucky; I hardly ever get bitten by mosquitoes. Maybe one or two bites per year.

When I was living in Newfoundland, though, and we went out into the country for day trips or camping, the blackflies took chunks out of me on a regular basis. Blackflies are truly nasty little beasts.

The EU is not trying to parent your kids. It's trying to regulate product safety, which governments have been doing for ages.

Right... Airbus cannot possibly compete with Boeing. ARM cannot possibly compete with Intel. Siemens cannot possibly compete with... well, actually, I think Siemens dominates the industrial controls space and I can't think of a comparable US company.

And ASML? Nobody competes with ASML.

Your post is typical of Americans who somehow think the US can do everything better than anyone else. Meanwhile, the US is rapidly losing ground.

And while NL is geographically only a bit larger than New Jersey, it has about double the population and that's the metric that matters.

Maybe, or maybe not. Prior to Hitler's becoming chancellor in 1933, the NSDAP had a minority of seats in the German parliament, having actually dropped in seat count from the previous election, and they had only 33% of the popular vote.

History doesn't repeat exactly, but we can't be complacent.

You're being disingenuous; you know exactly what the issue is.

Perhaps because on average, European countries are amongst the happiest in the world? Certainly far happier than the USA.

Trump might be gone in 2029, but Trumpism and MAGA ideology will live on.

Open-source code is much safer the proprietary code. It can be audited, and in the specific cases of Linux and PostgreSQL, there are enough EU developers working on them to fork the project if the USA gets too insane.

To me, the most important things to do to mitigate risk are: (1) No dependence on proprietary US software, and (2) no dependece on US-based cloud services. I think that's the best we can do for now.

OVH is a large hosting provider in France that can compete with the likes of Google and Amazon for cloud services.

Alternatives for Oracle and MSFT are open-source: PostgreSQL and Linux respectively, and LibreOffice to replace MS Office. Even though Linux and PostgreSQL have a large developer community in the USA, the fact that they're open-source makes them a lot safer, and both projects also have a lot of EU developers who will be able to carry on if the USA goes rogue.

IBM is a special case; I don't know of serious alternatives to IBM mainframes.