The difference is that going to the next LTS release rarely involves having to go get a new computer to meet some new requirement and doesn't tend to completely change something in your workflow. If you go with something like BTRFS, you can even easily roll the whole thing back if the results aren't good enough.

Also, you never wake up one morning and find that the system has updated itself to a new release without even asking.

If I'm honest about it? I feel like it's been years since any one web browser felt "better" than another to me for technical reasons like speed/performance or ability to work properly with web sites I needed to use.

My preference for FireFox has more to do with such things as the UI layout and the way it "compartmentalizes" certain things. (EG. On a Windows platform, it still manages SSL certificates in their own place, vs. sharing the common set of them stored and managed in Windows itself.) The fact it's NOT another Chromium-based browser means it's handy for troubleshooting too. (If I have issues with a web site, I like to have both a browser like Edge or Chrome AND FireFox to use so I can test it with both web engines.)

Who are these people who care SO much about how fast a browser renders content, anyway? It's the ongoing joke over on Apple forums with Safari browser.... "New MacOS release makes Safari snappier!" On any non prehistoric computer, web browsers performing poorly almost always have more to do with either the speed of the Internet connection itself, memory issues from somebody leaving a million tabs open, or poorly written web site code. I don't care what a stopwatch says. I care about the overall user experience, and it's fast enough in any decent browser.

Given the way so many people vastly over-estimate ChatGPT as an actual intelligence, I thing it's quite fair to put it up against an old and tiny chess engine on easy level. This is basically "Are you Smarter than a5th Grader" for AIs. And it is NOT.

Only sort of. Current artificial models are missing several layers of reasoning over the top. They do a decent ob of modeling speech and writing production, but lack any form of executive function or higher reasoning. They often model a person suffering fluent aphasia. They also lack the inhibition that curbs hallucination and allows for prioritization. Further, they lack the effects of the lower functions that seem to provide energy to the system to bump it out of local minima to the better broader solution. There's a long way to go.

Current work is mostly on the lower hanging fruit of making the part that's been figured out work better.

Because the female mosquitoes from the mating are sterile but the males are fine and carry the trait. Presumably those males mate with unaffected females of their generation and produce another generation of sterile females and carrier males. This can continue until there are no remaining fertile females, then they all die out.

They might bring the owl back, but thanks to their AI, it'll have 6 toes and whinny now.

The *real* problem is with people who aren't skilled enough at operating a motor vehicle while manipulating a device or controls. Long before cellphones existed, we had people accidentally rear-ending other cars because they were trying to change their radio station or volume. Yet, we didn't pass laws banning car stereos. (We collectively acknowledged the benefits of a car stereo while driving and decided people just needed to learn how to work the radio controls in a safe manner while driving -- which most people figured out how to do.)

People used to manage to unfold paper maps and refer to them while driving, back in the 1970's and earlier, without wrecking into people, too.

I'm amazed at how lax the drivers' ed testing has become in recent years. My daughter went to get her license last year and the entirety of the practical part of her exam was having her drive around the block, out of the shopping center the motor vehicle dept. was located in, and back into the lot to park in a parking space next to it. They didn't so much as get her out on the highway! I have a hard time rationalizing that as ok, while worrying about good/experienced drivers who multitask glancing at smartphone screens.

As long as he's referring to his own field (creation of animations/art for film or video), I think he's essentially correct. AI will become a required tool you need to be familiar with as part of your career. It won't take people's jobs, except for people who refuse to learn how to utilize AI as part of it.

I'm FAR from convinced AI usage will play out the same way in all industries. For example? If you work in law, it makes sense AI could replace your lower-paid paralegals who essentially just open Word templates and fill out fields with appropriate info for each client. However, AI isn't at all likely to take jobs of many attorneys out there because that line of work involves showing up in courts in person, and presenting things to other people in a persuasive way.

If you're paid to publish ad copy, then AI is likely to reduce the number of employees needed, but again? The ones retained will need to know how to utilize AI tools well (and how to supplement or revise what they churn out).

AI isn't going to do anything meaningful in most "blue collar" fields like construction, IMO. It might help an architect out with the design stages of a project, but people getting paid to build things won't get anything done by some software code running in the cloud.

/r/duck

Reddit's use of AI for handing out bans is getting concerning.

What really killed it is pointy headed morons replying "JuSt GoOgLe It" to every damned question. As a result, any attempt to google it just returned a few pages of said morons and no useful answer. If there was an actual answer on stack overflow, it was a needle in a haystack.

It doesn't have to. At the end of the fiscal year, cash in the bond for a cool 3 billion in revenue on the books.

Meanwhile, new analysis and techniques come along (often in areas related to security and resilience to hacks) from time to time that no AI is going to manage.

Vibe coding is essentially cargo cult programming if you peek behind the curtain.

AI isn't actually intelligent in the general sense and doesn't actually understand the problem. Vibe programming is when you request something from the LLM and it essentally "says to itself" when programmers are asked for something like that they usually write something like this.

At best, LLMs can be the new code monkey. They will not consider maintainability or expandability. They have no ability to anticipate that XYZ feature will probably be requested sooner or later, so the design needs to at least be able to accommodate that to avoid a complete re-write.

Give it a few years and watch as some poor schlep has to try to do something with the steaming pile to get it to do XYZ without requiring a whole new system with data loaded from scratch. You'll have to pay those people handsomely because it will be nasty work nobody wants to do. The AI won't likely be able to help you. We know that when you feed the output of AI into the input, it tends to go crazy and start babbling about quantum fluctuations and giving people 6 fingers.

Yeah, I don't mind the $20/month. It's a good deal.

The starting pitchers rotate, but the rest of the lineup tends to play almost every game baring injuries.

Of course, even with a 5 or 6 man starting rotation, they tend to blow their elbow out and require surgery somewhere in their mid 20s. Many players have to retire in their early 30s.