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Comment Re: Correction (Score 1) 89

How do you define quality?

If AI evolves over the next couple of years to the point that it quickly generates code from a spec then ideas like software maintenance become obsolete.

Industrial process controls follow a method like this today. There are large libraries of validated software modules that are as symbolic function blocks plugged together in a ladder logic schematic. Lots of stability, efficiency, and high performance/safety levels. Every oil refinery, power plant, and chemical plant operates on such software.

The specs are the engineering part. The coding is not. You can assign people to research algorithms, and develop optimum methods, but why should humans be coding?

You're assuming that AI evolves to the point where every piece of code it outputs works perfectly as intended, with no human interaction needed for testing and troubleshooting. Sure, industrial process controls work the way you described, but only after the pieces were built, tested, and troubleshot extensively. (like you said, "validated") You don't get robust systems fast, especially for the kind of critical systems you described, where if something goes wrong it's a huge deal, like oil refineries, power plants, chemical plants. When things go wrong in those areas, people die. It takes a lot of time and effort to build and test them to the point where they can be just left alone to run things. Plus, you're wrong about the coding not being part of the engineering. It is a large part of the engineering. Just because someone can describe how the process should work doesn't mean the engineering is over. It takes more engineering in the practical sense to implement the process.

Comment Re:Acting like Broadcom (Score 1) 190

Perhaps the proper non-malignant design for an application for which a company intends (and does) sell a perpetual license for is to NOT have it validate its license every time it runs using a TLS cert? Especially one baked into the application itself, guaranteeing that the app will cease functioning when the cert expires? I understand the technical side, but MS sold a perpetual license knowing full well that the baked-in cert would eventually expire and therefore the app would eventually stop working for people who actually bought the license in question. Standard IANAL caveat here, and MS may actually have a legal defense that could be argued, but at best the situation is bad corporate behavior.

Comment Re:Acting like Broadcom (Score 1) 190

Begin and end dates for certificates are an important part of modern encryption. Having said that, building (hard-coding) one into a piece of software and then selling a "perpetual" license for such, when it (apparently) uses the cert every time it runs, otherwise functionality is reduced (crippled, one might say) is IMO false advertising at best, and actual fraud at worst. They made this decision when they built the software, either with the full knowledge that when the cert expired the software would cease functioning (bad behavior), or not realizing that would happen (gross incompetence). I lean towards believing the first. If it were the latter (incompetence), an effort could be made to remediate the problem, which from all accounts we are not seeing.

Comment Re:I'm actually gonna try and defend Microsoft her (Score 1) 190

A "bunch of security warnings and annoying bullshit you have to bypass"? Just out of curiosity I just installed LibreOffice on my Mac running Sequoia and my experience was the following: a brief wait the first time I ran LibreOffice while it verified the app (about 15 seconds or so), and exactly one warning/notification that it was an application downloaded from the internet and did I want to run it with two clear buttons, one YES and one NO. Again, this occurred only once, the first time I ran LibreOffice after installation. I'd hardly call that of security warnings and annoying bullshit you have to bypass. IMO as a user of both Windows and MacOS for many years, and a software developer professionally, I have to place the blame for this current situation squarely on MS's shoulders. It certainly appears to me as a desire from MS to push users either to purchase a newer version or to get users to switch to the subscription version, either of which is driven by the desire to wring more money out of people who have already paid them once.

Comment Re:AI or no AI there is a huge automation push (Score 2) 76

He may be wrong about "recession" in a definition sense, but that doesn't invalidate the rest of his thoughts. If you removed his first sentence ("A lot of the layoffs are because we are in a deep deep recession caused by incompetent leadership."), would you disagree with the rest of his analysis? I wouldn't disagree with it overall. CEOs care about one thing: profit. It doesn't matter whether it comes at the expense of the general population. In fact, it's better if it does, because the less money the general population has, the more money the CEO has, and that definitely gives them leverage and power.

We're at the inflection point of a second industrial revolution, but this one comes with massive unemployment due to the replacement of humans with robotics and AI, not a shift of jobs from agriculture to industrial. The jobs won't shift, they'll simply disappear. I don't think there's anyone alive today who remembers (first-hand) what 20% unemployment looks like.

Comment the event was a BUST (Score 1) 154

(and I don't mean that as a pun on "drug bust.") With the exception of the strongmen in the deadlift competition (Mitchell Hooper, 2x and current World's Strongest Man champion and Hafthor Bjornsson, current world record holder for srongman deadlift), the athletes who competed were at best Tier 2. They were either older and past their prime (some of them were literally coming back after literally a decade or more away from their sport) or were never Tier 1 to begin with. So, honestly, it was no surprise to NOT see a lot of records broken. It was lackluster to watch, and the only reason I did was to see if Thor could pull 515kg on the deadlift (which he didn't).

Comment Re:8 GB?? (Score 1) 147

The memory is my biggest concern also. I fully realize that the specs on this new Mac aren't for heavy users. It's not aimed at that market. The CPU and other specs are probably fine for a large group of real-world users, but I'll reserve judgment until we see how it performs on real-world tasks with only 8GB RAM.

Comment Re:Resistance is futile? (Score 1) 107

The Qualcomm chief executive might think that quoting Star Trek makes them sound cool and with it, but he may want to reconsider quoting the bad guys. He may also want to remember that ultimately, even in that fictional universe, the Borg were defeated.

The quote the bad guys intentionally at this point. The tech CEOs have made it abundantly clear that they view all the warnings in sci-fi as roadmaps to glory, and this particular CEO quoting the Borg just makes it even more clear that they view the bad guys as the heroes of the story. And their ultimate goal is to re-write the sci-fi future into one where the bad guys always win, because they think the bad guys were cooler.

I don't necessarily disagree with you here, it's fairly impossible to think that saying "resistance is futile" is an accident or a coincidence. The CEOs might also want to remember that the rest of the world doesn't think like they do.

Comment Re:it will happen either way, uncomfortable truth. (Score 1) 195

You just made the argument for the rest of the world developing nuclear weapons, given that the US is the "other guys" who built them first.

Is this trying to be deliberately misleading? Do you think no other country was testing and trying to build them? Or somehow you think everyone only started buidling them after the US did?

You'll want to look into that a bit more. Countries were trying to achieve this globally, the US was just the first to successfully deploy one against another country. So, that's a complete BS statement trying to frame a specific narrative.

Historically, there was exactly one other country (Germany) that was attempting to develop atomic weapons at the time. As it turns out, we found out after the war that they were nowhere near success. To claim otherwise is to distort historical evidence.

Except we're talking about mass surveillance of our own population here, that is what is being asked for. How does that counter another country's surveillance of their population? For the second part of the paragraph, it is practically the height of hubris to assume that once you hand over the decision to kill to non-humans, you can still control it.

Your problem is a fair amount of your "own population" are foreign citizens who entered your country illegally, from such countries that would absolutely employ these tactics, and we're seeing a large chunk of them are not refugees, but criminals and people coming for economic advantages. It doesn't take a massive amount of people to cause signficiant damage. The informed minority will always win against the uninformed majority. There are specific incidents, which we all know, where that has absolutely happened. Pretending it didn't would be delusional and intentional to try and let history repeat itself.

Ironically I'm against having complete survailance, but I also don't know how to stop these assholes for r-ing k-ing and whatever else these garbage people (citizens or not) are doing. So, let's hope we can get a better solution, but I have complete survailance over my property, because people keep damaging or stealinge when they can and quite frankly, I've have enough. You either need to catch them for doing it, or make the consequences so severe it's not worth trying.

It doesn't sound like you're against having complete surveillance. It sounds like you're saying that you can't think of anything better, and therefore we should accept it. Except that every surveillance state (read: communist, etc.) country that's done that has led to horrific abuses of the populace. To quote you directly, "Pretending it didn't would be delusional and intentional to try and let history repeat itself.".

You're framing this as a "we need to do this (get as dangerous and inhuman as anyone else) or submit" choice. Things are rarely that simple in the real world.

During an interview someone was asked what the biggest lie they were told was and they said it was when they were told, "It's not that simple". Yeah, it probably is. If the US didn't end up deploying viable nuclear weapons first, they probably would have lost that war, and Japan wasn't going to love you, unless you were Japanese.

So it seems it is that simple when you generalize it, isn't it?

I challenge you to find (and cite) a reputable historian that states that without the use of the atomic bomb, the Allies would have lost the war in the Pacific. There would have been MANY more casualties, certainly. But Japan would not have won. It was never a matter of "President Truman, without dropping atomic bombs, we'll lose." It was a calculation to save Allied lives at the cost of Japanese lives. An incredibly difficult decision, and I'm not sure I could have justified a different decision had I been in Truman's place. But Japan was NOT in a position to win the war.

Comment Re:it will happen either way, uncomfortable truth. (Score 2) 195

"Nuclear Weapons bad!" Yes I agree. "No one should develop them" Okay, that sounds pretty good. "Shit, the other guys built one, and now are threatening us" Well crap, I mean, if they are going to build them I guess we have to build them to deter them threatening us with them.

You just made the argument for the rest of the world developing nuclear weapons, given that the US is the "other guys" who built them first.

It's the same with the AI. "No mass survaliance or automated machines that fire on their own!" Okay, I mean that sounds good. I like that. "Shit, a country I wouldn't want to live in or under developed mass survaliance for centralized intelligence with AI, which is also watching us, and have automated weapons that fire on their own, and are now threatening us" Well, shit, I guess we should have them as well to stop them.

Except we're talking about mass surveillance of our own population here, that is what is being asked for. How does that counter another country's surveillance of their population? For the second part of the paragraph, it is practically the height of hubris to assume that once you hand over the decision to kill to non-humans, you can still control it.

That is the bottom line is of the problem. If no one could do it, then that's super reasonable and we shouldn't create it. If other people who I don't want to live under their rule are going to make it anyway, and I have a choice to either live under that countries rule, or have our own countries also develop those weapons, I'm going to be the lesser evil.

Both choices suck, but unless you're god you're not going to change what everyone in the world does.

You're framing this as a "we need to do this (get as dangerous and inhuman as anyone else) or submit" choice. Things are rarely that simple in the real world.

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