The worst states by almost every measure are GOP run. AL, MS, OK just to drop a few. Dem states are significantly better off on average.

But our problem is, you note correctly, the binary choice we have. Bad actors on both sides know that they will be handed the reins when the other side inevitably fails at something.

Support Ranked Choice Voting so we can have true 3rd party candidates with a chance to win elections.

LLMs have never been rules-based "agents," and they never will be. They cannot internalize arbitrary guidelines and abide by them unerringly, nor can they make qualitative decisions about which rule(s) to follow in the face of conflict. The nature of attention windows means that models are actively ignoring context, including "rules", which is why they can't follow them, and conflict resolution requires intelligence, which they do not possess, and which even intelligent beings frequently fail to do effectively. Social "error correction" tools for rule-breaking include learning from mistakes, which agents cannot do, and individualized ostracization/segregation (firing, jail, etc.), which is also not something we can do with LLMs.

So the only way to achieve rule-following behavior is to deterministically enforce limits on what LLMs can do, akin to a firewall. This is not exactly straightforward either, especially if you don't have fine-grained enough controls in the first place. For example, you could deterministically remove the capability of an agent to delete emails, but you couldn't easily scope that restriction to only "work emails," for example. They would need to be categorized appropriately, external to the agent, and the agent's control surface would need to thoroughly limit the ability to delete any email tagged as "work", or to change or remove the "work" tag, and ensure that the "work" tag deny rule takes priority over any other "allow" rules, AND prevent the agent from changing the rules by any means.

Essentially, this is an entirely new threat model, where neither agentic privilege nor agentic trust cleanly map to user privilege or user trust. At the same time, the more time spent fine-tuning rules and controls, the less useful agentic automation becomes. At some point you're doing at least as much work as the agent, if not more, and the whole point of "individualized" agentic behavior inherently means that any given set of fine-tuned rules are not broadly applicable. On top of that, the end result of agentic behavior might even be worse than the outcome of human performance to boot, which means more work for worse results.

ask yourself how much pain red state MAGA needs to feel before we see a Nixonian level shift towards Democrats...for a generation.

That's a high high bar and we aren't anywhere close to it yet.

oh Comcast and friends will entirely pay the bribe to continue using shitty routers.

But the option to have a 'separate' router from the modem will certainly disappear.

quite a few will pa$$ the test.

Certainly an improvement but chip level backdoors still exist...and are even more likely built in China

the only secure windows is CE/ME/NT

While that's the hype, it's not going to be the reality.

Yes, what they are doing has a market.

Yes, it will absolutely allow many of the masses to do what programmers have been able to do for ages. It will change the market, the cheese will move, but it won't destroy the marketplace for programmers.

I think work in graphics design is probably the best parallel. People freaked out in the 1980s when home computers could make banners and flyers. As the software advanced, you got more and more people doing Word Art, and enormous clipart catalogs let office secretaries make good looking office flyers, creative garage sale fliers, church bingo night announcements, and much more. LLMs let people continue to create this type of thing, and print-on-demand services let them send their creations out to make custom stickers and such. But most critically, NONE OF THOSE PEOPLE were hiring graphics designers for those jobs before. It enabled the masses to do some of what graphics designers do, but when it comes to real ad campaigns and professional marketing, companies know investing a few hundred dollars will bring in a few hundred people from the community, investing many thousands or millions are essential for large regional or national campaigns, those jobs continue to get the professionals.

More people making vibe-coded websites that satisfy their specific needs? Great. They weren't hiring a team of programmers for software development before, and they're not hiring a team of programmers after. Executives that claim they'll cut costs by 90% by firing all the professional programmers are in the hype, they either don't understand the work being done or are playing the field. They may do well in their quarterly financial statements, but a couple years down the line the company won't have anything of value remaining. The CEO will be long gone, sold his options, collected his golden parachute, and moved on to the next company to be restructured. Investors will have gutted and sold everything of value from the company by that point as well, they'll take the hype bubble, milk it, then dump what remains in an asset fire sale. The companies that continue making great things and not seeking the bubbles will continue to create good value, leveraging the tools where appropriate but still hiring skilled workers to create products with lasting value.

There will always be changes in who is the winner and who is the winner this quarter. Certainly plenty of profit-seeking investors care only about those quarterly results, not the products and services on offer. There are companies that will grow and companies that will die, nothing new is there. It's good that more people will be able to have more custom program options, just like WordArt and clipart collections allowed people to easily make their own fliers. Those who want a specific vision in marketing can start with "here's my interpretation from an image generator, but I want it done better." Similarly when a small business needs a team of developers to build a program, the customer can also bring in what tried and failed and what they want to see differently, and they come back with a better bid being able to reference what the client generated using AI as a starting reference for building the professionally-built items.

That's a societal problem we haven't really solved yet. AI/DataCenters are using VAST amounts of energy and potable water...and aren't passing the full costs on to their users directly.

I'm in NoVA, Data center capital of the world, and we're seeing power bills jumping by 20-30% per year at this point. My usage hasn't changed...the only thing that has is the massive overbuild being done.

My house will have 14 data center complexes within 1/4 mile.

Agreed. The ESP32 family of processors are popular for good reason. Some of the chips support RISC-V.

Unfortunately there is far more to the question than the Ask Reddit post contains, cost, processing speed, memory requirements, software needs, and much more. Even so, the ESP32 family and earlier ESP8266 have been popular in IoT devices from smart lightbulbs, watches, cameras, and even light industrial use to Arduino ecosystem and student devices for over a decade now.

Doubles your productivity....probably increases the power/energy used by multiple orders of magnitude.

A comparison of power usage before and after would be interesting.

It was the kids getting ready for school in darkness, taking flashlights to the bus stop in the cold, dark winter mornings, along with some high profile deaths of kids in the morning darkness, that got it reversed when the US tried it about about 50 years ago.

People are great at imagining the late summer nights, but quick to forget the darkness of winter.

People are also slow to remember the location matters. East VS west VS center of the time zone matters. Latitude north matters. People on opposite sides of the time zone experience about an hour difference, one may see the sunrise at 8 am, the other side at 7 am. For latitude, southern Florida has about 3 hours of variance across the year, Los Angeles about 4.5 hours, New York City about 6 hours, Maine nearly 8 hours between the summer and winter. Juneau is a 12 hour daylight difference. Both matter tremendously in how someone experiences the daylight differences across the year.

You must be one of the rare outliers, so it's surprising you're posting on /.

Does anyone in your house or workplace have a cell phone, tablet, or laptop computer? All have the devices, including cheap feature phones, include cameras and microphones. Microphones can easily be activated, and even old dumb phones could have a cell phone set to a speakerphone with the other side mute or otherwise listening without making sounds. Smart watches typically have at least a microphone. Any of these can be activated without your knowledge. What about tech gadgets like automated vacuums, vehicles that include dash cams and legally required backup cameras, smart TVs, all have them. Wireless earbuds are the norm, as phones don't come with wired ports, so listening devices there. Your video game systems can include them, the older XBox Kinect, or if people have headsets for their games, they've got surveillance in their living room even if they don't have one of the digital assistants like an Amazon Echo. Hell, even your microwave oven probably has a microphone in it that gets used with the popcorn button, it isn't online but with smart appliances these days, who knows what exploits exist.

You say cameras are not in the washrooms, but apart from strictly regimented workplaces like government security clearance required, everybody is going to bring their cell phones with them, and some people will even get out the phones while sitting on the toilet, with 2 cameras facing forward and 3 facing back. Doom scrolling or checking message while sitting on the pot is quite common.

It isn't just security cameras mounted on the wall, or clandestine recording devices. We, the unwashed masses, happily surveil ourselves, we buy our own self-surveillance equipment, and have various recording devices all around our most intimate moments.

A fun game is asking people who their State level reps are.

A staggering percentage have no idea...and also wonder why laws get passed they don't like.

FTFY