Leading question.

Would you want to spend your entire life in a small cell all by yourself? Because then your wallet definitely won't get stolen.

Yes, life is not risk-free. But we have done a great job at making it several orders of magnitude less risky without mass surveillance, and it is doubtful if turning a free society into a police state would do all that much on top of that.

Every time you sit in your car, you risk injury, permanent disfigurement or disability and death - because all of these happen every day as the result of traffic accidents. And yet, without even being consciously aware of it, you hope every day that today it's not you.
You seriously want to tell me that that's a risk you are willing to take, but having your car keys stolen justifies mass surveillance?

Absolutely not, no.

I have some on my private property, because you don't have an expectation of privacy when trespassing on private property. But in public, we all should not feel under constant surveillance. There's a reason why China et al love total surveillance of the population so much.

Unless they acquired your explicit consent BEFORE the information gathering, the argument would still be the same.

Not at all.

But corruption and planned cost overruns and all kinds of "bid low then add costs later" tactics are working - for the politicians, the managers, the shareholders.

We absolutely do know how to run large projects and how to build large infrastructure. It's just that applying that knowledge is less profitable than fucking over taxpayers.

Easy solution:

If there is an accident at a nuclear plant, and even a hint of management being responsible, then management must join the crews doing the clean-up work, and they must be at the very frontlines.

I'm pretty sure that adding radiation poisoning to the equation changes the importance of quarterly results somewhat.

How is this any different from any unimaginative but very elaborate software spec? VLC is arguably the best media player, but it does have some really bizarre quirks. I wouldn't ripp off VLC if I wanted to rebuild it, I would simply ask the AI to build a media player with the features I wanted. Problem solved.

My current software project is FOSS but it's built with AI. It's the same thing, just the other way around. I really don't get the hype.

This thing is just a very fringe use-case of AI-built software, that's all. I doubt it will get any wider use.

High ozone-levels don't just arise in smog, they can occur in (mostly) clear air as well. Likewise you can have epic smog that is a health risk with no elevated levels of ozone.

Why Auto-update is a trap.

If you have WP plugins from teams you can rely on that have a professional software pipeline serving the updates, then auto-update really isn't a problem. The key point here being of course "professional software pipeline". The broader WP community and it's huge 3rd-party market is a crazy bunch delivering the most ghetto-type sh*t in code under the sun. Quite a few of these guys shouldn't be let near a keyboard, that's for sure.

Likewise, if you've bloated your WP setup with 15+ plugins, half of which are in maintenance delay or offered up by the aforementioned ghetto faction of "developers" (emphasis on the quotes), you shouldn't be running that setup at all, either with or without auto-update.

The key problem is that WP these days is basically not a CMS but an platform and millions of users use it as a playground for their web-projects while barely knowing what they are doing. That's a huge upside since it does enable total n00bs and ords to dive deep into FOSS and FOSS-driven user empowerment - by and large actually a good thing - but with the downside being that most WP setups quickly get bloated beyond repair and eventually fail the most basic of security and stability standards.

As someone who has done a decade of WP development and using it as a key platform I don't really mind if this sort of thing keeps me in a job with things to do. What is frustrating is that you constantly have to convene with deciders would can't tell the difference between a client and a server.

A well implemented and managed WP-centric pipeline with disaster recovery in place however is a god-send when it comes to rapid development and pivoting some web-project on a dime within half an hour because some agency type person can't make up their mind about what they want. Truth be told, for most end-customer web projects time-to-market with WP is unbeatable.

You are right, I didn't know or didn't remember those.

... instalbase compromised! We're all gonna die!

My HDD on my laptop with VGA grayscale had 40MB, the Zip disk 100 MB. It was basically a permanent extension of my early 90 DOS setup. I could even run it off my Highscreen Handheld pocket PC. The cable was pretty thick, but you could do it. Awesome. It never failed me and I eventually decommissioned it and moved all my zip disks to one CD. 8-)

Right. You are applying legalese word precision assumptions to throwaway online comments. I don't think that's going to work well.

No, the one that answered:

"You know what he means, ahole. If this were truly a problem the jet fuel would be rationed and private aircraft would be at the bottom of the priority list"

The entire point of rationing would be to REMOVE the pure market forces that would deal out the limited commodity to those with the largest wallets and replace it with a scheme that benefits the most people, instead of the most money.

If you actually knew better, you'd have posted it, not just made a vague assertion.

Yes, and the only ships running on nuclear reactors are military ships. As I said: No civilian use-case.