For deaf, since one of the features is captioning a speaker.

On the one hand, I know all too well that the AI will screw it up some.

However, if you watch closed captioning, you know that the captions are already frequently messed up, long before even AI was a possible strategy. Usually the live captioned stuff had lower quality, but you'd see it in scripted shows too.

I also wonder about the converse, captioning someone using sign language for those that don't know it.

But that FOV is just so tiny....

It holds up in some cases, not in others, and calculating an average muddles that.

Personally, I use AI coding assists for two purposes quite successfully: a) more intelligent auto-complete and b) writing a piece of code using a common, well understood algorithm (i.e. lots of sources the AI could learn from) in the specific programming language or setup that I need.

It turns out that it is much faster and almost as reliable to have the AI do that then finding a few examples on github and stackoverflow, checking which ones are actually decent, and translating them myself.

Anything more complex than that and it starts being a coin toss. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's a waste of time. So I've stopped doing that because coding it myself is faster and the result better than babysitting an AI.

And when you need to optimize for a specific parameter - speed, memory, etc. - you can just about forget AI.

Hey, industry, I've got an idea: If you need specific, recent, skills (especially in the framework-of-the-month class), how about you train people in them?

That used to be the norm. Companies would hire apprentices, train them in the exact skills needed, then at the end hire them as proper employees. These days, though, the training part is outsourced to the education system. And that's just dumb in so many ways.

Universities should not train the flavour of the moment. Because by the time people graduate, that may have already shifted elsewhere. Universities train the basics and the thinking needed to grow into nearby fields. Yes, thinking is a skill that can be trained.

Case in point: When I was in university, there was one short course on cybersecurity. And yet that's been my profession for over two decades now. There were zero courses on AI. And yet there are whitepapers on AI with me as a co-author. And of the seven programming languages I learnt in university, I haven't used even one of them ever professionally and only one privately (C, of course. You can never go wrong learning C. If you have a university diploma in computer science and they didn't teach you C, demand your money back). Ok, if you count SQL as a programming language, it's eight and I did use that professionally a few times. But I consider none of them a waste of time. Ok, Haskell maybe. The actual skill acquired was "programming", not a particular language.

Should universities teach about AI? Yes, I think so. Should they teach how to prompt engineer for ChatGPT 4? Totally not. That'll be obsolete before they even graduate.

So if your company needs people who have a specific AI-related skill (like prompt engineering) and know a specific AI tool or model - find them or train them. Don't demand that other people train them for you.

FFS, we complain about freeloaders everywhere, but the industry has become a cesspool of freeloaders these days.

The number of people isn't the problem here.

The "started every" is.

How did they not catch that during development and found a solution? I mean, the meme's where a TV ad starts Alexa and orders 10 large pizzas are a decade old now.

Indeed, No True Scotsman would use STL with C++.

The last job I had where I had to use C/C++, we automatically ran an expensive static analysis tool every time we checked in code. I'd estimate that it only found about half of the potential segfaults, and it made up for that by finding twice as many false positives.

Nope. If I had used st::list instead of std::vector, it would have been perfectly fine and officially supported. (Assuming I changed "i+10" to "i+11" in order to make the algorithm actually terminate, although that change wouldn't affect the vector crash.).

The problem is that there are dozens of different rules you have to remember to apply to the different types of lists and iterators. And that's only talking about that one topic. There are hundreds of other rules covering a multitude of language aspects that you have to mentally apply against every single line of code you write, many of which can potentially cause memory corruption.

Given his other examples were mostly containing real stuff, you seem to totally agree.

The railroads continue to be key to this day, even if they overreacted in the day.

The Internet infrastructure absolutely is critical now, despite the somewhat false start.

That is a dangerous misconception. You don't need to use any pointers to get memory errors in C++:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <vector>
 
int main() {
    std::vector<int> v = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9};
    for (auto i : v) {
        if (i % 2 == 0) {
            v.push_back(i + 10);
        }
        printf("%d\n", i);
    }
 
    return 0;
}
 
$ g++ -Wall -pedantic t.cpp
$ echo $?
0
$ ./a.out
 
1
2
-947527061
1600570778
5
6
7
8
9

Are you seriously trying to suggest that never allocating memory is not also a "straight jacket"?

You seem to be saying that a currently existing bowdlerized version C++ is safe for close-world problems. Possibly so, but that still leaves C++ unsuitable for open-world problems. That makes C++ only suitable for niche applications. Why learn it?

If you just use Rust or any other memory safe language, you won't have to worry about what kind of "world" you're writing for, or about choosing from a range of increasingly dangerous "profiles".

From a fundamental standpoint, I 100% agree with this level of fee on H1B visas. It was intended for bringing in people who had specializations that didn't exist locally, not for bringing in people who would simply do the work cheaper then the local labor pool. This has led to all kinds of stagnation in compensation especially when there was high demand for the jobs as well as rising cost of living.

That being said, remote work has shown that some of this can be done without being at the office anymore. I think some businesses will look at this again and review their recent back to the office policies, and the need to have workers live/reside near certain tech hubs/centers, and will use it as an excuse to then pay the going rate of where the person resides, not the rate of compensation for the work itself....

I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.

EVs would be residential, not wholesale, pricing.

Big AI Data Centers would be wholesale pricing.

It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

How about we put this much hyped AI to good use by employing it to automatically shut the door in such cases?

While we're at it, I could use an AI robot dishwasher that can actually clean pans, determining whether to use scouring powder and then use it or not, and position dishes itself, no more need for the user to carefully position everything, just dump the dirty dishes in the machine.

Too bad all the hoopla around AI was hype, and AI still can't do such simple things.