Yes, exactly, this is it.

In this case, it dug up something on a company website, and then I could go read the real information there.

True, there's a huge downside to being fed the answer.

I do spend a lot of time looking at virtually random stuff, anything that just seems interesting. What is maybe more alarming about AI isn't the job replacement scenario, but the killing of creativity and synthesis.

Being able to talk to the computer to ask it to find things based on meanings is like Star Trek technology and it's sad in a way that the hype is distracting from what they're good at. For example, yesterday I had a problem (not tech but a field I know nothing about (oh wait like tech then)) and the first AI search I did gave me an excellent find. Maybe I would have found it after spending all day browsing, but this was a great answer. And what about when we were supposed to wait for the semantic web and all that. So it's a bit sad it gets hyped as being able to replace people.

I think different.

Yes, and not just functional but I doing it detracts from the emotional experience for the user.

I have an older iPad which is light and thin and wonderful and all that, except it has a protruding camera. It won't sit flat on a table. I dare not rest my hand on the screen whilst writing because I don't know how much or little force is needed to bend the pad given there's this protrusion in one corner.

And why should I wrap it in a thick case when the back is already metal?

I find it totally stupid.

I find it incredibly ugly (I am an iPhone user).

I don't like notches in screens either. It's a stupid aesthetic and functional lie.

Oh and the daft Apple TV remote that's too slippery, plus it's hard to tell which way up it is.

I've tended to be a fan of Apple for their design, and that also means I kinda hate them when they screw up the design.

Design is about compromises but don't make the wrong compromises.

Thanks, ok, point taken. :)

And I guess it will be interesting how the world does that. In the last 50 years world population has gone up and up, and fossil fuel consumption has continued to increase in absolute terms, rising higher and higher. I remember about 10 or 20 years ago there was a paper written by mathematician who explained that, essentially, the environmental movement refuses to understand basic math. It's all these notions about how we all make a small change and that will add up to a big change and so we all have to do something. He explained that, if everyone makes a small change, it'll only add up to a small change globally. And he seemed to decry that, that math seems to be too difficult for most people to understand.

But I don't believe that the higher level people who are driving the stuff are inherently stupid or deluded. I'm sure they're too smart for that.

I'd speculate that a potential more likely explanation is that, with the advent of nuclear weapons and the possibility nuclear proliferation, where any small rogue state could threaten superpowers, the main powers in the world felt that they had to somehow start exerting a much more powerful grip over the planet, and be able to more easily these destabilise and even erase individual nations. But that is hard to do when people identify with their nation state, so supernational concerns like the planet itself and the environment, are being pushed as narratives to try to deconstruct the individual's sense of national identity, and make them as it were, long for a planetary governance.

And that planetary government would ideally be under the control of your favourite superpower.

Personally, I'm not a fan of nation states, and nationalism, having caused major world wars, and ongoing geopolitical horrors, and I think it's abhorrent that a child born in the world today is severely handicapped just by the accident of them being born in Mogadishu versus California.

But the big problem is that politicians are inherently untrustworthy, and corruptible. So do we really want another supranational layer of governance above the nation states? I think even George Soros said in some interview clip somewhere that, the problem with the global government, is that if it turns bad then you've got nowhere left to go.

Anyway, I don't know, and that's all just speculation because the actual environmental movement and it's lack of understanding or admitting basic math, just makes me think surely there must be something else going, on because it just doesn't make sense. Smart, capable, powerful, knowledgeable, highly motivated leaders would not go about solving an existential crisis in such a slow and dumb way.

If you can't stop people reproducing and you can't stop them from consuming, i.e. you're not going to impose martial law to save the planet, then that suggests resorting to massive massive build out of nuclear, despite all its drawbacks, because the problem is existential survival, if the real issue was CO2.

And yet nuclear has always been negated and downplayed, despite the scale and severity of the threat.

Whereas instead, we get measures which seem to deconstruct nationalism, in particular attack racism and ethnocentrism, and deconstruct culture, and emphasise the common good, and emphasise global action and global justice, and emphasise new forms of taxation and new forms of value counting, like carbon credits, and these all seem to be more in line with some kind of global governance, and so why spend so much time on paperwork, rather than finding technologies that could actually make a quick impact on the basic math, starting 40 years ago, unless of course the point of it is the global governance? But as I say that's obviously speculative and to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

Ok, sorry, it's an ambiguous word, and I do mean, if people really believed there was a tiger about to eat them, they would run for their lives, not just sit and polish their shoes. I mean, judge what people really believe by what they do, not what they say. It's not a comfortable conclusion for me, as I remember how shocking it was when I first heard about global warming. But here we are 40 years later. And there's no second planet right? This is it. And yet there have been enormous mobilisations over comparatively smaller issues in the past.

Oddly they've been announcing that we're out of time since a long time ago. It's a chief marker that whatever the science says, no government nor people nor the UN have ever believed it to be real. Nations go to war and mobilise vast resources and impose martial law and so on, over far smaller threats than what's supposed to be a planet ending scenario. Nobody, nobody actually takes climate change like it's reality. So if we look and judge them not by what they say but by what they do, it's obvious that many organisations are simply milking the narrative for their own purposes. There's no global shutdowns and manhattan projects and global rationing and cutting consumption 90% and population controls -- which is what would have been needed to stop the tipping point beyond no return as was predicted to happen within years, i.e., before the year 2000.

Ok, yes, and... what kinds of things could they have done with their virtual machine infrastructure? And likewise, what about all the stuff companies build in AWS?

True in many ways.

But I wonder why it hasn't happened; coders being expected to have similar professional liability as people who design and calculate steel structures.

We recognise the rigour of real engineering, and wish programming could be like that, but I wonder if that's an illusion.

For example, I might wish my doctor has the same clarity and objectivity as the structural engineer, but medicine and biology are just so much more complicated.

That's not for lack of smarts, the doctor learnt vast information to get though medical school, but living systems are just so much harder to deal with, it's often more about art and experience and risk balancing, as well as science and testing. There are medical matters which could be tested, but it's just too expensive to do it, and to get a clear answer the testing would actually be unethical, for various reasons -- just as one example of the difficulties.

Now I'm not saying coding is as hard as medicine, just that medicine is an example of how, sometimes the nature of the stuff doesn't lend itself to "engineering".

A steel beam doesn't have unknown confounding factors which screw up the research results. Someone was commenting that, because mice are often used in medical research, the mice have evolved to have an unusual resilience which have then confounded most of the research results, but nobody noticed.

So I'm wondering if software has some real world issues which just mean it doesn't lend to an engineering mindset, as attractive as that ideal might be. Bridges are not software.

Medical errors are a leading cause of death, and I'm sure as a society we'd want that to be better, but maybe that's just far too expensive and/or slow, if we decided to stick with only what can be proven to a sort of engineering level of confidence.

Software might be similar for other reasons. Is it just too hard to prove code is correct? and no, having a certification which says you know all the OWASP top 10 doesn't mean the software is reliable or correct. As an example, OWASP, as we know, is just a collection of common mistakes, which is hardly the same as being smart enough to avoid all the other mistakes, or spot new kinds of mistakes in new software environments. Bugs sit around undiscovered for 20 years, then "suddenly" there's a severity 10 issue and everyone has to patch.

So overall, if engineering isn't the model or analogy for finding an answer, my guess is that it would be more about the incentives.

Are these programmers very smart, have they been given plenty of time, including freedom to scrap it all and start again, and can they provide traceability of their work throughout the supply chain, and are they free to block new versions until ready, and do they have time to create vast testing coverage, and so on...?

Maybe the problem isn't lack of engineers, but it is more like the overworked doctor who gets to spend 7 mins with a patient and misses a critical health issue, or who has to prescribe drugs in combinations which have never been tested.

Maybe we don't need engineers, we just need less fast code and more slow code.

But you'd have to change the incentives.

That's kinda true and a good point -- but having multiple suppliers for everything is going to cause other problems and trade offs. But even if in balance it made sense to stick with one supplier, maybe they should have been watching the company like a hawk, and seen this coming...?

Nicely yielded, and I'd add, code is just code, and I guess the real issue is, has the person grappled with the issues in the particular domain area long enough to know the particulars of what matters and what's relevant, rather than some abstract ideal like "engineering".

I'm guessing that engineers have common sense rules of thumb, like, every rule has exceptions, and, solve the right problem, because beyond principles like quality and reliability, you still have real world messy situations to deal with. Life is messy.

And when I say 10 or 20 that's just because I haven't studied history and so there's obviously injustices and damage caused by corps probably going right back to their original time of invention.

The Corporation:
The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
Joel Bakan

can be an interesting read.