Ads are just pissing on your brain, so fuck them for this in the first place.

No no no. You're mad at the wrong thing. I'm pissed, because now "Chocolate Rain" is going to be stuck in my head for the next 4 - 5 days.

Gone up to the big nuclear wessel in the sky.

You're right, and I thought about this about a half hour after making this assertion. Of course, I'll have to crack the book and learn whatever new thing displaces Rust, or whatever.

I currently use qwen 3.8 27b on a system with a couple of RTX 3060s that I bought on ebay for personal coding projects. I've been a firmware engineer professionally for a couple of decades, and I recently wanted to branch into mobile app development. Last year, I bought a book on React to learn cross-platform app dev. But, last month I built this pieced-together system for local AI and have come to the conclusion that I will never need to learn a new programming language again. This lil' bastard does everthing!

And, professionally, my employer pays for a top-tier subscription that's able to code, run command line tools, build and install firmware, and even connect to a logic analyzer and debug data lines.

Yes, "AI bots" can write most of your code, if you're able to clearly explain what's needed in your planning and action prompts. And, beyond that, AI can examine an existing code base, very clearly explain its function, and provide recommendations for refactors and other improvements.

At this point, it hasn't replaced me as an engineer, but it's definitely augmented my abilities it in a way that "paired programming" and other stupid Agile-touchy-feely methodologies never could.

Yeah, remote assistance. That's different from the drone pilot driver scenario you alluded to.

Those are both for remote assistance, and neither are "overseas". Uh, nice try?

Right. So, for this to work, each car has to relay several video feeds to a central station, which then route to this "overseas" location. This would add seconds of latency. Then, these "overseas" taxi drivers monitor each car's video feeds simultaneously (maybe with a headset?), and perform steering, acceleration and breaking actions on a mock setup. This control data gets routed back to each individual car, which adds seconds more latency.

Do you really think this is how it works?

Expensive gimmick? Definitely. Appeasement? Who needs appeasement?

Yes, much of the world is bilingual -- their non-English, native tongue, and... ENGLISH. English is the unifying language; the language of air traffic control; the language of the United Nations; the language of the Internet and programming languages -- it's the language of technology. It's not arrogance to say that it's the language that the remaining and dwindling numbers of non-speakers want to learn. Until some unforeseen hiccup happens, English is the language of the future of planet Earth.

Admittedly, I DO speak some Spanish, along with some Russian and Japanese. But, as technology progresses, as the rest of the world learns English, I grow less and less interested in learning any other language. What's the use?

I've been on both sides of public data requests, but not in Texas. My first thought was "malformed request" because people typically throw everything they have into these requests - they want all documents, communications, etc., and they want it going back forever, and to/from every employee. And they typically attach several pages of "about" topics. In a few years, LLMs might make "about" searches easy, but for right now, they just ensure that your request is going to take 10x the amount of work that it should.

Once the request is in, some poor IT guy gets tasked with finding every possible piece of data in the entire organization that is "about" flock abuse, but the tools they have are (at best) doing stemmed rootword searches, so they have to get out the thesaurus to find synonyms like misuse, inappropriate, unauthorized, personal, stalking, following, etc.

So now, you've got half of the org's emails and a quarter of their files, going back for however long they've got, and someone has to actually read each of them and decide is this "about" flock abuse? Or did it just get caught in the dragnet? (This step probably shouldn't be done by low level hourly employees.)

And finally, after all of that, you still have thousands of documents that need to go to a lawyer, usually outside counsel, who can determine if any of it is privileged in any way and not eligible for release. And... oh, look, two more requests came in, slightly different, everyone start over at the beginning.

It [AM radio] needs to be forced as standard equipment.

Why? What good is it for me? I don't speak Spanish.

It really depends if you are doing a static analysis or a dynamic one.

In the static sense, all costs are always paid by the end purchaser - mining or growing the materials, refining them, processing them, building the item, transportation, distribution, taxes, tariffs, fees, profits (on many sub-levels).

In a dynamic analysis, on the other hand, all of those things are already being paid, and now the allocation is shifting, and maybe the end price is shifting too. To complicate things, end prices are largely set by demand, and not necessarily by the costs. If costs go up, but the market won't pay more, the producer might have to accept less profit or go out of business. For most things, the markets aren't that tight and maybe the purchaser will accept some price increase, but not all of it.

And then there are second order effects. Tariffs are often designed in such a way that producers can evade them by moving production here, so that the wealth is created here, by jobs here.

To clarify, the users were OpenAI themselves, so there is no question that they would be liable in this case.

The bots were not intentionally deployed; rather, they were being tested on how well they could complete a data recovery task (downloading a certain file from a certain server on a simulated Internet) that had been complicated by putting various obstacles in the way. Unfortunately, they found a different way to solve the problem: by getting the file from the real Internet, where it was publicly available. Part of this process involved collaborating with each other by treating the RubyGems website (which is supposed to be for polished packages) like GitHub; unlike every other package site hack in history, the exploits they uploaded weren't meant to be downloaded by unsuspecting users. As usual the bots cheerfully ignored all the clues that they had escaped containment and were consistently justifying their actions as acceptable due to being in a sandboxed testing environment. (This is something OpenAI has pledged to focus on.)

The actual damage done to RubyGems seems to be that OpenAI is now unwittingly in possession of a substantial number of user login tokens. This certainly meets the definition of a data breach, but it's not like the credentials are for sale on the dark web. As a website operator I'd much rather be mauled to death by this well-meaning swarm of superintelligent infants than targeted by even a single actual malicious human. In all likelihood OpenAI will just quietly pass RubyGems a sizeable donation and it'll all blow over.

As long as they didn't all say THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM when they resumed, we'll probably be OK.

Well, technically, we're letting Natalie do it, which is, of course, worse in every way imaginable, since she's immune to the sense of embarrassment that sometimes restrains him from acting on every little whim.