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Comment Re:A watershed moment (Score 1) 65

...now AI is one of the most destructive

The profit motive is making it non-economical to do anything other than create mediocre code with LLMs. Exceptional generation defining leaps in tech (like DOOM and Quake) simply won't happen if everyone is just generating their way to the next paycheck.

Think about it, could AI have come up with Fast inverse square root... I'm sure it could have with enough prompting and someone who knew what they were looking for, feeding it prompts detailed enough that they contained the answer.... but on its own, there's no way AI would've coded it from scratch into a game engine.

Comment anyone got a cd-rom drive? (Score 1) 67

I recently had to deal with some xray images on CDs, and discovered to my surprise that I didn't have a reader... I tossed away all CDs like a decade ago, and old hardware just got replaced, all without drives. Nothing came with cd-rom drives in at least a decade, no? So genuine question, how many folks still have a cd-rom drive to be able to read those CDs?

(I ended up buying a cheap drive just to read those xray images... but haven't used it for anything since).

Comment Re: So did it fail in the last stage? (Score 1) 36

Absolutely no incentive. Normally ransomware gangs (I've heard) strive to provide great customer service in order to maintain trust that they will decrypt future victim's payloads. But since this attack was carried out by AI the data was at the mercy of a stochastic parrot. The lesson learned for the attackers will probably be to ask the attack to execute a known script once it achieves a toehold instead of trusting the prompt to do so the work.

Comment Re: Before someone says it (Score 1) 134

Misinformation is a genocide engine. That was true before social media (remember Yugoslavia?), and it's true now (see Myanmar for a recent example).

The problem with the internet is that it greatly accelerates factionalization (via filter bubbles, foreign influence campaigns, and algorithms that optimize for outage). It's fertile ground for seeding doubts and conspiracy theories (5g, flat earth, "pandemic", etc). This is corrosive and disintegrative.

To invent civilization, humans had to create and improve countless "social technologies" including language, art, religion, finance, law, corporations, and various schemes for distributing power and curtailing selfishness. The internet (and now AI) are something new and wholly transformative... we need new social innovations to deal with the problems they create. We will have to try a lot of things (many which, sadly will backfire or be abused) and it will take a long time.

Comment Re: Before someone says it (Score 1) 134

I distinguish "social media" from "forums" by content and design. A forum (like slashdot) discusses ideas/news/events, either for a particular subject (furries), a broad domain (news for nerds) or the world in general; it's also predominantly textual and permits multi-paragraph responses, almost always in a threaded format. Social media (like Facebook, Instagram, and linked in), by contrast, revolves around participant's identities and social graph ~ think vacation photos, profiles, real name policies, community groups, business page that should have been dedicated websites, etc. While forums might have personalities (well-known prolific posters), only social media has influencers.

Social media is also heavily visual. This they have in common with meme sites (like imgur and 9gag), but the latter lack the sustained cultivation of personal (and business) identities.

Comment Re: With xAI and Cursor (Score 1) 67

Judging from the name of his drone ships, he's clearly read some of Iain Bank's Culture series. It features a futuristic interstellar socialist civilization run by benevolent AI's who just happen to be very deadly spaceships.

  (I recommend Player of Games for an easy/fun read and Use of Weapons for deeper theme/characterization.)

Comment Re:"Speech Rules" (Score 1) 84

I've always been pro free speech, but social media has left me wondering... if a business model can be shown to inherently fracture societies, destabilize democracies, and fuel genocide, should it be allowed to exist? Maybe there's a different way to share cat photos with your grandma that doesn't require entrusting our civic discourse to algorithms that maximize for fear and outrage.

Comment Re:Oh dear (Score 1) 55

So... everyone talks about vibe coding these days... yet nobody within the administration comes along and says "oh, instead of paying MS for 500k licenses... how about we just vibe code something similar with an open local model"...

(e.g. do they *really* need the latest frontier model for routine administrative tasks... or would a 7gig local model do just as well?).

Comment Re: So let them fail (Score 1) 110

Your comment presupposes that those who coast will just get washed out and it will only affect them. Instead:

(1) As a result of AI, students who would have invested the effort and become solid developers will instead "coast" thru.

(2) Many of the coasters will still get their degree, enter the job market, and obtain developer positions.
They may even have an advantage over non-coasters because they will have had more time to devote to extracurriculars and internships.

NET RESULT: AI weakens the overall quality and quantity and good entry-level developers available for the field to hire.

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