There's your problem: Javascript.

I'm actually serious. LLMs in their current incarnation need a lot of guardrails, and I think they do much better with a very strict, statically-typed language.

If I did have to write Javascript and I wanted to use an LLM I would focus hardcore on extremely thorough and extensive unit tests, because that's the only way to provide the necessary guardrails. And I would closely scrutinize all test changes made... or maybe just mark the test code as read-only so the AI can't modify the tests.

Also you should be very picky about architecture, and have the LLM implement in smallish chunks, thoroughly vetting its output each time.

Is this a lot of work? Yes! It's a lot less work than doing it all yourself, but if you just give the AI a high-level problem description and turn it loose, you're probably going to end up with crap. Even worse in a language like JS that encourages crap anyway.

How on earth did you survive watching the 1970s Wonder Woman?

I'm imagining devices going by a conveyor belt, and a worker with a wirecutter is making a brief snip on each of the devices as it travels by.

The boss walks up, and the snipper guy asks "Is it true? Is the customer canceling?"

The boss briefly nods but then shakes his head. "Yeah, they're canc--no, I mean they still want the devices. They just don't want the snipping anymore. They say go ahead and leave the warrant-detection-and-lookup circuit live."

"Good. I never really understood what I was doing here. They're still weren't required to check the sensor anyway, so why disable it?"

The boss explained, "so we could charge them for the snipping."

*Citation needed

True but what about the data being collected?

I went to it last night. I have no idea what the complaints are about. 'Dark and Muddy' we were on a world destroyed by war, with people scrounging out an existnance that had bad guys stealing every female child for a breeding farm. Should it be bright and clean?

way to blow the ending spoiler. Yes, she killed a guy. how many action movies have been released where the body count is 100x higher and we're cool with it? the hero murders entire base full of people blows it up on the way out, but supergirl stabs a guy who shot her dog with a poison that tortures it to death over three days and killed a kids family, killed another family and their kid in front of her.

He died to quickly for my taste. He needed to die screaming, one appendage ripped off at a time.

it was a fun movie, I swear to god I do not understand people these days.

There's no way to interpret these costs, that nobody is ever going to be willing to pay, as a reminder that soon these companies are going to be bankrupt.

Every time I see an AI story like this, it makes me realize I really have no idea what the AI bubble hardware is actually like, and how it might be used after auction.

A few months from now you might find yourself at an auction where 4TB of faster-than-anything-you-have RAM might be for sale for $80, but of course it won't be in the usual DIMMs that any of your existing mobos can use, will it? What will it be, and how do we best exploit it?

For now at least, wearables require radio frequencies to work.

So block the radiowaves.

https://www.homedepot.com/pep/...

Paint the room with EMF shielding and you do not have to worry about any connections - not cellular, not bluetooth, nothing.

You mention the Rambo ripoff movies which is good point because the original First Blood https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... is pretty left wing. A Vietnam vet with long hair and serious PTSD is just trying to live his life and pass through the town. But the small town (and minded) police don't like him and all hell breaks loose. It's really a tragic story.

Sheriff Lobo? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's high. I have a team of three reviewers, and I think their reviews are kind of thin. They do point out useful improvements, but I think more careful review could find more. That said, I also feel like the overall quality is actually higher.

I've also been coding professionally for a little over 35 years, and AI is a complete game-changer. It's going to take us a while to figure out just how much. I actually wonder if my focus on code quality is pointless. I put a lot of effort into ensuring that code is clean and readable for humans, but will that really matter? My current project is the realization of something I've been thinking about for 15 years... how to build a crypto API that guides users to use it correctly and safely. But will that actually matter, or will users just point an LLM at it that has more knowledge about what's safe and hygienic than I do?

Mostly I don't think about it. I'm building something I've wanted to build for a long time, doing it incredibly quickly, and having a great time at it. I'm going to do this for another 2-3 years, then retire. I expect to leave behind something that I'd have been immensely proud of a decade ago... an elegant design with a very high quality implementation.

But I'm not sure that it will be better in practice than something quick and dirty, because I'm not sure people are going to be writing code at all in a few years, and I don't know if the readability and maintainability characteristics I'm so careful about will even matter to its users.

Fair. In a competitive market those are the same things, but monopoly situations -- especially government-enforced monopolies, like patented drugs -- create curves that behave differently.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

To the degree that's true, it's nothing inherent in the processor generations. What's happened is that Moore's Law has slowed dramatically. If there were as much performance difference between a 2026 CPU and a 2020 CPU as there was between a 2006 CPU and a 2000 CPU, we'd still be feeling the need to upgrade regularly.

Consider, for example that between 2000 and 2006, clock speeds tripled, CPUs went from single to dual core, and instructions per clock went up. A 2006 flagship CPU was ~20X faster than a 2000 flagship CPU. From 2020 to 2026 we saw, what, 2X? And most of that gain came from increasing core counts and hybrid big/little cores, which means that most workloads don't realize the full benefit.

When machines are getting an order of magnitude faster every five years, you're going to be upgrading frequently. That hasn't been happening for a while. If we have some major shift in CPU tech that give us 10X faster machines by 2030, the upgrade treadmill will resume.

Incorporated AC when Paris was built?