LLM-based AI can do some pretty impressive things. It *seems* to answer questions with remarkable accuracy, and it instantly produces code in response to often ridiculously vague input queries:

"Write me an app to track ant farms in Vietnam"

And what do you know? You get something that seems surprisingly useful!

Except that it's all an illusion.

I'm an experienced software developer (25 years now) and I focus on information lifecycle apps targeting workgroups and enterprise - organizations of 50+ people. As I write this, about 20,000 people are concurrently using an app I created.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to deeply integrate AI into my workflow. It's there when I write code in VSCode, it's there when I write sysadmin/shell code, and it's there when I'm refactoring.

The more I use it, and the "better" it gets, the more frustrating I find it. It's only somewhat useful in the area that most coding projects fail: debugging.

No matter what it seems, LLM-based AI doesn't *understand* anything. It's just an ever-more-clever trickery based on word prediction. As such, it serves only as another abstraction that still must be understood and reviewed by a real person with actual understanding, or the result is untrustable, unstable, and insecure "vibe code" that is largely worthless outside of securing VC funding, which is the thing that AI perhaps does best: help unprepared people get VC funding.

You still need real people to get code you can live with, depend on, and grow with.

Who is "we"?

Why "should" a video game not be "killed"? Why "should" a company have to keep a game going into perpetuity? Ditto operating systems.

That's nice for Enterprise people. What about the average user? How does one get it? How much does it cost?...

Evidently we now need Robocops, who will be able to connect a port to the robotaxi and communicate with it.

Based on my personal experience, my impression is that full-sized USB-A connectors are more robust than the others. If, for example, you've got an external device connected to your laptop and you, another person, or the dog may knock the device off the couch or walk into the cable, the cable is less likely to pull out and the connector and port are less likely to be damaged.

Bad analogy. Using drones to seed clouds will have a very small impact on the jobs of pilots - there aren't many pilots who do this kind of work. And it won't have any impact on airline pilots, who are the people who fly airliners, not the small planes that do cloud seeding. Their concern, as the article says, is with drones flying in the same airspace as airliners and with the debris (like "space junk" but at a lower altitude) that the cloud seeding flares generate.

The rich and powerful are treating it like a tiger running after them. They know that they don't have to be faster than the tiger, just faster than other running from the tiger.

Well, you know the difference between a BMW and a porcupine.

(A porcupine has pricks on the outside.)

Actually, many plants contain very little protein. Sago, for example, in dry form, contains less than 1% protein. The lack of protein, and specifically, the lack of protein containing certain crucial amino acids, is why it is tricky for vegans for obtain an adequate diet. They have to make sure to consume enough of the minority of plant foods that do contain a lot of protein, such as soy beans.

You're assuming that women who put on water rather than the rose scent are not smelling anything. That is not the case. There are all sorts of odors around us. It is however true that more would be learned by having women put on different scents.

There is absolutely no reason why a word processor, spreadsheet, database, image editor, or other such program needs to send data off-site. Why on earth do people buy a product that insists on doing this when there are perfectly adequate alternatives?

Of course not. For one thing, even if some aspects of language are innate, others surely are not. Aspects of intonation could be innate without any of syntax, with which Chomsky is primarily concerned, being innate.

Precisely. By the time the methane is ready for use as fuel, the other components of initial product have been removed.

Okay, fair point. But the ratio of C12 to C13 doesn't make one source ickier than another. There's no odor or bacteria or anything like that left.

Its just CH4. Unless it has somehow been contaminated, there is no trace of its origin. Without knowing its history, there's no way to tell whether it came from human waste, animal waste, the breakup of organic matter at high temperature and pressure in sedimentary basins, respiration by anaerobic bacteria, or synthetic hydrogenation of carbon monoxide.