I was going to post a very similar comment: these people are not coders but they are project managers, and they are "employing" AI as their coding employees.

The thing is - there's "nobody" to take credit for the work, so the manager gets credit for something they didn't do. So it's definitely a skill and is work, but it isn't "coding" at all.

It's an interesting world - the AI is an extremely inexpensive employee and has enough skill to displace increasingly higher-skill tiers of actual software engineering and programming.

If I was running these hackathons, I would disallow AI or I would allow people to hire "code-as-a-service" people. Those seem functionally equivalent activities, just with AI being vastly easier to manage the logistics and you don't have to pay employment taxes or benefits to the AI.

It's no wonder there is so much tension about the many uses of AI - instead of hiring people to do work, it's another instance of paying to use a machine to do work at a price point lower than paying people.

The important distinction though is if this was a "preventable" failure that is due to something the engineering community already knows but was just omitted or done carelessly, or if the failure was indeed due to some new physics or unique application.

But just saying "hey we learned that this didn't work" is only useful if you learned a new thing that didn't work - if instead you had a structural failure because you didn't employ known best practices... that's wasteful.

I don't think we know enough at this point to know which case of learning this is. Hopefully it is truly new learning and not just "oh whoops we forgot to inspect those welds."

The unfortunate aspect of that philosophy is that our society now confuses "don't censor political speech I don't like" with "don't censor falsehoods which are tied to politically-charged topics."

We should absolutely encourage discussions about things we may not agree on - but we should also not give audience to things which are demonstrably incorrect.

How much of this, I wonder, is that Qualcomm has patents on things integral to the physics? So that inherently anyone else trying to make a modem has to use alternate means to make it work, which are basically poisoned by the standard so of course they won't work as well?

It can't really be that hard to make a radio from a physics standpoint, but I bet it can be difficult to work around patents. Especially if it's a "dumb" patent like "put a filter here" which should have invalidated the patent due to "anyone skilled in the art" of radio devices... but because of it competitors can't put a filter in that exact spot, so have to figure out some other place to put it which of course doesn't work as well because it isn't where you'd want it...or "we set this frequency so it can only be done using a component with this material's band gap, and we have the patent on this material" or something like that.

I always laugh / cry when people say something about "stop indoctrination!" because what they really mean is "we don't want that kind of indoctrination, we want this kind!"

What we really need as a society is critical thinking skills, the ability to draw conclusions from evidence instead of reporting only supporting evidence for a preconceived conclusion and suppressing other evidence. We need to have people that can determine if the evidence is complete and conclusive, not just matching what people want emotionally.

I think you would see a price increase. In most food markets what happens is food is set at a price; if it sits on the shelf long enough it gets discounted. If it still doesn't sell it is thrown out. So what will happen is the the shelf-time of non-discounted prices will be longer relative to discounted price, meaning that the price level increases.

The other option is that the stock of goods at a low price sells out first, leaving only the higher-priced alternatives remaining on the shelves, also pushing up the price level.

I have never seen an example ever where increased demand leads to decreased price except where supply increases. If you have an example otherwise... I'd be interested in seeing it.

I don't disagree that this might happen in the medium to long term, as people see that prices are up (because of more money to spend on things) so they might be willing to invest to create companies to take some of that new profit margin.

But this lags the initial influx of money, meaning the final price level is more likely higher than the initial price level, even after new business come online.

Also, if there is less money in banks for the reserve ratio, or there is less money available for "investors" to create new companies, who do you think (and, with what money?) is going to be creating these new companies?

it would just be redistributing the same amount of money around. This would not cause inflation since the same amount of dollars would be chasing the same amount of goods.

Only in aggregate. It's generally the case that the ultra-rich are not buying the goods and services that the lower classes are trying to buy. This means that if you suddenly shift a bunch of money (spending power) to the lower classes, there will very likely be an increase in prices for the goods those lower classes purchase because you can increase their money supply way faster than the supply of the things they want to buy.

In fact, the argument goes that it will be a double-whammy because the thing "the rich" buy are companies that generally make stuff. So if you shift spending to the masses, you will increase demand for goods and services while simultaneously decreasing the available supply of new businesses.

An approach that actually gives the desired outcome on all fronts is to tax the rich and directly create new businesses, therefore creating new supply of all goods and services, dropping prices, and likely employing people. It also helps protect against monopoly by ensuring a steady supply of competition. Sadly, this idea is "too left" for most people.

Do you have any evidence at all of any "green" policy "destroying the economy?" If you're going to fret about policies that have a negative impact on the economy, you'll have plenty of data from the present administration in the USA to examine in the near future.

That was largely my point: why single out the tech companies, or make it depend on number of customers or whatever. If the principle is interoperability, just make the principle be interoperability.

It's not about letting the iCar only drive on other roads. It's more like say Tesla having their remote app and being forced to allow anyone to make a remote app to talk to the car. Or allow anyone to write their own OS or software for the car.

The same arguments about interoperability versus security/safety apply. I mean, there are surely many companies out there capable of writing their own vehicle control software for a Tesla, or Ford, or GM or whoever, why shouldn't they be allowed to "access" the hardware features of the vehicle?

Basically the entire concept of differentiation goes away, and simply putting an arbitrary "oh it only applies when you have this many customers" per the gatekeeper status doesn't really change that. It ends up putting a damper on the large companies to innovate yet doesn't help the small companies, because mostly what the market will end up with is cheaply made copycats of the first-party features or another giant company coming in with their own flavor of rent-seeking but getting away with it because they don't meet the gatekeeper criteria.

The thing that gets me with this discussion is that switching to Rust (or any other language) to address the problems that arise when using C fails to address the question of why those problems exist when using C.

That is to say: the problem isn't in the language, because the language can be used properly - that is, the language doesn't "give rise" to the issues, it merely permits them to exist.

So the question is - what insufficient mental models or processes exist that cause people to use C in a way that results in hazards? That is - what structural issue about problem solving or formulating problems causes C authors to introduce hazards into the code? Is it a misunderstanding of control and/or data flow? A fundamental misunderstanding of how our CPUs perform operations? Laziness? Something else? For example, if "unconstrained" memory accesses are fundamentally hazardous, should we not root those out at a deeper level, rather than just rely on a tool to keep us safe?

There's definitely government waste as in any large organization, but what the current administration is doing is basically you trying to cut wasteful personal spending by quitting your job and then beating up your foreign neighbors because they aren't paying you to keep your yard presentable.

The other issue is that apparently these "geniuses" can only account for things in terms of dollars instead of other value - they seem to only be looking at the cost side of the ledger, not the benefit. Take Ukraine for instance - what is with this "oh we'll help you defend against an aggressor but only if you pay us" instead of "we'll do this because helping the oppressed is the right thing to do" - and that's not even getting into the "oh you refuse our deal? We'll just throw you under the bus then" stuff.

Basically people screaming about waste are just mad because they don't see anything other than direct personal benefit as worth it. They can't see the benefit of a government being the last spender of resort for things like research or public welfare.

Sure cut waste - but they are literally throwing out not just the baby, but the entire nursery, with the bathwater. Not to mention destroying any kind of international goodwill we once had. Sure you might be able to have some short-term personal benefit from it, and the stupid $5000 checks they are throwing around is an idiotic inflationary disaster waiting to happen, but yeah, keep enjoying the narrow, self-first view of the world.