That's fair.

Indeed. One of the key areas in which AI research has lots of opportunity to advance is in efficiency. In theory, silicon-based intelligence should be both faster and more energy-efficient than neuronal intelligence because our neurons are actually quite slow and not terribly efficient. But the human brain's architecture obviously makes vastly more effective use of the processing power it has, so there's enormous opportunity for improvement in our current silicon analogs.

It will crack me up if after a few years and a few trillion dollars of investment into massive data centers for AI we make a big architectural efficiency breakthrough that makes the technology 3-4 orders of magnitude more efficient and renders all of those big data centers redundant. Perhaps we'll build out huge renewable energy production capacity to support AI and then suddenly find all of that capacity freed up for other purposes. Enormous green energy surpluses could power the carbon recapture needed to truly fix global warming as well as high-volume desalination and water pumping to fix water shortages... and lots more. That is, if AI doesn't kill us all.

It is the Microsoft way.

There's a difference between not using AI tools at all and not using code generated by AIs.

The latter involves a lot of risks that aren't well understood yet -- some technical, some legal, some ethical -- and it's entirely possibly that some of those risks are going to blow up in the face of the gung-ho adopters with existential consequences for their businesses.

I mostly work with clients in industries where quality matters. Think engineering applications where equipment going wrong destroys things or kills people and where security vulnerabilities are a proxy for equipment going wrong.

I know plenty of smart, capable people working in this part of the industry who are totally fine with blanket banning the use of AI-generated code on these jobs. A lot of that code simply isn't up to the required standards anyway, but even if it does produce something you could actually use, there are still all the same costs for review and certification that any other code incurs. That includes the need for at least one human reviewer to work out why the AI wrote what it did, which may or may not have any better answer than "statistically, it seemed like a good idea at the time".

The claims also seem a bit sus. "Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week." Is this the same statistic someone was debunking recently where anyone who had done something really basic (it might have been using the search facility?) was counted as "using Copilot"? A lot of organisations seem to be cautious about using code generated by AIs, or even imposing a blanket ban, so things must be very different in other parts of the industry if that 80% is also representative of professional developers using Copilot significantly for real work.

>"While the computing infrastructures are totally different, the time it took my 8-bit Tandy Color Computer 3 from the 80s to go from power up to usable was about 20-30 milliseconds."

AH, but not if you were loading/running OS-9 level 2 like I was :) Then it was a MUCH slower process. Totally worth it, of course.

>"How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and "You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?"

I don't know, because all my machines have always been Linux only. My home Acer MB desktop with Ryzen takes about 6 seconds before it hits grub, then I am looking at a GUI login screen in about 5 more seconds. Of course, that machine reboots rarely, only when I need a major update and I am in the mood to do it. Similar boot times with my older Lenovo laptop.

My newer Lenovo ThinkBook X13 gen 3 AMD is a bit different. There is a random time before it starts to actually boot. It will sit with a black screen for a random amount of time, as long as 20 seconds, before it starts to boot. I have never figured that out. Various work desktops, mostly HP mini's (Intel), take about 5 seconds before they start to boot. All machines with secure boot off.

>"And more importantly, why is it all taking so long?"

I don't think an average of 5 seconds is that long. If you want long, you need to look at servers. My HP servers take a RIDICULOUS amount of time before they even show ANYTHING on the screen. And then, they can spend over a minute after that before finally hitting grub! It is irritating as hell.

I'm not rationalizing anything away, just trying to be accurate. You should try it!

This is a good example. It is absolutely not true that the whole of the judicial branch is corrupt. It's not even true that the whole Supreme Court is corrupt.

I was 85% through TFS before I realized this wasn't about banning games in which players kill things in-game.

The especially concerning/scary thing this time is that what the giant corporations want is to make computing seem like "magic." Make a wish into the wishing well that is AI, and what you will receive will be what you wished for ... provided, of course, you keep paying the corporation for the privilege of having your wishes granted.

Never mind having the actual skill, talent, understanding, etc. to make your wishes come true yourself. Just pay, wish, and it will be yours ... and never mind anyone who tells you it used to be possible to get what you want to achieve without paying a giant corporation. Just keep wishing, lean how to wish big, and your wishes will come true.

This seems like the antithesis of how anyone who considers themselves an educator should think.

And the really sad part is they're not just saying this to CS students. They're saying it to writers and journalists, artists, musicians ... basically anyone whose job doesn't involve a hammer, a shovel, or a stove.

That's mostly correct, but IMO it's worth understanding the nuances.

The "ratified by Congress" phrase indicates that you're thinking about the Constitutional treaty approval process, which requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate (no involvement of the House).

But that's not the only type of treaty the US enters into, and in fact it's the least common kind. Another important kind is the "Congressional-executive" treaty, in which the executive negotiates the terms and then takes it to Congress to pass as an ordinary bill: majority vote of both houses plus presidential signature. This makes it federal law exactly the same as if it went through the Senate "advice and consent" process.

The third kind is the "sole-executive" treaty, in which the executive negotiates and enacts the treaty without any congressional participation. This perfectly constitutional as long as the content of the agreement consists of things that the executive branch already has the power to do, either because the required power is granted to the executive branch by the Constitution or because Congress has passed legislation that delegates the necessary power. The most common sort of sole-executive treaty is a "Status Of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) which the president signs with countries that are hosting US military forces. SOFAs are about how the military will act in those other countries and the president, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to issue orders.

In the case of trade agreements, Congress has delegated some trade agreement power to the president, so some trade agreements can be enacted as sole-executive agreements, depending on the content, though it's generally better to make them one of the other kind because what one president can do on his own, another can undo.

As for Trump's trade agreements, if the US side of the agreement is just about tariff rates, and if the president has the authority to set tariffs (a power SCOTUS just reduced but did not take away), then they could conceivably be enacted as sole-executive treaties. What has to happen on the other side varies, of course.

What's really interesting is if the US side of the agreement was to not enact tariffs that SCOTUS just said the president can't enact anyway. In that case, the other countries maybe allowed themselves to be rolled, because SCOTUS ruling does a lot to ensure that the US follows those agreements... but only because the US couldn't have broken them without congressional action anyway.

Time and again, people are learnng the hard way that making deals with Trump is a bad idea. Appearing to make deals with Trump, however, is a great idea. It's particularly effective to promise to do something in the future that you have no intention of doing and which Trump will forget about.

"Flood the zone with shit" is Bannon's phrase (and maybe someone before him), nothing really to do with Project 2025. The strategy is implicit in a lot of their plans, but they don't ever call it out as such.

No, they wouldn't, because that's not how courts work. They do not rule on issues that aren't in front of them, and with few exceptions, they rule as narrowly as possible on the issue that is in front of them. There are really good reasons for them to work this way, so you really want them to, even though it sometimes means that issues that are important to you get dragged out.

Note that I'm not saying this is a sane court, just that even if it were, it wouldn't have done what you want. This also isn't a completely insane court, though. It's a mixed bag that on balance is pretty bad, but not entirely. When faced with an issue that is as ridiculous as Trump's claims that IEEEPA, which isn't about tariffs, lets him set crazy tariffs based on an "emergency" he made up out of whole cloth, they rule 6-3 against him. With a fully sane court it would have been 9-0 with one or two blistering concurring opinions in addition to the restrained and lawyerly majority opinion.

But it still wouldn't address issues not properly before it.

That number is roughly accurate, but misleading.

What they have been doing (and it's bad, and wrong, but not quite as bad or wrong as the number makes you think) is giving him his way on temporary, emergency orders, then finding against him on the merits, as late and as narrowly as possible.

The consistent pattern is:

1. District courts find that he's doing something that's probably wrong and which creates risks of irremediable harm, harm that can't be fixed later when the court makes a final decision on the merits of the case, so the judge issues an injunction ordering the government to stop. The injunction is just a temporary "stop", while the courts decide if it's legal.
2. The government appeals the injunction, and loses. This is actually somewhat weird. Usually the government just obeys the injunction until the issue is decided.
3. The goverment appeals the injunction to the Supreme Court. Then this court does two historically very strange things. First, it actually accepts the appeal. SCOTUS hasn't historically done that, instead deferring those issues to the lower courts. Second, it stays the injunction, and does so with very little explanation, because honestly there isn't any good reason for doing it.
4. When the actual case eventually makes its way to SCOTUS, they agree to hear it, and then drag their feet as long as possible before issuing a ruling.
5. When they eventually rule on the merits Trump loses most of the time. 57% of the time, to be exact. That's mostly in his first term, though. In his second there have been only two cases with final rulings. and his record is 50/50... but that's even kind of misleading because the one he won was a procedural issue. If I were to assign some sort of weighting by subjective importance, I'd say his second term record is 90% loss.

I don't think there's any doubt that the current SCOTUS is ideologically biased and politicized in Trump's favor. There are two justices who, AFAICT, have never ruled against him, even when their history says they should have disagreed on the merits. But still, when the court actually has to write out opinions justifying their decisions -- and setting binding precedent in the process -- they go against him more often than not. Given how weak the administration's argument are in a lot of the cases before the court right now, I expect his overall win rate to plummet.

Waymos are not "remote control cars." The human operators you reference can't control the cars directly. They "give advice" in anomalous situations, such as unusual obstructions.