Comment Re: Is any company managing to make AI anything pa (Score 1) 92
Comment Coding interviews are a waste. (Score 1) 147
Your best engineers will be AuDHD, and AuDHD folk don't do well in these sorts of synthetic tests.
I can code in 20+ languages for over 12 different OS', write code that's good enough for CERN to run for particle accelerator data collection for a decade, have accelerated systems by an order of magnitude by understanding the poem space better than their previous engineers, but I am abysmal at exam style settings.
The software industry is riddled with SEs who write abysmal code but can pass a coding test easily. They're the folk that you have always needed to reject but didn't because they ticked a box.
Comment Dwarf planet no more (Score 1) 70
It's planet of short stature now
Comment Re:I say no to all foldable touchscreens (Score 2) 69
I like the idea of a folding phone. I really like a flip phone for something smaller to carry around.
But I'd never go back to a phone with moving parts. Just way too much stuff to break. No phone I've had with moving parts ever lasted longer than 2 years. I'd much rather just carry around a regular slab phone. They last so much longer.
Comment Re:Harm (Score 1) 109
While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.
Comment Re:Well... (Score 1) 146
Interesting... I didn't consider that angle.
Thanks!
Comment Re:Good (Score 3, Insightful) 146
While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.
Comment Well... (Score 4, Interesting) 146
My opinion is that AI will kill Linux eventually. Not now, not when Linus uses it, because Linus knows how to code and is careful. But eventually the crappy vibe-coded junk will seep into the kernel. And then you'll get Microsoft-style code quality issues.
Comment Re:Unbelievable what people will publish (Score 2) 16
They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.
The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.
If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.
I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.
But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.
Comment Damn... There goes my porn (Score 3, Interesting) 173
Russian sites like Yandex, Rutube, VKvideo... are great to find porn. But if they go down, I'll take the minor inconvenience for the sake of Ukraine.
More seriously, Yandex has been throttling queries rather aggressively lately, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with their compute going up in smoke due to Ukrainian drones.