If you dig deeper, you'll find that AMD originally reverse engineered the *8080*, not the 8086. The two companies had entered into a cross-licensing agreement by 1976. Intel agreed to let AMD second-source the 8086 in order to secure the PC deal with IBM, who insisted on having a second source vendor.

There would have been no Intel success story without AMD to back them up.

(That actually would have been for the best. IBM would probably have selected an non-segmented CPU from somebody else instead of Intel's kludge.)

I once worked at a place that had a clean room process to create code compatible with a proprietary product. Anybody who had ever seen the original code or even loaded the original binary into a debugger was not allowed to write any code at all for the cloned product. The clone writers generally worked only off of the specifications and user documentation.

There were a handful of people who were allowed to debug the original to resolve a few questions about low-level compatibility. The only way they were allowed to communicate with the software writers was through written questions and answers that left a clear paper trail, and the answers had to be as terse as possible (usually just yes or no). Everyone knew that these memos were highly likely to be used as evidence in legal proceedings.

I highly doubt that any AI tech bros have ever been this rigorous, and I'd bet that most of these AIs have been trained on the exact same source code that they are cloning.

Twice, in fact -- once in an academic research lab and once at a company that designed and built medical imaging equipment.

In both cases we worked on image classification using digital image processing and statistical pattern recognition. (In one of the two cases we also used syntactic pattern recognition and machine learning.) It's very, very, very hard to make this accurate enough for clinical use even if you pour effort and time and money into it. There's no way this technology should be deployed without humans backing it up.

As to the human mistakes: everyone can cite a case where a professional radiologist committed a false positive or false negative error. But did you stop to consider why they made a mistake? Were they 13 hours into a 14-hour shift, their third one in a row -- because the hospital CEO felt that money should go into his pocket instead of into hiring another radiologist to share the load? Was it an imaging anomaly (they happen) that was ambiguous? Was it because the study that was done wasn't the best choice? (I.e., imaging modality or location) There are all kinds of ways for this to go wrong that will result in blame being assigned to the radiologist, and only some of those assignments are fair.

AI isn't a magic fix for this. And I certainly wouldn't even try to use any of the general-purpose models -- as Zathras would say: "This is wrong tool." If I were to do this again today, I would return to the approach we used before with modest success, I'd take advantage of some of the improved algorithms that have come along, and obviously I'd use bigger/faster hardware, because that opens up approaches that were computationally infeasible. But I wouldn't even consider removing humans: these are, or can be, life-and-death decisions, and a human being needs to make them.

"Michael Marshall Smith's 1996 novel Spares, in which the hero liberates intelligent clones from a "spare farm", was optioned by DreamWorks in the late 1990s, but was never made. It remains unclear if the story inspired The Island, so Marshall Smith did not consider it worthwhile to pursue legal action over the similarities."

Anyway, we're all saying the same thing here. This is all Torment Nexus stuff. We know how this ends.

In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.

Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?

There's legitimacy to that. Taking a potentially dangerous drug under the supervision of a doctor who knows how things are supposed to work, what side effects look like, with drugs of consistent purity and dosage, has a lot of advantages over winging it with stuff made up random chinese chemicals and toilet bowl cleaner.

Unless you're talking about cocaine etc. brought to the penthouse by a personal assistant or something. Plenty of ultra-rich celebs have killed themselves that way.

How can it be that? Survival has never been more assured. I wonder if we'd be less depressed if we had to do physical labor for food and fight the neighboring tribe once in a while to punctuate life with more immediacy and urgency.

BOOK:
The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness
https://www.amazon.com/Mindful...

No drug necessary.

The Underlying issue is: Why are some people depressed?

If we understand that, it is very likely that no drug will be necessary. People won't become depressed.

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

Windows is crashing because users are doing things that cause crashes.

This issue needs to be investigated in MUCH more detail.

I don't have crashes.

Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.

As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.

Captchas were thoroughly defeated years -- MANY years -- ago. The only reason that some people mistakenly think they're still working is that some targets aren't worth the time and trouble to attack.

A few of the numerous references that can easily be found to support this:

unCAPTCHA Breaks 450 ReCAPTCHAs in Under 6 Seconds

Bots are better at CAPTCHA than humans, researchers find

AI researchers demonstrate 100% success rate in bypassing online CAPTCHAs

Troy Hunt: Breaking CAPTCHA with automated humans

Stanford researchers outsmart captcha codes