"some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn't have considered before."
yeah, I also remember this moment when I graduated 30+ years ago. I came out of college with a list in my head of about three famous companies that I wanted to work for. Thing is, 99.99% of people don't work for those companies. Leaving college is a hard reality check for sure.

Of course, I didn't work in software - since we're talking about Stanford grads and software engineering, there has been a 25 year-long bubble in the Bay Area where probably most of them stepped direct from Stanford to one of the tech giants.

Although that sloth is positively satanic.

Yeah, this post has a real "Old Man Shouts at Clouds"-vibe. I agree with the ethical concerns, but trying to convince people that adequately good content is not adequately good (especially when we're only on - what? - Gen 2 of a process that's going to get better and better) is a losing battle.

I dig the fight you're fighting, but fight on better turf than 'the eyes are slightly the wrong size' and don't gaslight me.

Really good response, thank you!

FWIW, he's putting together a start-up AI company called Keen Technologies now...
https://keenagi.com/

>> Remind me, what's Einstein's definition of insanity?

Happy to, except I don't know it. I suspect you're referring to the quote "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" but it turns out that there's no evidence that Einstein ever said that, it's more likely the anonymous writer of a booklet for AA or Rita Mae Brown.

Well, there you go. Turns out checking your facts is something you didn't do when writing your post. These people never learn.

Yeah I guess you're right. I just cut-and-pasted the stuff ;)

> It doesn't end well for the humans. https://en.wikipedia/ /Alien_vs._Predator_(film)

Speaking from experience, especially the ones that paid for tickets

For reasons I won't go into beyond saying it's an educational projects for kids, I needed to write a (very simple) app for an iPhone 3G recently, Problem is: I've never written any kind of app at all. I have remnants of a single college level C++ class from thirty years ago, that's it.

I was lucky to have a friend 'in the business' - he pointed me in the right way and got me set up in Xcode (4.4, in case you're skeptical), but I was astonished how much AI (specially Chat-GPT) was able to pull me through. Explaining to me what the code was doing, and - crucially - writing chunks of it. It was wrong often enough to cause problems, but feeding its own mistakes back to it and asking for corrections worked well.

Point is - I became a vibe coder and the app now works: I still can't write code or understand half of what is in my app. Even the basic principles of UIView construction made no sense to me. But it works, and the kid's project works.

We're at that level today. Someone with zero experience and knowledge can produce basic working apps. I gotta think we'll be much further along in 3-5 short years. My heart goes out to the code-crafters, but manipulating (synthetic) language turns out to be something AI is excellent at.

Thanks for a good answer, lots of reasonable points.
I looked into three of the planes that you linked to: Vespina, the UK equivalent of Airforce One, Konrad Adenauer, the German equivalent and Cotam 001, the French. As far as I can tell, they are all just regular commercial planes with pragmatic changes to reflect their usage (eg seating layouts, private spaces, etc) and upgraded radar. They're pretty cheap in commercial jet terms.

eg. Vespina: It's a standard (new) Airbus 330 (list cost approximately $250m) with about $15m spent on refitting it for purpose. Total: $275m. It isn't fitted with ECM, EMP hardening, armor etc. It's just a convenience thing. Both the German and French retrofitted previously used commercial planes.

The next (pair of) Airforce Ones will cost the US taxpayer at least $3.9bn. Much more than 10x Vespina. Running costs are astronomical (about $100m per year)

You're probably right that there's a good case for a dedicated aircraft for senior government officials. I'm not convinced having a supposedly nuclear-hardened Boeing boondoggle one makes any sense at all. (Don't fall for the 'Boeing is losing money on this' argument, the US Government will always bail out Boeing whatever happens)

Does any other nation on earth feel the need to have a tricked-out James-bond passenger jet for the benefit of one individual? What a colossal waste of money.
In the event of nuclear war, the chances of survival or otherwise of the President is a) not very greatly influenced by 'thicker windows' b) not very important compared to the survival of civil society in general, which is more dependent on personnel redundancy, planning and bunkers than whatever trivial armor is on a VC-25.

Imagine a US without Air Force One. It'd be the same, but a little richer.

... and that is why I feel this matters.
The SFX accomplishments in this movie deserve to be honored by being seen. The first ever computer-controlled camera allowed unprecedented freedom in model FX, and I would love to be able to appreciate those, instead of the quite bog-standard CGI in the Special Editions. Kudos to Dennis Muren, John Dykstra et al!

It's two clicks deep on the article that Moryath linked to, so I can see how you'd miss it:
https://www.nature.com/article...
A peer reviewed paper from Nature Medicine giving the scientific basis for believing that the spike protein was a natural occurrence, not engineered.

except:
"While the analyses above suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity, computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal7 and that the RBD sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding7,11. Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation."

Just in case anyone isn't aware: you can still buy a single one-off permanent license of Microsoft Office 2024 for $150, supported until October 2029
I make that a saving of over $500 over that period, assuming that the sub price never goes up again! Microsoft haven't added a feature I cared about for over 10 years.

Microsoft kind of bury it, but with this price increase I can't see why anyone would pay for the subscription.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...

It's both of those effects. And, in addition...
It's an unwritten rule of critics (well, published ones) that you don't write even an honest negative review for a relatively unknown band/author/director etc. What's the point? No would be interested to read the review anyways. But it's absolutely fair game to slam a successful band's new album because they can take it.

So sum up all three effects: selection bias, reversion to the mean and 'your-first-album-is-your-life's-work' and the conclusion that 'critics are to blame' is pretty obvious.

'Fan' ratings are an even more flawed metric. They are, by definition, not remotely objective. A new band has fewer devoted fans to declare their album awesome.