I bought a Ford F-150 XLT (the full-hybrid pickup) and was very disappointed to find that several of the features (Including Blue Cruise and navigation) were subscription-based with an initial free period of a year or so.

Other than that the vehicle is fantastic - but was very pricey when I bought it, so having to pay over and over for the features was a very annoying surprise. (They quit working rather than quit updating when the subscriptions run out.)

... a bunch of cancer progression theories based on cell culture progression had to be thrown out when it was discovered that the cultures were being contaminated by a particularly robust and aggressive cancer cell culture, HeLa, which had contaminated lab equipment like environmental chambers or survived equipment sterilization and eventually took over culture lines in labs.

Ok, but some of us actually want to do something useful instead of just try to win the trophy of making a model run on the cheapest hardware. Unless you're generating at least ~30 tokens / second, it's not useful.

If you want to split the cost evenly, sure. But a team of 3 people working at a software company today typically pays the AI companies about $5,000-$10,000 a month, so I don't think they need to rely on the parts of the world where $400 is twice their income.

Who the fuck leases a PHONE.

I think that's the question we should be asking. Just buy the thing. If you can't afford to buy the thing, then get a loan/card to buy the thing.

And a phone just shouldn't be that expensive or difficult to maintain or break so often that you can't do either.

You can keep your vanity plate names and waste all the money you want on them.

Nobody cares any more. They just google or bookmark you.

Yeah, I mean, who would call a website slash dot, because it then becomes w w w dot slash dot dot org....

16kloc is a small project.

I should soften what I said before: You can get away with seat-of-the-pants work if one or more of: (a) your projects are small, (b) your projects are non-critical or (c) you invest in massive testing and validation.

In my old job, if I made one kind of mistake it could prevent three billion Android devices from being able to boot. If I made a different kind, it could result in the same number of devices being insecure against data extraction and other attacks (of course, OEMs often made those mistakes for me). In my new job, if I make mistakes vehicles can crash and people can die.

I want all the help the tooling can give me, and I spend a fair amount of my time building additional tools to prevent mistakes. None of it eliminates the need for testing, of course, especially when lives are on the line, but bugs that get caught by the compiler cost almost nothing. Bugs that get caught by QA, or, far worse, in the field, are very expensive.

Note that there are big systems built in Python. Instagram has millions of lines of Python code. They also mandate explicit type declarations everywhere and they built their own static typechecker, Pyre. Lots of other people have built typechecking libraries and tools for Python, trying to fix that problem. Maybe the next time I write Python I should try some of those tools.

Though I probably won't ever write any Python again. I really only use it for quick and dirty scripts, and these days I tell AI to write those for me, and I don't even bother to read the code. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, I tell the LLM to figure out why, and fix it.

Sure there are. Some bug reports, you look at them and dig in and say "Damn, that's obscure. It depends on subtly-wrong but arguably-correct-in-isolation mistakes in four different places. How the hell did they even find that?".

Granted that it's more common to glance at it and just be ashamed, or to look at it and say "Really? You think an attacker can do A, B, C, D, and E, all at the same time? Oh, and to do B or D they'd already have to have the system mostly compromised. Okay, I'll fix it, but no way in hell is that actually exploitable."

Sorry, but you're wrong.

Maybe... if the projections are in formal filings I don't think they can do that without risking SEC penalties. They can be optimistic about revenues or falling costs or things, because who can tell? But straight up ignoring things, probably not.

You said that this creates an arms race, which implies that it's a question of capability.

Marketing? Because companies famously want to use models in their networks that just run off and commit major crimes? *eyeroll*

I strongly dislike dynamically-typed languages like Python. They're okay for toy programs but for anything of any size... you'd better have one hell of a good test suite because the tools give you absolutely no help. I want strong, static typing. I want a very picky compiler that won't accept anything that isn't exactly correct. C++ is good. Rust is better. I do like type inference so I don't have to manually specify types very often. C++ is reasonably good at this. Rust is better.

I also do a fair amount of work on very tiny systems, programming on the bare metal. Something like Python is a complete non-starter there, it just won't fit. C is the norm for those cases, but C is almost as loosey-goosey as Python, but without any run-time checks. C++ is much better than C. Rust is better yet.

The worst non-hardware bug I've ever dealt with in nearly 40 years of professional programming was in Python, using the Twisted framework. I traced it down to one place that took a pure abstract interface, instantiated it, then called methods on it!. Even logging the type of the instantiated object showed that it was the abstract type. Someone way too clever had built a dependency injection framework that was so magical that there was absolutely no way to figure out what dependency was being injected.

I also have AI write most of my code these days, but that actually increases my desire for a very picky compiler, because AI does a lot better with those guardrails in place.

In the hopes of clarifying some concepts and descriptive words:

The US army runs under fascism. Management is top-down, everyone has to do what their superior says to do, and if you don't do it there are grave consequences.

All militaries across the globe run under fascism. All militaries throughout history have run under fascism.

Almost all businesses are run under a similar system: there is one person at the top, usually with a vision of what he wants to happen, and everyone from there down what their immediate superior says to do. There is some leeway in the case of business: you can disagree with your superior and perhaps have a discussion, doing the right thing against orders is OK if it works out, and the penalties for disobeying aren't as severe (getting fired versus getting sent to Leavenworth, or being shot).

The fascist model of governance is one of a handful of governing types we know about, and is useful in situations where decisions need to be made quickly based on experience (military planning) or based on vision (business planning). Military actions fall squarely within those situations. It's not the best model for an economic system, where divergent opinions and "try it and see" is more efficient, or a political system where individual corruption can lead to violations in human rights or reasonable policy.

The US military is not capitalistic, but it is not "anti-capitalism" system in the sense that it works against capitalism in any way.

The US military isn't socialist, except that it tries to provide for it's members in compensation for the risks they take. It's similar to businesses providing health insurance or stock options or reimbursement for college courses - we don't normally think of employment perks as "socialism", and in the same manner we shouldn't think of military benefits as socialism either. Socialism is a foundational principle, not a system of perks.

I don't know that using AI is a weakness of the system. The military is famous for actually studying the effects that certain decisions have. You can look up the government's studies on whether and how much coffee improves performance, whether sleep learning is of any use, and the minimum IQ to allow before it takes more resources to manage an individual than the resources the individual brings by enlisting.

Looking into new technologies and their application to warfare is something the US military does very well.

And apropos of nothing, it's completely obvious that drones are a tectonic shift in military technology, this came as a complete surprise from the Ukraine war, and we totally should be pivoting away from expensive missiles and more towards swarms of cheap drones.

I don't know why you're characterizing drones as trendy and popular, either.