"protect against renegade AI"

This is a fundamentally unsolvable problem. It's like: "How do we stop humans from being humans?"

Saying that's your objective is fundamentally dishonest. You can't protect against the unknown. You can't protect against anything without covering all the corner cases, and AI, by it's very nature, is almost exclusively corner cases.

You've apparently not worked in "developer heavy" companies before.

Nobody gives a shit about operations, generally.

It's Covid/Two Weeks to Flatten The Curve/The Terrorists/SARS/9-11/The Russians!/The Nazis - all over again.

Just reactionary FUD to try to herd sheep into a specific direction.

This shit can't be trusted.

The federal government has always (for at least several decades) used the threat of removing federal funding to force states to do things that they don't want to do. This is nothing new, and is not, as this summary implies, setting a dangerous precedent.

The difference is that normally, this is used to do things that add standards intended to make things better/safer for the general public or serve some legitimate public need.

This is being done to remove standards intended to protect the general public. As a general rule, states have always been allowed to have stricter laws than the federal government, just not more lax laws. Using the threat of removing federal funding to take away laws intended to protect the public's rights, reduce competition among content providers, and push the Internet more and more towards a content monopoly is doing the opposite of that.

It's not the federal government using the threat of withdrawing funding to push its agenda that is bad. It is the agenda itself that is bad. It is fundamentally antithetical to the rule of law, fundamentally contrary to the regulatory powers required to maintain a functioning capitalist system, and fundamentally contrary to the public interest. It is putting greedy corporations ahead of the American people.

Additionally, the executive branch taking such an action without authorization from Congress is also bad. The long history of doing this has, to my knowledge, been limited to the executive branch acting on laws passed by Congress that give them the authority to withhold funds for specific non-compliance reasons. Doing so in the absence of such laws is likely a violation of the separation of powers.

But unfortunately, the current administration has a long history of violating that separation of powers, doing various illegal acts, knowing full well that it will take months for the courts to strike down those acts, and that the damage will have been done by then, and using the threat of such illegal executive orders as a way to extort concessions out of states, government agencies, corporations, nonprofits, and individuals. And that right there — the repeated willful commission of unconstitutional acts for borderline felonious purposes — is a fundamental abrogation of their oath of office.

So the way I see it, there are only three ways to fix the problem:

A. Pass laws clarifying that Congress has exclusive power of the purse, and that the executive branch shall not retract funding to any state, any agency, or any individual for any reason unless the right to retract funding for that specific reason is explicitly codified in the relevant law as an executive power, and that this rule shall apply to all government agencies, without exception, superseding all previously assumed authority, and providing criminal liability for anyone acting in contravention of this law, with no statute of limitations. That way, federal agency heads who act on such executive orders will no longer be protected by any assumption of legality or constitutionality, and will risk future criminal charges if they act on an executive order that violates the separation of powers in this way.

B. Remove the people who are pushing this agenda, whether through the ballot box, through impeachment, or both.

C. Do both A and B.

How can you state that? I'm assuming you're a Rust proponent from that wild statement, which goes to show you how little you know about the topic.

Yes, memory leaks can and do happen in Rust. Rust is not perfect. Neither are the people who write it.

Most Rust code is written by its proponents' AI models, anyway.

This is an engineering maxim as old as time.

If your response to theoretically old, brittle, and "wrong language" code is "rewrite it in something better", you don't understand the problem.

There has never in the history of software development been an effort to rewrite a platform in another language which wasn't subsequently plagued by all manners of new and interesting problems.

In a best case scenario, the product has an exhaustive regression testing framework, complete unit tests for every function, e2e testing, and reintegrative CI/CD. But that is rarely true for any project, and certainly isn't true for old ones which predate such practices.

You make an important point: the biggest positive contribution to making old tools better without introducing more brittle behavior is with coverage from test suites, and improved code coverage.

This IS the Rust community you're talking about, after all.

While Rust is a fine language, the community tends to be a bit fanatical and irrational. Pair that with a generally shallow technical aptitude depth and a lack of experience, and vibe coding, and therein lies the problem. There seems to be a high intersection between them and the systemd, so that's not a surprise.

And that's without getting into questionable mental health practices that are common in that community.

I can assure you that blockchain work is still very much happening in finance today and there is a lot of capital being spent and a lot of profit being made. The 24/7 tokenized stock market is sadly the future of investment. If you work in the industry, you know.

I keep telling my mortage company this, but they in their legacy minds just wont take bitcoin! Same with BMW financial and my local grocery store! It's a nightmare living amoung luddites like this.

I think you are framing your argument from the luxury of the modern era. Early adopters didn’t finish working out the serious problems with cars, machinery, or electricity before widespread adoption. Safety standards and regulation often developed in response to harms that were already happening. In fact, this is happening today with AI. Tech leaders are calling for better standards and even regulation to reduce the harms AI is causing.

Some of us here were lucky enough to live in a world without leaded fuel running our cars. Luckily those "early adopters" figured that out over a few decades and we phased it out 70 some years after the fact.

Like industrialization? I'm not saying it's for the best. It is impossible to know if technological progress is for the best. I'm saying it is no different than any other kind of technological progress and we have to make a choice. Protect jobs at the cost of progress or accept that this is the cost of progress.

Sure I'd love for there to be a generation of 20 something hand crafters carving the scroll work on my shotguns, but the market has decided that engraving machines are cheaper and good enough. So that job is pretty much a hobby. I'd love to still be a doing the IT work I was doing in 1999 as well, but those skills are worthless.

I don't celebrate anything or make excuses. I see the world for how it is and I decide what I'm going to do to help myself.

It is well known that you can only think about one issue at a time. This is the core reason why "what about X" is always the best and valid defense to anything you disgree with. If you are trying to reform police camera use then it's impossible to be actively trying to stop other things.

At least that is what the politicans and small minds tell us every time they say "But what about X?"

It is also creating jobs. No different than what a spreadsheet did to acocunting, what the car did to the buggy whip industry, what computers did to people who did that work by hand, what the internet did to printed research material, what smartphones did to dozens of tools it replaced, electric lighting did to lamps, the printing press did to hand copying, digital photography did to dark rooms, CAD did to drafting.

People lost their jobs at first, then new jobs using and leveraging that tech replaced them. There is a whole career out there right now in helping business secure the use of AI. It pays great and requires a lot of expeirence in how AI is used today. There is a lot of work out there for people who can intergrate AI into stacks, to find ways to create efficiency in the use of AI, to build skills, systems, tuning, and even models for dedicated workloads in a company.

Sure a lot of jobs will be destroyed. That is the thing that happens with all technology. It's why western union doesn't bring me money on a horse carriage.

Mental illness in this country is out of control. People come to a tech forum and see an article about AI and suddenly are talking about single moms and spanking children. It's not a healthy train of thought. Please touch some grass.

Nope, they're all "distilled" models. That's what post training is, largely, and they're all using other models to help curate the datasets for this. They're all doing it. It's why all the models appear to be converging in terms of capabilities and personality: they're effectively using the same feed stock and using an increasingly similar set of techniques.

US "frontier" labs are distilling, as well. It's postulated (with good reason) that Opus 5 is, for instance, just a distillation of Fable to a smaller model: it's very architecturally and behaviorally different than prior Opus releases.

The anti-distillation argument is basically the same argument that's been used against Open Source in general over the past 30 odd years. It's anti-competitive and self interested.