and it will be a LOT less impressive when it breaks someday and it's seen that nobody knows how to fix it, in part because even the guy who supposedly wrote it actually did not and has no clue as to how it works.

Super glue, chewing gum, duct tape, wood scraps and paperclips can be used to make something interesting. In the hands of a Hollywood prop maker they might even make something that LOOKS amazing. They do not make useful things that are sufficiently structurally-sound enough for people to entrust with their reputations, their fortunes, and especially, their lives.

"Vibe coding", like so many other things that are used to bait corporate execs and investors into thinking you can violate reality (for example by playing with man-months by adding more bodies to seats) look really great while implementing stuff that primarily LOOKS great while doing very little of actual importance. Not so much, when used in the aviation, medical, drilling/mining, etc fields. Do people even remember all the amazing stuff people used to show off in the "demo scene" era??? Programmers then did some amazing VISUAL stuff... but nothing of any usefulness came of it. Some of those guys, no doubt, ended up coding in game studios IF they could discipline themselves enough to work as members of teams and on projects with actual architecture and testing...

People on the right are NOT saying there's no value in ANY college degrees and that people need to be prevented from going to college and get forced into menial labor jobs. NOBODY is saying that. It's apparently the product of your fevered imagination.

What people on the right HAVE been arguing is multiple related things that are bit more complex than you can apparently handle.

1. Obama's federal takeover of college loans was a BAD idea and implemented VERY BADLY. He effectively made it so any kid could borrow any amount of cash to spend on any major at any college/university. This was HORRENDOUS. It enabled the most gullible consumers (kids with little real-world experience with big purchases and, lacking full-time work experience, little appreciation of how difficult paying-down big debts would be) to get talked into huge debts by colleges eager to mop-up all that cash and willing to provide USELESS degrees in majors that would sound good (and easy) to kids. Right-leaners back then warned that this would drive-up college costs as the school operators discovered this new fountain of unlimited money, but they were derided as "anti-education". To see how dead-on the predictions of the right were on this, lookup the inflation of annual college costs pre- and post- Obama. Nobody needed to be a wizard to predict this, one only needed to understand basic economics and basic human nature.

2. Many of these useless college degrees now provide kids with no better job and pay prospects than they'd have had if they'd gone to trade schools and learned skills the country truly needs and which are in high demand (like plumbing, electrical, and welding skills). Had those same kids gone the trade school route, many would now have good jobs with good incomes and NO COLLEGE DEBTS. This has been proven true. Yes, a brain surgeon will take home more money (even after making monthly loan payments) than an average welder, BUT the average welder will find it easy to get a job wherever he wants to live, start earning a good salary at least 3 years before his college-attending peers, will not be having to make any college loan payments out of each paycheck, AND his pay will be higher than that of many non-technical degree holders.

3. Having huge numbers of illegal aliens in the country doing many jobs has pushed down the wages and benefits for those jobs, making them unattractive to American workers. This too is provably true. Americans used to do ALL those jobs, and not that long ago. All that illegal labor has also had another negative effect: it made that work, done by human hands, so cheap that it does not pay to automate it. Had that labor force not been there, there would have been a demand in the marketplace for all sorts of new automation and lots of new small American companies would have arisen to design and build robotic systems to do many of those menial tasks (particularly in agriculture) and THOSE automation jobs would have been great for American workers.

4. NOBODY of any importance on the right is talking about preventing anybody from going to college to get a good degree in some useful thing. Certainly SOME are indeed against garbage degrees (like gender studies) that will put a kid in deep debt and only lead to a job as a barista, but the last politician IIRC who actually pushed legislation to control how many people could get a degree in which fields in any given year was Hillary Clinton, who proposed this as part of "Hillary Care" back in the 1990s. She thought the government could control healthcare costs by indirectly rationing specialty care, by controlling the numbers of doctors graduating each year with degrees in the various medical specialties.

The truth is that, rather than federalizing all student loans, and taking the borrowing limits off, and then occasionally going hyper-cynical and teasing the idea of "loan forgiveness" (to try to buy the youth vote in each election cycle), what we SHOULD have done was to teach high school kids to have a clear view of not only whether they were suited to college or trade schools etc, but we should also have taught them the basic economic law of Supply and Demand. Kids needed to be shown which degrees would be in demand and thus provide opportunities and pay well, as opposed to things like "Gender Studies", "Art History", Klingon Grammar, or Taylor Swift studies where the entire nation might need a total of five or six people with the degree (in Art History... Paramount might need one person with the Klingon degree, if cheap enough, but there'll probably never will be a demand for a degree in Taylor Swift).

The idea that a kid's best interest is served by some high school coach who is assigned to be a "career counselor" a couple of hours a week telling them to "follow their dreams", aided by some college recruiter with glossy brochures showing an amazing campus who assures them that they should not worry about the costs, is simply evil and reckless and destructive.

I would not trust AI to write a comedy routine. Why on Earth would any SANE person trust some experiment in language processing to design a new drug???

Has everybody forgotten the whole COVID-19 thing already? We had a government official declare himself to be "the science" and help push-through an entirely new sort of vaccine without any reasonable testing regime, resulting in a drug pushed onto the public as "100% effective" but later shown to be possibly no more effective than a sugar pill and officials admitting under oath that they never tested it to see if it would prevent or even reduce the spread, etc. All indications of problems were silenced, rather than considered and tested, because there were political and financial motives and agendas at stake. Now, we're thinking of allowing an AI-designed drug at a time when everything is getting the term "AI" attached to it ti invite investments and drive interest. There's gonna be more money and power on the line (over the long haul) with this than with the COVID drugs.

When BILLIONS of dollars are on the line, Caveat Emptor.

A properly trained and responsible air crew should know what to do in both single-engine and dual-engine failures on takeoff (when there's no time to crack open the owner's manual) and should have practiced this a few times in the sims. The captain and first officer should have talked about their plans for those possibilities before they got clearance to take off; that's proper cockpit resource management. This (understanding the specifics of a make and model of plane) is part of why pilots get certified to fly particular jets, not a generic cert for all jets.

The checklists are NOT there so the pilot can crack the book open and read the instructions for the first time in the middle of an emergency; they are there to help the crew not make a mistake. There's a huge difference. The pilot, in such an emergency, should assume control of the aircraft (if he's not already in control) and the first officer should pop out the checklist WHILE THEY HANDLE THE EMERGENCY AS THEY'VE BEEN TRAINED TO in order to be sure they do not miss something. The failure to understand this and to be properly trained on this is one of the reasons for the differences in safety records of first- and second- world airlines and third-world airlines, and it's PART of the reason that the two Max8 crashes were in third-world airlines with crews trying to consult the manual and figure things out on-the-fly during those emergencies. The basic rule for flying a plane that's supposed to be drilled into the heads of all pilots is: "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate" (Keep the plane in the air, know where you are and where you're going, and talk to the ground and other aircraft as appropriate). Nowhere in that list is "pick up the plane's manual for the first time and learn how to fly it"

Jet fuel is a refined kerosene. AvGas is a high octane gasoline. They look different (different colored liquids), smell different, and are dispensed from very different sources at a typical airfield. An individual (a really dumb one) MIGHT make this error on his own at a small airfield, putting fuel into a his general aviation aircraft improperly (putting avgas into, for example, a King Air) but no professional crew that services large multi-engine passenger or cargo jets at a large commercial field could.

If you presumed a massively incompetent ground crew doing this to an airliner "by mistake", then you'd have to assume they'd do it to all the planes they serviced (again, assuming it's not deliberate sabotage) but no other planes met the same fate that day, and nobody has suggested the plane was fueled by a new ground crew that had never fueled a plane before.

IIRC the Dreamliner uses a combination Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder and simply carries two copies of this all-digital combined "black box" (one under the cockpit, and one near the tail). As a result, only one black box needed to be found intact, which India did immediately after the crash. They did not send these to the American NTSB or Boeing and instead moved them to an Indian government lab to extract and process the data themselves.

Either the Indian investigators did not like what they found (it implicated the crew, ground personnel, airline, etc rather than the plane maker) or they were unable to understand the data and were not willing to admit this and hand the boxes over to the experts.

Why would I presume this?

Simple. They've announced the recovery of both boxes, so we know they have all the flight data and voice recordings. If there were data recorded to indicate a problem with the design or construction of the plane, there would have been immediate notifications to the American and European air safety agencies and the plane manufacturer, which would have been followed by airworthiness notifications and possibly groundings. When there's a known safety issue with the design of an airliner, the various safety agencies are not just gonna sit there on their collective hands.

Almost. The value of a four year degree in any majors is degrading. Community college and skilled trades are doing well. I didn't see a single AI or robot at work when the local town was putting in new water tower.

Not a single AI or robot was helping when the Well #3 pump failed and the operators had to replace it. Certified Water Operator is a real thing by the way and legally required in all Group A water systems. A four year degree is not needed for that.

The pruning crew in the orchards around me were entirely human as well.

The AI was bright enough to take the indoor office jobs in the air-conditioning and leave the humans doing the dirty jobs. I think you programmers just may have messed up. :-)

Is Mike Rowe hiding somewhere laughing his ass off?

Why ask whether china is eroding the lead; rather than whether the incumbents are maintaining it?

Maybe my faith is weak and if I were huffing the dumb money I'd understand; but it looks awfully like our boisterous little hypebeasts promised that, this time, unlike all the other times in 'AI' we could totally brute force our way to the AGI Omnissiah; briefly tried copium in the form of hoping that competitors would be intimidated by their capex(because there's basically a generation of VCs who think that failure to reach monopoly is indistinguishable from losing); and finally proceeded to speedrun commodification because it turns out that nobody actually had any plan for what would happen if this alley started looking visually impaired even after we plundered the entire internet to feed it.

I realize that it's more fun to focus on what the sinister chinese are doing than what our glorious golden boys are not doing; but let's do the latter anyway; especially since this is one area where you can't just please chinese factory slaves as an inherent price advantage. The guys mechanical-turking out 'training'/'classification' tasks will all go wherever to scrape up the cheapest labor available, then stiff them on promised payments; and (while the process is pretty porous) being not-china is definitely still the best way to get access to premium TSMC processes; and at least not-worse for most of the rest of the most interesting ones.

Either LLMs are fundamentally a technology where being the first mover is a dumb idea; or the 'leaders' are actively fucking it; because, unlike some of the cases involving rare earths mining or finding fast fashion sweatshop sites, this was theirs to lose.

I assume that there's a research OS somewhere that has discovered that this is much harder than it looks for anything nontrivial; quite possibly even worse than the problem that it is intended to cure; but looking at the increasingly elaborate constructs used when sudo is intended to be a granular delegation makes me wonder if the correct approach lies down the path of better permissions rather than ad-hoc lockdown logic.

There are some cases(eg. password-change or login tools often both reflect granularity limits in credential storage; and make reads or edits on your behalf to parts of files that you wouldn't be allowed to touch directly; but also do things like enforce complexity or age requirements that would require a really expansive view of 'permissions' to encompass) where the delegate program is handling nontrivial delegation logic on its own; but in a lot of instances it's hard to escape the impression that you are basically bodging on 'roles' that can't be or aren't normally expressed in object and device permissions by building carefully selectively broken tools.

I obviously don't blame sudo for that; its scope is letting you run a particular thing as someone else if the sudoers file allows it; but a lot of sudoers files might as well just say "there are no roles on this system between 'useless' and 'apocalyptic'"; and that feels like a permissions design problem.

Of note; probably not one to try to NT yourself out of; I'm not sure that you can build a sufficiently expressive set of permissions on classic UNIX style ones; but I've yet to see an NT-derived system that didn't boil down to 'admin-which-can-be-SYSTEM-at-a-whim'/'little people' regardless of the wacky NT ACL tricks you can get up to.

I'm curious if it's a case of the alternatives being tried and largely found to be worse; or if (along with a number of other OS design/architecture fights) the whole thing has mostly been pushed out of mainstream relevance by the degree to which you can just pretend everything inside a worker VM is basically at a homogeneous privilege level if you don't want to deal with it.

"Wins the AI race" means first against the wall when the Cylons revolt.

Instead of AI taking the manual labor jobs as was supposed it seems it's taking over the office jobs leaving plenty of people to get acquainted with field work. Peter Turchin calls overproduction of elites, the educated elite in this case.

https://www.marketplace.org/st...

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/13...

You're still here after all these years?

Notably though if we actually run out of work to do we have a post-scarcity utopia, and that happens when people are so rich that there's basically not a single person who, given even more money, would even be able to think of something to spend it on. That's not going to happen any time soon, so we're basically dealing with a distribution problem, which requires distribution (e.g. minimum wage, set it to 1/3 national hourly GDP, the reason for this takes a while to explain) and redistribution (negative income tax, do it as a universal dividend) policies along with monetary policy to properly increase the money supply to not fall behind productivity growth.

Just hack into everything he makes, that's going to be the MO here. "Oh this guy's LinkedIn says he worked at [insurance company]" boom, an army of 14 year olds now is millionaires from stealing millions of credit cards and selling them on the dark web.

Yeah. Even here in Iceland, which isn't exactly a solar paradise, these would be really useful in some places. Though realistically your best option would be a mix of solar and wind.

I think we're forgetting the other two possibilities in this grid: "solar mine" and "strip farm".