If I were, perhaps it's because I'm not seeing any of the real stuff here.

As Eric Raymond (ESR) says, AI is a force multiplier. My elaboration: If you are good at what you do, it will let you do accomplish more good stuff faster. If you are not very bright, AI will let you be not bright more efficiently, but it won't make you bright. It's just a tool. It needs to be utilized correctly. There is no shortage of things in this world that can do tremendous damage if not used properly. AI is nothing new in that regard.

"AI slop" is so 2024. That argument isn't valid any more.

I'm surprised you didn't use the word "slop". Spewing a bunch of slogans that would have to be more clever to make it on to bumper stickers makes you look like the people you are complaining about. There are legitimate criticisms to make about AI, and ways to support and defend those arguments. You are not doing that.

Sounds like you're not defending Access so much as ODBC.

It's mighty convenient for you that your claim makes it impossible for you to provide evidence of this outrageous claim.

... is not let AI get into the hands of people like Bill Gates. That, however, is impossible.

I agree that for those of us who come into the field before Java, C is about as simple as it gets; there's literally not much to know about the language. However, the majority of post-Java programmers have no idea what a pointer is or the first thing about manual memory management. I actually prefer to work in C over Swift, and luckily Swift bridges to C quite nicely. I use C and Zig for much of my server work, and for smartphone and desktop apps under the UI. Why? Because I get fine-grained control over memory and threading, so my apps are smaller, faster, and more memory-efficient than comparable apps, and by a wide margin. That said, I do think that those who know how to program in C WELL are shrinking. It's not that it's hard, it's that newer entrants haven't used it and it does let you blow your leg off if you aren't careful.

I would imagine they decay into something else in like 10e-15 seconds.

They're destined for West Texas, where gas companies will pay you to take the natural gas they have to burn off otherwise. They are installing private natural gas turbines to power these things. Amazon is building a huge one as we speak. What's halted is connections to the grid, the off-grid ones are marching along unabated, and there are a lot of them.

Can we finally know whether or not there is beer on the sun?!

I have such fond memories of EA from the '80s, but as far as I'm concerned, that's a completely different and unrelated entity.

That mentality never left Microsoft. They just to have work harder to maintain plausible deniability. Plausible, that is, to the anti-trust courts and politicians, none of whom know anything about technology.

I don't think that's likely. GOG has been around for almost 20 years. If they were to renege on providing offline installers, what could that possibly gain them? That only makes sense if they are planning to reimplement DRM, and that would immediately kill the company.

Did it grow legs, plug in an Ethernet cable, proceed to leave the building and push the nearest senior citizen in front of a bus? These things don't do things on their own. It's just a bunch of static floating-point numbers memory-mapped into VRAM. What they do is take an input (ver much NOT on their own) and derive instruction context from that input. That input may say to "keep trying" until "something" happens. If no ground rules are provided, the calling harness will loop-and-loop-and-loop looking for a way to make that "something" happen. So to be clear, nothing happened on its own and it certainly didn't set its own goal. Someone prompted it to do “something," and the path it derived to achieve that "something" happened to go through a combination of known exploit vectors that targeted HF. So much nonsense and fearmongering. Know what the ultimate defenses against a harness and model are? Unplug the machine and yank out the network cable. The level of ignorance on the news about how these things are pure black magic is just off the charts.