I have not seen AI code that is *more* efficient than human code, yet. I have seen AI write efficient, compact code when pressed, very, very hard to do so, but only then. Otherwise, in my hands, and those of my developer colleagues, AI produces mostly correct, but inefficient, verbose code.

Could that change? Sure, I suppose. But right now it is not the case, and the value system that is driving auto-generated code (i.e., the training set of extant code), does not put a premium on efficiency.

Web browsers are absolute hogs, and, in part, that's because web sites are absolute hogs. Web sites are now full-blown applications that were written without regard to memory footprint or efficiency. I blame the developers who write their code on lovely, large, powerful machines (because devs should get good tools, I get that), but then don't suffer the pain of running them on perfectly good 8 GB laptops that *were* top-of-the line 10 years ago, but are now on eBay for $100. MS Teams is a perfect example of this. What a steaming pile of crap. My favored laptop is said machine, favored because of the combination of ultra-light weight and eminently portable size, and zoom works just fine on it, but teams is unusable. Slack is OK, if that's nearly the only web site you're visiting. Eight frelling GB to run a glorified chat room.

The thing that gets my goat, however, is that the laptop I used in the late 1990s was about the same form factor as this one, had 64 MB (yes, MB) of main memory, and booted up Linux back then just about as fast. If memory serves, the system took about 2 MB, once up. The CPU clock on that machine was in the 100 MHz range. Even not counting for the massive architectural improvements, my 2010s-era laptop should boot an order of magnitude faster. It does not.

Why? Because a long time ago, it became OK to include vast numbers of libraries because programmers were too lazy to implement something on their own, so you got 4, 5, 6 or more layers of abstraction, as each library recursively calls packages only slightly lower-level to achieve its goals. I fear that with AI coding, it will only get worse.

And don't get me started on the massive performance regression that so-called modern languages represent, even when compiled. Hell in a handbasket? Yes. Because CPU cycles are stupidly cheap now, and we don't have to work hard to eke out every bit of performance, so we don't bother.

Isolate should be capitalized as Cloudflareâ Isolate©. They're probably running out of synonyms for Sandbox, Container, Jail, Cage, Cell, Vault, Pod, etc... And has the side effect of also being an homage to oldschool Science Fiction (Isaac Asimov The Foundation which probably has the word "Isolate" as a noun used more per page than any non-scientific book in history).

Remember kids, spaceflight is hard. Nature does not like us being in space, at all. She puts up serious, difficult barriers that we need to overcome. Just look how hard it was for a new program like Space X to start from scratch even with all of the existing knowledge developed by NASA, ESA, etc.. How many rapid unscheduled disassembly events did they suffer? I lost count. Even the Russians, who arguably have as much or more LEO experience than the US, continue to face challenges. Heck, so do we, as the current generation of engineers no longer has the direct experience from Gemini and Apollo to guide them. Space is deeply unforgiving of mistakes.

To the GP, if you think that your 5-second considered opinion is better than a fleet of talented folks, I'll wager that if you more time, did some research, you'd change your opinion. I hope you do.

I have no idea why you've been modded down - your comment on this story is one of the most insightful ones I've read. Sadly, I commented just before I got to yours - otherwise I'd have modded you up.

Even though I use a keyboard almost exclusively these days, I'm going to play Devil's advocate here. I would at least want to see the time split between screens and paper. Taking notes on paper is - brain-wise - a qualitatively different thing than typing. Also, the ability to draw pictures, or even to just doodle, can be a valuable thought and memory aid.

Additionally, when you've written something in pen and then change your mind, you have to cross it out; whereas on a device you simply make it disappear as though it never existed. Having a record of a mistake or a discarded idea can be very valuable, both for learning and for creativity.

Then there's the ability to communicate in writing and drawing even when you only have pen-and-paper, stick-and-sand, or whatever...

I don't use technical references much these days, but when I do I like to have both digital and paper, especially for data books and app notes. The digital version is easier to search, but the paper version allows for using my fingers to hold two or three sections open simultaneously. Paper is the best for random access.

And that's why when I'm reading fiction or scholarly / scientific stuff, I only use the electronic version if have no other choice. For those kinds of reading, I will frequently flip back and forth by dozens or hundreds of pages to confirm my memory, or to find what a character said. In my experience, trying to do that on a device utterly sucks.

Reading a book and reading a screen are, for me, very different experiences. If I had to choose, I'd drop e-books in favour of paper and never look back. Except in the pages of my dead-tree books, of course...

I've been expecting that eventual outcome since the early 2000s when we (as in someone in an academic lab) grew a 3rd kidney in a mouse by grafting stem cells from a donor.

Is there any other kind? Every photo of him I've seen looks like the result of a poorly formed query processed by a janky LLM.

Maybe it's the ghost of Windows 3.1 haunting Microsoft for giving it such a shitty legacy.

Then again, perhaps it's the essence of MacOS, taunting Windows users.

It could be done in a way that Apple does not know the key and is technologically unable to comply. But for such a low stakes system they would obviously never go through the trouble as it would cause more user friction than it's worth.

(You could have a privacy email be created as a totally unique auth key that's just stored offline on a User's apple computers and synced via an encrypted storage system).

Of course Apple could still associate source IPs for logins between multiple accounts.

You really said a mouthful there. From my Canadian perspective, it's utterly shocking to watch American news and to see even the supposedly liberal media soft-peddling current events. And when I hear average American citizens being interviewed, and see the fathomless ignorance many of them have regarding what's going on even in their own country - never mind in the rest of the world - I feel as though I'm watching a parody.

I think America's approach to education has a lot to answer for. Sadly, even my own province's education system seems to be drifting that way. Gee - I wonder if it's just a coincidence that our Premier is a knuckle-dragging nepo-baby whose allegiance is to property developers and (allegedly) to organized crime.

Brilliant! Thanks for the laugh - wish I still had mod points.

Too late - they already handed the keys and the contents to Palantir a long time ago.

It would appear that LLMs aren't content to be merely replacements for low-level and mid-level workers. This latest behaviour qualifies them for the upper echelons of HR, the consolation-prize positions in the C-suite, and even - or perhaps especially - the CEO slot.

I'm pretty sure investors could get behind letting chatbots run a company, given that they're more than sufficiently psychopathic and cost said investors a lot less money.