Believing in one person, one vote and the concept of individual liberty is playing right into their hands.

You don't have to engage if you really don't believe it is plausible that something catastrophic could happen by hooking all of our infrastructure, law enforcement, surveillance, and military into statistically-driven software stuck in a feedback loop.

If your code doesn't compile in Rust just wrap it with unsafe { }
Hacking around and doing it the wrong way is much easier than figuring out how to get a complicated data structure through the borrow checker and value** lifetimes.

** I think of Rust values as objects in the general sense.

"review the recent changes, looking for: gaps, flaws, inconsistency, or overtuning."

"oh shit! update the tests and docs too."

The very rich intend on owning serfs. People keep telling me how California is full of far left liberalism, but that is not what I've seen living in Silicon Valley for almost 30 years.

You can use non-standard extensions with C++ today to cover some of what Rust does, like -Wlifetime in C++ for something roughly equivalent to Rust's compile-time borrow checker. UBSan/ASan lets you enforce address and undefined behavior with runtime checks, it's useful and easy to use, but it has a big performance impact so you normally turn it off in production code.

Google Carbon seems promising, but it deviates enough from C++ that it feels like yet another language. But theoretically you will be able to have a project that has a mix of C++ and Carbon and it should Just Work(tm).

Ada / SPARK is an alternative to must of what Rust offers, it's a wildly different approach and not a 1:1 equivalent. But you can make reliable software and even do some formal verification and static analysis on it. It's easier to deal with violation messages from the Ada compiler than with Rust. But it's also a lot more work to put all the contracts and declarations in place (you need multiple files just to make a module, so it's a very different workflow compared to C/C++/Rust).

Coming from Pascal where write/writeln is a special language construct that doesn't work like any other function/procedure, it's refreshing to see that Rust made printing a macro, and that you can roll your own easily. That every macro ends in ! makes a lot of sense in terms of transparency, but it was a confusing little doodad in the syntax to see on my first day.

And I prefer C to C++ or Rust. And I prefer shell script, awk, or Lua to Python. So I'm a bit of an odd duck.

But Rust is pretty good. It's tedious at hell to write anything safely, but you can do it and you can have high confidence in the results. (obviously you still need a full test suite)

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

Either you get fucked by AI when you lose your job because a CEO that destroys a business by adopting it in a moronic fashion.

Or your fucked by AI because you buy an Elon Musk robot that has that feature that you can unlock from the app store.

I pretty sure everyone hates my old fashioned classical liberalism with a touch of center left view on social democracy, welfare capitalism, mixed economy under a transparent and democratic governance. I'm usually the bad guy for saying that we should embrace and accept people who come from other cultures, but that also there is a dominate culture in this country so raising your children to speak English fluently is vital for their financial success.

My wishy-washy middle of the road politics upsets everyone. But most of those people deserve to be upset all the time.

That's why I don't advertise my politics on my truck. If the wrong people in government found out that I am for a constitutional republic with elected representation and a system of checks and balances with three coequal branches of government, I would surely be labeled as an agitator, a far left radical, and perhaps even a terrorist.

Add the waste to the existing pile off the Farallon Islands.

Excellent fishing there, you can catch rockfish and lingcod most of the season almost as fast as you can take them off the hook. I'm hardly radioactive at all, although I got terribly seasick because the water is usually really rough from the Golden Gate out to the Farallons.

A bonfire can't write Shakespeare, but it can still burn you. A car can't cook you breakfast, but if the brakes fail it can still cracks a few eggs (heads)

AI agents have no agency. They are not alive. And their capabilities are inconsistent and it struggles to translate competency in one area to another.