nfh

The field of artificial intelligence has also made incredible strides in the last decade, and the decade before that. The field of artificial general intelligence has been around for something like 70 years, and has made a really modest amount of progress in that time, on the scale of what they’re trying to do.

Critically, the people who build these machines don’t typically update drivers to port them to a new OS. You buy a piece of heavy equipment, investing tens, or maybe even a hundred thousand dollars, and there’s an OS it works on, maybe two if you’re lucky. The equipment hopefully works for at least 20 years, and basically no OS is going to maintain that kind of compatibility for that long. Linux might get the closest, but I’ll bet you’re compiling/patching your own kernels before 20 years is up.

This kind of dynamic is unavoidable when equipment vendors sell equipment which has a long usable life (which is good), and don’t invest in software support (which is them being cheap, to an extent), and OSes change enough that these time horizons likely involve compatibility-breaking releases.

It’s a structural challenge more than a fallacy, but I don’t entirely disagree. This sort of thing works best when one of two things is true, there’s some way for people to organize, or it’s relatively small and there are real options.

The former clearly isn’t true here, but I think the latter is. There’s a lot of companies trying things with AI, and some are working better or worse. This particular use is relatively small, and I think the downside of doing it is also small in the short term. (This is a giant red flag, avoiding a red flag isn’t a large cost)

In a very real sense, applicants are first and foremost deciding if it works. If they can do something resembling standing together, and refuse at any reasonable scale to take part in AI making hiring decisions, it will fail.

A job at a company that won’t respect your basic humanity isn’t worth having. If you’d rather willingly step into that trap than proceed with whatever you’re doing, or go with other options, are you okay? Like if this sounds like an opportunity and not a giant red flag, I wish there was something I could offer to help you.

Honestly? Especially if it was only for cops

You don’t get to be a billionaire without some malfeasance.

And even if you don’t assume actively malicious intent like you should with Musk, there’s a lot of potential danger with technology like this, and if you don’t stand a lot to gain, and have reasonable controls against things going wrong, it’s probably not a good idea to be an early adopter. It’s just like a pacemaker, there are a narrow segment of people who should want to test a new model/concept for them.

Speed cameras are a privacy issue that doesn’t solve the problem of speeding. People are most comfortable driving the speed the road is designed for, and if that speed is too high, the solution is to modify the road for a safer speed. The speeders in your example are right here, for the wrong reason; speed cameras should be rare if they’re allowed to exist at all. They have, at most, a short term benefit, and broad public surveillance is a very serious issue they contribute to.

I was one of the people who went to college to learn things, but the more I learn, the more I’m saddened by all the people I went to school with who studied things they didn’t enjoy, didn’t particularly care to get better at, all because they saw it as a way to make money. In optimizing for money, they miss out on learning and fulfillment.

This wasn’t that long ago, but I can only imagine how much heavy GenAI use could intensify that effect

Imagine borrowing $200k for an education, and then doing as little work as you can to actually learn the things you’re paying to know

If a problem exists, and you try to fix it without AI, do you even stand a chance at getting promoted?

The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.

Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they’re running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.

I’ve been using Cinnamon for most of the last decade, but switched to Gnome3 recently, heavily customized to work like Cinnamon. Basically because Wayland is finally stable enough to use.

If Cinnamon gets Wayland support working well, that’s my choice. Otherwise I’ve got some Gnome3 configs that make it work pretty well, and I’d happily run it into the ground too.

There’s an important distinction here: “is a good idea” is not “is the right way to do it”. You can also keep kids off of dating apps by banning dating apps, banning children from the Internet, or even just banning children. All of those are horrible solutions, but they achieve the goal.

The goal should be to balance protecting kids with minimizing collateral damage. Forcing adults to hand over significant amounts of private data to prove their identity has the same basic fault as the hyperbolic examples, that it disregards the collateral damage side of the equation.

It’s all about the implementation. The Washington bill is treating diet products as similar to alcohol (check ID in-store and on delivery), which seems fine to me.

The NY law seems to be suggesting that dating app services need to collect (and possibly retain) sensitive information on people, like identification, location data. That’s troubling to me.

I think I basically agree with you and the author here. People applying technology have a responsibility to apply it in ways that are constructive, not harmful. Technology is a force multiplier, in that it makes it easy to achieve goals, in a value neutral sense.

But way too many people are applying technology in evil ways, extracting value instead of creating it, making things worse rather than better. It’s an epidemic. Tech can make things better, and theoretically it should, but lately, it’s hard to say it has, on the net.

But how many of them do you think put it away within a week of using it to make content? I would bet the ratio of people who possess one to people who will be disappointed is huge, assuming there are in fact disappointed users.

It’s just like TikTok, but if you don’t drink milk in your tea, you will be exposed to corrective content as needed

I think you and the person you’re responding to both have a point. They’re totally passing the buck to their users, but their users will probably be better at putting accurate information than they are. It’s a different set of problems to be sure, but I think it’s a preferable one

I’ve long had a mix of Windows and Linux machines, and currently have a gaming desktop with Win10, my old gaming desktop/media center PC on Win10, and my laptop/homelab machines all running Proxmox or Debian. At first I hadn’t migrated to Win11 because Microsoft hadn’t convinced me it’s an upgrade, but Copilot has now convinced me it won’t be an upgrade.

I haven’t decided exactly when, but the Windows 10 EOL is going to drive me to remove Windows from my remaining computers, and just use Linux.