gustavus

Or the one that spent $24 billion dollars fighting homelessness only to have overall homelessness numbers increase? My point being California could do a lot more to fix their financial situation but cutting their expenses than trying to claw more money from people.

There's a discussion to be had about taxation in this country but I predict no matter how much revenue they make from this "one time 5% tax", they'll blow the whole thing within 3 years for no gain and then start proposing another "1 time tax" again to try and fix their coffers.

After all it doesn't matter how much money you make if you're spending more than you earn, and nothings more permanent than a temporary fix.

The only substantiative comment to address the claim in the title, and it is from a nebulous "Tech industry insider". The other comments are by guys that run various "AI" Startups.

I don't buy a lot of the hype either but trying to present their claim as some revelation or news should have something to add.

The entire article is "Some tech people say the agents just had a bad sandbox and proper controls would've prevented this. Politicians are introducing bills to 'ban AI research '."

There saved you a click or a commanding your AI agent summarizing it.

In fact the biggest issue with safety he has seems to be the use of tech in military drones, which 1) wouldn't really be prevented by a "code" and 2) isn't an issue of engineering, it's a whole separate philosophical debate and question of values. I mean remember the guy who invited the process for mass producing nitrogen which led to fertilizer production vastly increasing and is largely responsible for ending world starvation, for which he won the novel prize, was only doing it because he wanted to figure out how to speed the production of TNT for wartime uses, he also later went on to become the father of chemical weapons in WW1.

So if your hope is "if we give every software engineer an ethics 101 course then everyone will hold hands and sing cumbaya" is hopelessly naive. In the meantime for a lot of the industries where your software can kill people there is already heavy rules around it.

But you're right I'm sure that if there hadn't been the GCC there wouldn've been a ton of competing compilers. I'm sure that it was the existence of Apache that ruined computing and brought about the enshittification of the web not MS trying to force everyone to cater to IE and then Google doing the same with Chrome, it's all just because of that evil Open Source.

Or a bunch of dudes in the deserts of yemen couldn't defend against a modern military with aircraft carriers, realtime control of almost all communications, autonomous drones and missiles and 5th gen fighters

History and current events seem to be disagreeing with you.

So if I have to choose between the slim possibility that a crazy person might develop a bio-weapon and the possibility that Anthropic, et. Al convince the government to regulate and control open source models (because I'm sure the government will only do that for good reasons and never things like covering up scandals, squashing dissent or enhancing their own power) and any competitors. I'm probably going to put my chips on a nutcase in a trailer park developing super sars over regulator capture by the government.

Stay strong big brother is watching!

I don't care if the guy who made my hammer is a Pastifarian I care how well the hammer hammers, I don't care if my accountant likes to dress up as a skunk and go to conventions demanding people address him by Sir Reginald Stinkington as long as he does a good job at my taxes.

In this case it seems the concern is that the company donated to an OS project that is headed by a guy whom you don't like.... That just seems like there are plenty of other problems to address in the world.

I'm not saying for or against, I'm just curious why they are choosing Texas?

Then you just can't. I'm sure the utility companies are heart broken they have to not spend on maintenance and can instead pocket the extra cash but it doesn't change the levithianian regulatory mess California has erected around doing anything in the name of protecting the environment, compromise and competing concern be darned.

In short it won't be. Less than $100 in a century during the highest recorded rainfall in the US.

In contrast since then we've had almost not noteable physicists or Computer Scientists that I'm aware, we've got a couple, Hawking and Knuth. But apart from that I don't know if there is a single scientist I could point out today that has revolutionized our understanding or even done any real breakthrough work in the field of Physics since Einsteins era.

Secondly the confusion is designed to benefit the bull** by using ambiguous language they can do as humpty dumpty did in Alice in Wonderland and say "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less" Which benefits whatever they are pushing.

Beware those that attempt to muddle language and avoid precision in speaking.

Visual Basic

Low-Code

Power Platform

Although AI substantially changes the situation the hard part of being an engineer was never the code.

A technician is defined by the tools they work with, an engineer is defined by the problems they can solve. Taking a dozen different business processes and stakeholders and figuring out how to actually solve the problems they have is engineering.

This actually very much understates the problems. HOAs are no longer small organizations where the local biddies gather to feel like they are back in high school because they have nothing better to do with their time. They've become defacto governments.

True story I at one point bought in a development that had an HOA the rules of the development were that for the first 5 years or until have the development was done then developer would be in charge of the HOA and then it would revert to the homeowners at 4 years 6 months the HOA board (who was the developers) voted to merge with another HOA to a that ran a dozen other developments and complexes throughout the state.

HOAs are now massive multi-million dollar corporations that controls vast swathes of land, and rule over their tenants without any of the checks or balances or recourse one has available against the government.

For those who say "just buy in a non-HOA area" the problem is that almost all new builds have HOAs built in from the start as part of the developers plan and so the options for those not wanting to deal with an HOA are increasingly limited.

In short abolish HOAs. If people want to get together to form groups of homeowners that's fine but there is no world in which someone should be able to take your house because your grass is too long.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a7750bd-1538-83ea-840c-57266e366f...

If you don't think the NHS has any problems then I don't know what to tell you on that you either don't follow any information about it or don't interact with it.

And let's not start with a blog post or website comment. Those aren't speech because they aren't even written by human hands they are instead just using a very fancy elctro-mechanical mechanism for transferring a series of electric waves from one individual to another across the palent.

Which is just the saying as "I'm right you're wrong" without adding any value. Most politically contentious issues have at their root a difference of value or tradeoffs, and it is only by understanding that we can really have civil discourse and reduce the polarization. And to be clear if you believe that the difference in value is simply between evil and good, e.g. everyone who belongs to Party A loves puppies and wants to bring happiness and love where anyone who votes for candidate B wants to revive Rasputin and unleash the legions of hell. You are part of the problem. (And if you're immediate response to this is to point out how Bernie/Trunp/Tredau/Harambee actually does want to feed puppies to Morgoth you're part of the problem)

This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves.

The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict.

The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link.

The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.

And updoots might not but plenty of people now are protesting and pushing against allowing data centers to be built near them so it is working.

Sounds great, at this point doesn't really seem to be anything I can do as an individual except enjoy the ride, because it's now a race to see whether swarms of killer AI robots do us in, the global economy collapses, the ocean currents fail, and if none of those happen the air will end up killing us all anyway.

Sounds like I might as well try and enjoy it while it lasts. Cheers!