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.

This is basically what I said, but there are nuances. If a net of 100 lives are saved but there are a net of 100 more people who are put in a lifelong coma and have to be cared for round-the-clock in intensive care until they die of old age, and everything else is equal, I wouldn't count that as a clear-cut "win" or even a "win" at all. Depending on the net value you put on a life of someone living in a decades-long coma, you might count it as a win and that's fair. But I wouldn't.

That's why you run pre-production-quality hardware/software in test environments, and you plan for failure even in production environments.

Who cares if it can be used to build bombs, nuclear and thermonuclear power are and natural so they must be good for you.

Take AI-assisted self-driving cars. SUPPOSE for the sake of argument that self-driving cars CAUSE fewer accidents than they prevent, CAUSE fewer deaths than they prevent, CAUSE fewer serious injuries than they prevent, and the medical and other dollar costs of the accidents they CAUSE are less than the money saved by the accidents they prevent, it would be an overall win, EVEN IF some people die who would otherwise not die.

We don't have enough data to say if this supposition is actually true, but suppose it is.

The same is true for the "seatbelts save lives" argument: It's a net win, even if there are some edge cases where the use of a seatbelt may kill someone who might have otherwise survived.

Ditto medicines. Even for some common medicines that have been around for decades like penicillin, we know that overall they save lives but every now and then someone has a fatal reaction, killing a patient who was not at risk of dying.

IMHO, there are still too many unknowns with AI to let the industry go "full steam ahead" without putting in automated and human guardrails.

It probably was radioactive, just not harmfully so.

Speaking of radioactive things, I have this shipment of bananas....

it also presumes YOUR device is the most important device around, as opposed to, say, air traffic and flight scheduling systems, train systems, electricity control systems, stoplight control systems (they adjust their 'rush hour' times each switch), cruise and shipping departure and arrival times.

All of those systems need independent testing time to confirm that they have the switch, they can exchange information with other computers and be accurate about the switch, and all handle the fact that there would be no 'extra hour' on Nov 1st that would have already been accounted for in their schedules for that day...and note they'd be dealing with computers in other countries that would likely be even slower in getting the upgrades needed to test on their end.

But that's not what Trump is asking for. He is asking for "effective immediately", just like the British Columbia bill was.

Yeah, you're suggesting Congress could set it for next year (giving next year's Congress a chance to revoke it), but that's not what is being proposed by the Administration nor the bill that already passed the House but the Senate seems to be never picking up.

that is a very naive way of looking at how computers work, especially computers that have to share future scheduling information with other computers. NO computer has what you are talking about that would just magically solve everything - especially in THIS case where the DST would be 365. Yeah, you could tell your computer to 'lie' about its location and say it was in, say, Brazil rather than Chicago in order to stick to whatever TZ you want your device to think it is in...but that is not something that scales up to all of the hundreds of data centers on the east coast with the millions of computers involved. They need to be absolutely and automatically accurate to where they are and 'when' they are, and no 'flip of a switch' will be adequate for that purpose.

Hell, about half the computers and software systems (like databases) in the public right now still aren't ready to hold Americas/Vancouver time on DST-365 (my own macbook didn't get the upgrade until about a month ago) when the flip happens. Not all the upgrades have rolled out or people are still intentionally using older systems because they "just work" (e.g., sticking with Java 8 and not having any time or inclination to try to get to Java 25 which changes so many network related libraries one might as well just rebuild the enter system from scratch).

A calendar-clock change like this needs at least a year of time to prepare it and get all the software systems tested and ready for the change when it happens. Yeah, it is easier to actually code the changes now for some systems than it was when we had the big change in 2005-2006 (in fact, because of dealing with that change), but that doesn't simplify the testing required for something on this scale.

no, there is no tip, and there is no mention of the price increase either. i emailed them about it, and they requested me to call and wouldn't reply in writing with their reason

Unless you are playing exclusively MMOs, this is just misinformed. I moved my desktop to Linux over a year ago, and literally everything I've tried on Steam just works. None of it is native Linux, but it all runs perfectly fine.

A few examples: MW5:Mercenaries, MW5:Clans, Empyrion, Starfield, X4, Just Cause 3, Control, Battletech, etc. I've played local, streamed remote, put things in a window side-by-side with videos running, run games concurrently with background VMs. No audio problems, no video problems. I've put a running game on top of a VM window using Looking Glass, with the VM running Win11.

The only games that have actual problems are ones that need kernel based DRM - to keep the multiplayer cheaters out. But I don't do MMOs, so I don't particularly care.

Ever since deep-fakes became practical, artists and others should know they may be asked to show their work.

These days that means keeping all intermediate materials and revisions. If possible, time-stamp them in a way that is very resistant to being accused as being faked. There's 20th century precedent for creating immutable, time-stamped records.

Should artists have to prove a negative - prove they didn't use AI? Whether they should or not, the reality is these days they do, and any artist paying attention to the world should know this by now.