"If you shrink from such a future, by which principle would you justify stifling it?"

(Addressing the author of the article here, not that I'm under any illusion that they're reading this.)

Kudos for the rhetorical trick of framing opposition to your plan as stubbornness or unreasonableness on the part of the questioner. It's clever, but it's kind of a shame that that's not how burden of proof works. It's not up to us to prove your way is wrong, it's up to you to prove that your way is better than what we already have.

You give us a full paragraph of rosy-sounding suppositions. Yeah, if they're all true this method sounds wonderful. IF. Are they? Suppose you give us some evidence to support them? Frankly, the whole thing sounds like a mash-up of The Diamond Age and 1984. I don't think either book describes a society I'd like to live in.

Finally, I know it's just the name of the magazine in which the article is published, but having just re-watched a certain 1970 movie I have a deep distrust of any AI project even tangentially associated with that name.

I knew it! This is why TV shows and movies are so dark you can't see what's happening, isn't it? Time to move production to the southern hemisphere, I guess.

AIs don't kill jobs. CEOs with AIs kill jobs!

We're missing the point, I think. It's not that the new model can recreate Slack in 11,000 lines and only 30 hours, it's that the new model can simply work on a single task for 30 hours without shitting itself. Whether or not it produced anything of value in the end is irrelevant.

Weird flex, man. The world of AI corporate one-upmanship is even stranger than the world of AI development, I guess.

The article is truncated by The Verge's "subscribe to see the rest" policy, but the Wayback Machine has it in full. Near the end is an odd quote:

âoeItâ(TM)s been actually really helpful to have a continuous running prompt that I use of, âDo a deep web search, come up with like these parameters for profiles to source for certain types of roles on my team,â(TM)â Penn said.

Did an AI write that, or is that just what happens to your brain after interacting with an AI for too long? Is it even English? I sure as hell can't parse it.

(No, I'm not going back to fix the Unicode. The 21st century is a quarter over already. It's high time Slashdot moved into it.)

Yeah, pretty much this. And in order to get halfway repeatable results we'll have to formalize the prompting language. It will just become the next rung on the high-level language ladder and will still require specialists (ie., programmers) to write it. Because English suuuuuuuuuuucks for any kind of formal description.

Not that I think it's really going to happen. I think coding via AI is going to be another fad that gets relegated to a niche position in the toolkit. Just like all the visual specification and programming languages that have been cropping up since before I started my career in the 1980s.

No offense, but if you even get to the summary and don't comment just based on the headline... You must be new here.

It's an impossible job from a technology perspective. It requires the bad guys to play nice. You can make a secure system that keeps your data out of the hands of everyone, that's not an issue. But you don't want to keep it out of the hands of everyone. You have it online so you can give it out selectively to people and companies. As soon as you let someone see any part of it, though, that part is no longer under your control. I don't care what fancy permissions and terms of use you have on it, you're just trusting that your wishes are respected. Let's face it, if we could trust companies to play nice we wouldn't be in this situation to start with.

Not possible, technically. It might be possible legally, if lawmakers create and enforce penalties for non-compliance. Europe might do it, but no way such anti-business legislation is going to pass in the USA. Not for another decade at least.

Nonsense. It should be plenty profitable to offer a subscription service that lets you disable the AI. Mostly. They'll still let a little in and ramp it up slowly, so they can offer a "plus" subscription add-on later that lets you disable the AI you thought you already paid to disable. Really, truly, no backsies this time.

As a maintenance programmer for most of my career, non-reproducible builds were the bane of my existence. Object files with embedded time stamps and source paths, changes in link order, which module got done compiling first when doing multiple modules in parallel... Hell, even uninitialized padding bytes to align to word boundaries could change from build to build. We were using C and gcc, so it might be fair to say that was our problem. I'm not even sure it's possible for that toolchain to produce identical binaries every time for any non-trivial project.

"Why don't the actual numbers match our hype? Something must be wrong with reality!"

The answer is in the summary: "Revenue at US companies providing AI infrastructure has risen by $400 billion [...]"

Yeah, it's going gangbusters at the places that provide the AI. They've managed to convince everyone that AI is a "must have" technology. But why would anyone expect that to translate into more productivity or revenue at the places that actually use the AI? They're paying the AI providers, but whatever productivity or revenue is seen is being eaten by that new cost. What this shows is that AI isn't as useful as it's hyped up to be, at least at its current price point.

Yeah, the entire NOVA scale is like that. It classifies pasta (made with only flour and water) as group 1, "Unprocessed and minimally processed foods". But "grinding or milling" (such as, say, turning wheat into flour...) is group 2, "Processed culinary ingredients". Homemade plain yogurt is group 1, but add fruit and it becomes group 4 "Ultra-processed foods". It's all very subjective and seems to be based on the premise that if an idealized old-country grandma made it, it's minimally processed.

NOVA says that one way to tell if a food is ultra-processed is "Sophisticated and attractive packaging is used, usually made of synthetic materials." Obviously the packaging has fuck-all to do with nutritional value. As it is, NOVA seems to be a prime example of the "appeal to nature" fallacy. Natural is good, and the farther away from nature you get the worse the food is for you.

I can't comment on whether or not there's validity in classifying food by its processing. But if it is valid, it seems to me that the type of processing, not just the amount of it, should have some bearing. So yeah, I agree that it's certainly time for an improved definition.

You can read the classification system for yourself, it's not very long. Ultra-processed foods, diet quality, and health using the NOVA classification system

Bingo. They welcome it. In 2016 we could believe that people were tricked into voting for Trump, that they didn't realize what a shitshow he really was. But 2024? After he'd screwed up for four years and had one trial after another for four more? No one can say they didn't see it coming. They wanted him to do exactly what he's doing. Anything that hurts "those horrible people" (immigrants, minorities, queers, liberals, whoever) gets a rousing cheer from the rank and file MAGAts. It doesn't matter if it hurts them, too. As long as it hurts their perceived enemies more. They see life as a zero sum game. Anyone else getting ahead in any way necessarily means you're losing. And if you can make them lose, that's the same as you winning.

Sure, go ahead and test effectiveness of improving health in humans. That's good to know. But, I don't think I've ever bought an air filter because I thought it would improve my health. I always had a more immediate goal: Remove an odor, make it easier to breath by removing smoke (blame Canada!), alleviate pollen allergies. These things are all primary effects that the user will be able to judge within hours or days of installing the filter.

Measuring health benefits is tricky. Studies take a long time, require a large sample population, and have many confounding factors. A general claim like "improves overall health" is nearly impossible to measure. More specific claims like, "reduces your chance of contracting XYZ virus" is easier, but are your test subjects trapped in a room 24 hours a day? If not, even with a filter that's 100% effective there are outside opportunities to contract the virus.

On the other hand, it's easy to test whether or not the filter removes particulates. Dirty air in, clean air out, measure the presence of the particles of interest in both samples. Done and done. Practically no confounding factors, doesn't need to compute statistics over a large sample population, doesn't take a long time to wait and see if there's a correlation between use of the device and lung cancer decades down the line.

I'm not saying that health studies shouldn't be done. They absolutely should be if the manufacturer is making any sort of health claims. But saying, "filters 99% of particles of this size" doesn't need human trials. Even saying "filters 99% of the virus which causes this disease" is objectively measurable in a controlled environment, without human trials.

And like I said at the start, that's really why I'm buying the air filter. To filter the air.

I always assumed that the "Must Have" designation was a paid promotional spot, just like recommendations are on every other storefront. So, maybe cough up the dough to claim it?

And Xitter is listed as a "news app"? If so it must be severely mis-categorized. No wonder it can't take the #1 spot.

So the journey is going to last 400 years. That's a minimum of 8 generations. If you were born in such a ship, and your parents were born in the ship, and your grandparents, and your great-grandparents, and your great-great-grandparents, and so on back to your (great*5)-grandparents were born on the ship... Why bother stopping at a planet at all? You're very well acclimated to ship-board life. You're used to all the things that it necessitates, like strict recycling, birthrate control, etc. Why doom yourselves and your children to life down at the bottom of a gravity that your descendants will some day just have to climb out of again? You might want to pause and restock on consumables, maybe even build another ship for expansion. But actually *live* on a planet? With uncontrolled weather!? And an unenclosed sky that you just *know* is going to leak out all your atmosphere into the vacuum of space? Eeeww!

For that matter, why bother with the "ship" part of "generation ship"? The design gets a lot easier if you don't have to deal with that whole propulsion component. Plus, if you hang out in the solar system you retain access to resources and sunlight. You might even choose to vacation down in that awkward gravity well, if Earth is still habitable.