"they have been more then forward with their intent to replace us all with AI and robots"

Citations needed. Focus on the word 'all'.

I get the anger towards technology displacing human workers with no apparent plan to re-employ them elsewhere. But this is just the latest in a series of such revolutions. AI isn't replacing plumbers any time soon. Unless the AI can direct robots to manufacture housing with preassembling utilities, but that's a fantasy away from happening.

I was repairing desktop calculators for a while until they became too cheap to bother. I repaired typewriters and older, more proprietary word processing systems, until PCs took over. Then I went into the PC service and support business. And the PC networking business, because networking was a thing. Then an ISP, because the Internet was seriously sucking the air out of the world. Then I migrated into support and customer service, which after 17 years became much less demanding of head count, and now I've retired, 50 years after those nixie tube calculators sat before me and my soldering iron. There is more after this particular bubble. Watch. The real threats are philosophical, disguising as politics and religion, of which they are neither. Ideas spur more killing, because it is in the end all ideas.

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

Watching chip fabs, housing, and so.much.retail being built around here, I think you got to get out more. Data centers are experiencing another in a line of booms, as new tech spawns new needs. Most of the complaining about data centers seems to be more hate the rich, with AI the current boogeyman for that. And many construction trades are shorthanded.

Besides, Microsoft is probably admitting they are going to do fine with 3/4 of the head count they had yesterday, and that's rarely a bad business decision, unless you subscribe to the theory that they never really knew what they were doing, which explains the billions. Not.

SO narrowminded I'm genuinely surprised you can use words with more than 2 syllables.

(Disclaimer: Written with an AI collaborator, because human editors were apparently too busy copy-pasting to proofread.)

Speaking of slop, notice how the summary ends by repeating the exact same sentence twice:

"It's hard to compete against things like the DALL-E image generator."
"Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 quips that maybe 'It's hard to compete against things like the DALL-E image generator...'"

When humans publish duplicate-riddled writeups without reading them, it really raises the question of whether "human slop" is even setting a higher bar than "AI slop."

I was going to complain about the exact same repetition that they did in the summary.

A couple of weeks ago, I submitted an article about Canadian researchers recommended that if/when daylight savings time is abolished, we should go back on standard time, and not permanent summer time. That is because politicians almost everywhere are hell bent on switching to year round summer time.

The editors massacred my submission, removing the information above.

And the ensuing discussion was totally derailed, missing the main point.

Now that anyone can produce an AI slop project in an afternoon, I think it's reasonable to set some kind of quality standard. I think this is just ensuring that the project authors and maintainers are really committed to the project instead of just aura farming. As a developer it really sucks when a project you depend on is abandoned after an initial big splash. I've used AI to create around 25 personal projects, all which are fairly unique and useful to me, but I won't publish them because I have zero intention to maintain them. Inexperienced "coders" won't understand what they're getting into when publishing an AI generated project. So, this just ensures that the projects promoted in the subreddit have some level of proven track record.

And, the moderators are correct, AI is bad for open source software. AI copies their homework and doesn't attribute or carry the licensing forward from the projects they copy. This isn't simply about Open Source projects using AI, but about AI being used as a loophole to separate Open Source software from its license.

A lot of the complaining is likely AI company marketing bots.

But again that's backwards. I let my AI coding assistant write tests exactly so that I have a reproducible, deterministic ground truth that I can inspect for logic errors. If you let the AI do the testing directly, it's a toss-up if today it feels like it or it decides that your desired result is "everything green" so it'll just give you that answer without actually testing anything.

LLMs obviously aren't human. But that's not the point. The point is that you don't need to know a programming language to program a computer.

For example: Especially in the early days of smartphones, there were mountains of small tools that did something that's essentially a simple script. Egg timers, remind-me-tomorrow apps, tons of stuff that's basically a wrapper around a web search, and so on. Almost all of those are today something ChatGPT can do, and are easy enough to describe.

2.59 SQUARE kilometers. Or about 259 Hectares (which is a more customary unit in SI-speaking countries).

Quite a decent farm, where I'm from.

But: 640 acres should be enough for anyone!

You all know that even if you are an adult, it would still require you to prove your age. I'd say it is technically pretty hard to prove JUST your age - your age is inextricably linked to your identity, else it would be just a number on your say-so. Some sites now require a copy of government ID, some record your face, etc.

So most governments (as it seems this one) offer to put in place infrastructure for age verification. Great, the socnet will only get your age out of this system in exchange for your login. BUT the government will know WHO is linked to each login.

It may not be "the death of the Internet" as some others hope, but it will certainly be

The Death of the ANONYMOUS Internet.

Post something the government doesn't like? Maybe show support for a completely legal political party whose only sin is that it has less support than the ruling party? Well, bank account goes brrrr (frozen) and now you can't pay rent or transport. Now you loose your job, and soon your house, your car, your kids, your spouse. And now you will say and do EXACTLY as the government tells you.

You can't even claim "That Will Never Happen!" Because it did and it does. See China, Canada and Britain for examples. This will just make it so much easier.

You can maybe claim that it won't happen to YOU because YOU support the majority party like most other sane, intelligent, and benevolent people, and your views are all politically correct and morally without blemish, and those deplorables who disagree DESERVE to be punished. Well, I don't think I have the ability to convince you otherwise, but I can implore you to read more history. And hopefully you'll learn from that that it's ultimately not about good vs. evil but about who can gain the most power by whatever means.

I didn't mean to imply that it is a single monolithic application, it does consist of several, but the relations must be pretty tight for there to be an article not even about language-independence; but about support for a single additional language, one often targeted by "C but cleaned up" efforts,

I was honestly surprised to see this myself. Regardless of its reputation for being more monolithic than classic init systems it still is, and has to be, capable of interacting with basically any flavor of service you'd want a service manager to manage; and I would assume that it doesn't include a d-bus implementation in order to not be capable of abstracted inter-process communication.

No doubt there are considerations at work here that I'm not smart enough to grasp; if you aren't having a bad time handling x.509 certificates you probably aren't doing it carefully enough; but I would not have expected it to be remarkable at all for a certificate-wrangling component to be implemented in a different language than some of the other components.

I assume that this is more pragmatic than just waiting for Sam to finish lying about transcendent AGI; but it feels a little dissonant to have the botmongers going back and forth between praising the glorious natural-language suitability of their progeny and putting together an entire platform, with more apparent effort than they have dedicated to human UI/UX considerations since sometime in win7(excluding dark pattern R&D) to aid you in discovering your sins against bot comprehensibility and fixing them.

One of my gripes in life is that if something "needs a generic image", it does NOT "need" it (it's generic, so it does not add any information), it "wants" it (for eye candy purposes and because of prior convention, presumably). This is of course not an AI issue, since "image for illustration purposes only" has been a thing for many years now. A niche which Getty and others stepped into and made money out of.

Of course the same sort of thing happens in other areas: "long-form" articles seem to be a thing on some web sites, and AI also excels in fluffing out text. And the newest trend is in "short" form videos that are stretched as long as bearable, so as to monetize the longer view time. AI seems to be so good at narrating at a soporific pace and fluffing up the script with superfluous and unnecessarily repetitive words, verbiage, phrasing, terms and expressions.

In an info-overload world, I surely wish for higher signal-to-noise-ratio communication (including advertising and restaurant menus). Instead we make do with good enough because that's what's offered.

I've actually outsourced the first iteration of that to AI. :-)

At the end of coding sessions, I generall ask it to spin up an adversial agent whose task it is to find flaws, inconsistencies, mistakes, bugs, etc.

I'd still strongly recommend to anyone shipping AI-generated code to have a thorough human code review, but for a first pass at surface level, the AI can check itself if it has some kind of separation between the generator and the reviewer.

Personally, after some experimenting, I've concluded that:

• AI is good at implementing known algorithms.
• AI is good in creating code that flows straightforward from a design document.
• AI is good at code reviews and finding bugs.
• AI (unlike me) doesn't mind writing a few hundred tests.
• But, it tends to over-engineering simple tasks to the point of "why does Hello World need enterprise-software levels of abstraction?"
• It struggles with code that doesn't have a known solution.
• It's difficult to get it into a different lane once it started going down the wrong way.

What I use it for these days is rapid prototyping. Using AI I can make a functioning prototype of an idea I have in a few days instead of a few weeks. I can quickly test out an idea for a feature or change in my existing codebase.

What I also have been using it for a while is as a code-reviewer and for someone like me who is mostly working solo, that's an insanely valuable thing. Not just the bugs themselves, but also the ability to discuss code with someone. Basically, AI is a rubber ducky that replies.

Mickeysoft lost the plot again.

The game-changing element of LLMs and agents is that they have a non-computer-language interface - you can talk to them in plain English (or Chinese or whatever). This makes complex computer interactions available to a much wider audience than any previous computing invention. Adapting humans to the AI is getting that backwards. It's a sign you don't understand the first thing about why AI is so widely successful.

I predict this will be an abject failure and a year from now will quietly be pushed to the very back of the bottom-most drawer, never to be spoken off again (though it is getting crowded in there for M$).

Meanwhile, in the real world, everyone I've talked to about these things already has a skills file to teach the AI about their personal coding style. This is what actual humans came up with, independently several times, and it works: Adapt the AI to you. Plus we've been writing coding style guides for humans for a long time now, we've got plenty of experience doing that at least somewhat right.