I'm hardly an AI adept. I'm a software engineer who uses the tools available. Those who do not will be at a disadvantage in the coming years.

That's not at all what I said. There is a wrong way to use AI. There is also a right way. We, collectively, have been figuring out the difference between the two. "Ignore it" isn't the right answer.

Thats overstating things. There are absolutely new tools that do things tools couldn't do a few years ago. We used to need to review pages of documentation to find what we need; now we can just ask, and it will point to the relevant section of the documentation. Usually. But that's just a search engine! Well, yes, but also no. It's qualitatively different.

These tools are commonly called AI. Disagree with the name if you like, but not the reality.

Don't expect AI to be autonomous. It's not there yet. But that doesn't mean the human/AI pair programmer isn't better than the human alone.

There are cases where it saves a lot of time. There are also cases where it's a waste of time. Getting a feel for which is which seems to be the trick. I don't see how you could be consistently 5x faster.

General business could be legally extracted from the data. But anything that is personably identifiable has a much higher bar.

For what purpose? Data retention is a big deal. You don't keep user data around without a strong justification. EU laws force tech companies to be very strict with this.

That's the wrong hill to die on. The technology is already widespread; this isn't the camels nose in the tent. May as well do something useful with it.

I wouldn't worry about forever. Google Nest only stores a couple of months, and that's if you pay extra. Most of them are like that.

I think my No Soliciting sign covers that. Besides, it's 2025. Everyone has a doorbell camera and everyone knows how they work. You see one, don't act surprised about what it does.

Then you have consented to be identified. Don't want that, stay away. That said, we should avoid identifying people just walking by on the sidewalk. The lost dog thing is overdue. I suggested that two years ago.

Everything Snowden exposed has been patched long since. He let those companies know they were compromised; they figured out how and took care of it. That doesn't mean governments aren't paying people to find new ways in, of course, but what they had before is certainly gone.

Even if you could configure yourself for hosting, one server isn't enough for anything serious. You need failover, redundancy, maybe even just capacity. You need software that restores your service if anything disrupts it. Serving at scale is hard.

I carry extra batteries all the time. Anker makes them.

Using AI to rate AI isn't new. Look up generative adversarial networks.