... and for good reason. Difficult projects are risky and expensive, and if they don't work on the first try, the voters blame the politician and then very soon afterwards he isn't a politician anymore (or at least, not an employed one). Even if they do succeed, the politician will get blamed if they turn out to be more expensive than predicted (which they always do, because that's the nature of difficult projects).

The "safe" way to do it is leave the old system in place and running, and install the new system next to it. Let them both run simultaneously for an extended period of time, with the old system still in charge and the new system running and computing results, but its results aren't actually controlling anything; they are only recorded to verify that its behavior is always the same as the old system given the same inputs.

Once you've thoroughly tested and debugged the behavior of the new system that way, you flip the switch so that now the new system is in control and the old system is merely having its results recorded. Let the system run that way for a period of time; if anything goes wrong you can always flip the switch back again. If nothing goes wrong, you can either leave the old system in place as an emergency backup (for as long as it lasts), or decommission it.

This logic made a lot of sense on the original Mac 9" screen. It makes less sense on a modern Mac with multiple large monitors, where the distance between your window's content and the menu bar can be significant, and your mouse may move up past the the menu bar and into the screen "above" if you aren't careful.

Yes, excess energy that the grid can't accept should be stored for later use when possible, or perhaps used to generate hydrogen (or synthesize gasoline or whatever fuel is most appropriate) for resale.

Being able to code without having to look away from the screen whenever you need to press a key seems like a big win for efficiency to me. Every time you look away from the screen, you have to relocate your text-line of interest again when you look back; that may take only half a second, but if you're doing it 10 times a minute, those half-seconds add up.

Everyone here is reading the comments page of a Slashdot article, speculating about what will or won't happen at an upcoming Apple WWDC.

I think we can take 'incredibly dull lives' as a given.

That seems like short-term thinking. A better approach would be to figure out how to do the future-prediction optimizations in ways that malware cannot exploit, so we can reap the benefits of the optimizations.

Hell, what stops one of these rich people from using his money to take care of those who need it now? The only one who tries is Gates, and he gets routinely villified for trying.

The difference is that tech companies used to feel like they had to at least maintain a polite fiction that they were ethical and in some way serving a greater good. Now we're in the Trump/Musk era, where being unethical is considered morally superior to being pointlessly encumbered by ethics/morals/empathy/etc, so there's no need to pretend.

You'd think so, but I've seen plenty of very good answers get downvotes as well, and if you look in the voting records you'll see certain SO accounts that simply carpet-bomb every question and every answer with a downvote, reputation costs be damned.

Why they do that, I don't know. Some weird form of trolling?

It might be a personal problem, but I suspect it might also depend on the category of questions the questioner asks. For example, a person asking a C++ question on StackOverflow might have a very different experience from a person asking a CSS question on StackOverflow, simply because the development communities associated with the two languages have different cultural assumptions and thus attract different types of answer-ers.

You're not wrong, but StackOverflow's methodology for handling this problem proved (in hindsight) to be inadequate, because it maintained the experience quality for established users at the expense of new users, and a site like StackOverflow needs both kinds of users to thrive.

A better mechanism might have been to allow repetitive newbie questions, allow people to answer them as well as they care to, and then have an asynchronous "garbage collection" background process (either human-based or automated) that digests the redundant newbie questions into improvements on the canonical ones, and/or collates them into a second tier of non-canonical questions that are deprioritized in the search results. That way the newbies get the help they are looking for ASAP (which is what will bring them back) rather than the pain of rejection, while the experienced users get a well-organized, non-redundant site experience (ditto).

... at which point, the company's costs will drop to zero; making their cost-cutting initiative a complete success!

Instead of letting an LLM run a business directly, and hoping it will continue doing the right thing indefinitely, how about:

1. Task an LLM to write a state-machine/rule-set for running a business (e.g. lots of "if X happens, do Y" rules)
2. Have a human review the state-machine
3. Have a computer run the state machine (which is very unlikely to go haywire since it isn't an AI, rather just a set of rules)
4. If/when the state machine proves insufficient in some new scenario, goto (1)

If the stories are accurate, then something like this was in fact discovered by now, and that is what led to the articles being written.

Maybe you mean "there's no way something like this would not have been discovered before now", which would make more sense... but keep in mind that Teslas famously support over-the-air software updates, so it's technically trivial for any Tesla to have a 100% honest odometer on days 0-N, then receive a firmware update and have a "creative" odometer on day N+1, and a Tesla corporation that is under enormous pressure to reduce costs due to falling sales will have different incentives than a Tesla corporation that is doing well financially.