If this is what passes for news for nerds or stuff that matters than things are not OK.

So why haven't the Slashdot editors been replaced by AI yet then?

Data centers aren't going away. Unlike more traditional industries which require specific machines and specialized labor, a data center can run anything it has the hardware to handle. All it takes is for one use of LLMs to be successful and every data center will start doing that or something related to it.

Enough people have already thrown so much money into it that they'll keep throwing even more. They just need any one person to find a winning move and they can ride the wave. If you think it's really going away there are plenty of stocks that you can short to make out like a bandit yourself. I suspect that if you had to involve your own money that you'd be considerably less confident with your prognosis.

The data centers will be supplied by nuclear or geothermal which is best suited to supplying a steady amount of power. Solar is better than burning coal, but it's not well suited to all problems and trying to force it into areas where it's not well suited is foolish and only breeds resentment. We should be more focused on getting solar into residential installations where it works great.

Sure that will keep the sort of monkeys that cobble together JavaScript snippets taken from Stack Overflow posts away, but C was already a hard enough language for them to learn so they were already kept away. The language itself still can't prevent people from doing stupid things or ensure that they follow best practices as the recent CloudFlare outage showed.

It may be slightly worse because there's nothing quite so dangerous as someone who believes they're not in any danger because they've got some kind of magic rock. I'll take someone who knows that they're handling something dangerous (bonus if they've got the scars to prove it) and treats it like it's something dangerous. Rust (or any tool for that matter) is of no benefit if it makes the people using it more complacent towards the problems it can't prevent.

Probably pretty good. Even if she's just an average developer (or average for Stanford) just having a father who started a business and a lot of other investments is going to give her a massive leg up on getting funded. Even if it's probably a crap product that won't amount to anything, VCs fund dozens of those every year because one or two don't turn out to be crap and pay for all of the others that lost. The description of what she's made certainly sounds like the kind of buzzword laden idea that attracts angel investors and that just leaves a matter of getting them to know about it.

It's probably a good investment if for no other reason than it will get loads of free advertising just because she's the daughter of Bill Gates. Half of the battle that all of these startups face is attracting users and she's bringing free attention to the product. She can absolutely milk the women in tech crowd if she wants as well for even more free publicity for the product. Even people who want to hate on her because of her father are just generating more publicity and when there's an ocean of AI slop apps out there, having yours be the one that people think of first and download is incredibly valuable.

Just because something was standard for centuries doesn't mean we should continue doing it if it's no longer necessary unless you'd like your doctor to go back to chiseling holes in your head to let the bad spirits out. There are still a lot of jobs that require people to work on premises because they need specialized tools or equipment that can't be operated in their homes. Software developers are not those people and while there may be occasional benefits to getting people together in person, that's hardly something that needs to happen daily.

Over time the companies that insist on this will go out of business. The best developers will tend to take the jobs that allow them to work remotely and the companies that employ more of those remote workers will have lower costs because they're not paying for expensive office space that they don't need. Perhaps none of the existing behemoths will drive this change, but some startup will figure out they can maximize their investment dollars by getting top developers who are glad to be able to work from home while saving a ton of money not having to rent expensive real estate. They'll be more successful on average than the startups that don't and over time their model will become accepted.

This really isn't any different than requiring advertisements to disclose the use of paid actors. I can see it running into a few problems with internet advertisements though. I'm not sure it really matters though. Some people will buy stupid crap regardless of what kind of labels or warnings are put on something.

I dunno. They make decent enough output for shitposting on social media. While there is a certain amount of delight to be had in coming up with a clever limerick about someone's mother, some people really aren't worth the effort. The AI can do it well enough in a few seconds though.

I'm not sure I'd use it for any productive work though. Of course not everything has to be for work though either.

The ideal number of hallucinations is zero unless they are specifically requested for whatever reason. If someone told you they were going to kick you in the nuts 38% fewer times this week, you're still getting kicked in the nuts.

I'm not sure a person who's hallucinating could be convinced by another person that what they observe isn't really happening. I think a person has to come to that realization themselves in order to be able to not lose their shit.

Not really. Gambling (legal or otherwise) has been around for a long time.

What's changed is the ease of access. Today making a bet is a few taps away on a phone, whereas in the past you had to go to a bookie at the very least.

I'm not sure to what extent this can be fixed. I have a sneaking suspicion that even if all of these students were made to take a course that shows them how badly a casino, etc. will screw them out of their money that a few would just want to gamble even more because they think they can spot the tricks now.

Making it illegal won't really work either. Organized crime will just fill in for legal businesses. The internet makes it virtually impossible to stop unless a country is willing to implement levels of control similar to China and most people will not put up with that even if it would stop the gambling problem.

Really there's nothing outside of the ISA being open and freely extensible for anyone who wants to do so. The ISA itself is similar to ARM, MIPS, or other RISC ISAs. If you wanted to build a custom microcontroller for some purpose it would be cheaper to use RISC-V since it doesn't have licensing costs. Most companies aren't doing this though and just by OTS components that work with their codebase. If you wanted to create some dedicated hardware paths for computationally expensive operations, the RISC-V ISA lets you add those in. You'd need your own compilers to generate those instructions or to write the assembly code yourself, but it gives users that flexibility.

Otherwise there's nothing inherently magical about RISC-V that would make it better than ARM in some performance metrics.

I don't follow the NFL that much, but don't they have some kind of subscription service where you can watch all of the games without having cable or satellite? MLB has had that for a while and if you just want to watch one team it may not be the best value, but it's great for anyone that wants to watch a variety of games on demand.

If there's a football game I really want to watch I can just go to a friend's place or a sports bar. Both are arguably better viewing experiences as well.

That's nice Adobe, but why do I need any of your products at all if I can just use a LLM to generate the image I want or make the requested modifications to my existing image directly?

If AI manages to kill this shitty company and their shitty business model, I wouldn't shed a tear. GIMP has gotten surprisingly good over the years while Photoshop has tread water or regressed for completely bullshit reasons.

If they're being honest (fat chance of that) about it being random then the only input is repeated refreshing until you get a lower price.

If it's tied to anything external all you can do is try to hide your identity or pretend to be whatever gets the lowest prices. Really good tracking or detailed profiles might be hard to get around, but I suspect most approaches are still rather naive. This isn't anything new. Some years ago there was a big story about airfare prices being different depending on what browser someone was using and even before that I recall reading about how customers using a iPhone were charged more than Android users on some website under the presumption that they were more wealthy on average because they had bought a more expensive phone.

I doubt that the companies doing this would allow you to identify as Filipino for the purpose of getting eggs for $.07 cheaper. That rather defeats the point of what they're trying to do. Even if companies could implement this perfectly it's still pointless as any significant price disparity just creates room for a middleman to engage in arbitrage. The store will only sell bread to the blind Cuban woman with gout who gets the best price and then resells all of the bread she buys to everyone else at a rate lower than what the store would have charged those other customers. So even if there were money to be made using this kind of technology, the store won't be the ones making any of the money once other people catch on to what they're doing.