Shut down all AI-focused data centers, close down all AI companies, confiscate the wealth of the tech bro millionaires and distribute it amongst their employees who are no longer employeed, and bask in a new golden age as we no longer have to hear about AI or have it choke our life with crap, and as suddenly we have a huge energy surplus and a grid that can handle everything that we need on it.

Well, OK, I guess for a true golden age we need to have not a petty narcissist as president and an entire political party that has given up on its principles and that now just exists out of fear and/or delusion to prop up the ego of its chief bully. But, getting rid of all of this A "I" would be a very solid start.

Anything that starts with "OpenAI says"... should be immediately redirected to /dev/null

The evolution of Google, already long ago, was s/don't//.

Great folk stand on the shoulders of others, not on the metaphorical crutches of others.

Isn't this the worst possible outcome?

It probably won't substantially hinder Google. However, will the Firefox deal with Google that's been propping up Firefox all this time still be able to work? Or will Firefox be SOL?

I'm afraid of an ironic result of this being that Chrome becomes that just much more of a monopolistic monoculture as a result of the ruling.

Polyp used to be my least favorite word. I would read or hear it, and it would make me feel just gross.

I think monetize, however, is now my least favorite word.

1990s me is very surprised that somebody would have to go out of their way to make sure a word processor ran on their computer without automatically connecting to a network, and without needing a network for full functionality.

Every so often I put myself in the mindset of 1990s me looking at technology today, and what I mostly hear is, "Wow, you have a lot of capability, but WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???"

I'll take oxymorons for $100, Alex.

Many headlines could just be replaced with this.

Is this "during work hours, for the hours you're paid, instead of doing the job you normally do, do some warehouse work"?

Or is it "on top of all your regular work, come and volunteer to do additional unpaid work"?

If the former, then, whatever, this is no big deal.

If the latter, then, damn, Amazon needs to get the hell sued out of it. Not that that would happen in our current world.

I once asked chatgpt to write a sonnet about constipation. I remember being abused by the result.

Mostly, though, I try to avoid the brain atrophe device.

That reminds me of my O(N!) sort algorithm. (Really, it was a student of mine who proposed this, as a joke.)

(1) Randomize the array
(2) Is it sorted? If not, goto (1).

It's not clear to me that the people making the hiring/firing decisions, and deciding how many programmers can be replaced by AI, know the difference between the copy-paste coders you're talking about and the people who are doing the harder things.

And, given the way they think, and given the fact that all of us are subject to a whole host of cognitive biases, some places at least are likely to want to keep on the cheap copy-paste types than the more expensive senior programmers.

Short term, things will look good. Quarterly reports will be up. It will take longer for companies to realize that they've made a mistake and everything is going to shit, but because of the emphasis on quarterly returns, plus because all of these companies are caught up on the groupthink bandwagon of the AI evangilists, a lot of them as institutions may not be able to properly diagnose why things went to shit. (Even if individuals within the institutions do.)

I'm in science (astronomy) myself, and the push here is not quite as overwhelming as it is in the private sector. Still, I've seen people who should know better say "an AI can just do that more efficiently".

Of course, the fact that somebody talks about quantum physics without understanding it is not a predictor of whether or not somebody is retarted.

Talking about quantum physics without understanding it is a small but fairly universal part of our culture.

Somewhere early on in the video rental business back in the 80s, there was established a legal precedent that production companies couldn't forbid rental of anything they'd released on video. That carried over to DVD. Eventually we had Netflix DVD, which was superior to video rental stores because of its gigantic selection. Usually (though not always) what you wanted to rent was in stock. Yeah, there was a two day (or so) delay between deciding to watch something and getting to watch it, which we don't have with streaming. But one subscription got you pretty much everything.

Alas, the open renting thing did not transfer over to streaming, so now you have to subscribe to n different services to be able to get what you want on a whim -- undermining at least part of what streaming promised. And, stuff moves between services all the time. This is even before we talk about how crappy the discovery tools within one stream service is.

It was a sad day when Netflix DVD closed down.