Well I definitely disagree with the part about touch typing coming on its own. It's not a natural skill in any way that I can see. Then it gets into the strangeness about which keyboard I'm using in relation to the language settings (since I use two). My fingers "know" to switch layouts as soon as a special character comes up wrong?

However the bigger questions involve typing versus alternatives. For one of my languages I actually do most of my input via voice, which then has to be corrected. However I'm doing that deliberately to improve my pronunciation, so it certainly isn't part of the design plan. For correction there is an option to use a QWERTY keyboard, but I normally don't...

Yet within an IDE a lot of stuff is "typed" for you, and even formatted, so rapid selection from options becomes more important than touch typing? The AskSlashdot topic is "How important...?" and I still can't decide about the future. I think it used to be very important, but with AI support improving, maybe not so much next year?

I wish it was easier to see the chronology of comments on Slashdot... But right now this one appears at the end of a discussion that touched a lot of interesting points. I wasn't really going for that, but perhaps it was because I should have used "bizarro" in the Subject rather than "reverso"?

Really hard to summarize my position, but... If we insist that human beings have special value and deserve some form of special dignity, then we reach conclusions like preventing children from starving to death. Most folks would agree with that, but there's a slippery slope up to things like "heath care as a human right" or UBI where there is lots of disagreement. Or even minimum wage laws. Not sure how sliding up works, but...

The natural solution is different. In natural systems surplus produces growth until there is no surplus. All the animals are supposed to be on the edge of starvation all of the time. Okay, that is an exaggeration, but mostly because of the seasons. Usually it works our that breeding takes place during the season of surplus and most of the dying takes place during the off seasons.

When you do the numbers things get strange, leading me to strange conclusions. For example, the random shuffle of genes means that half the shuffles are worse than average and Ma Nature wants to square that circle with more than four kids but only two survivors (on average) for the next generation--and yet I haven't met any people who like the idea of seeing most of their children die before reproducing. Less of a problem if Ma Nature kills most of the parents before the question of which two survive is answered? But my strange conclusion for economics is that UBI is likely but I'd rather focus on limiting economic competition in ways that reduces the need for minimum wage laws...

Mod parent funny?

However i think the biggest joke may be that the sharks might be going after each other. Not the only reason, but one of the requirements for becoming so stinking rich is that they ALWAYS want MORE money, even though they already have more money than makes any human sense. Up to now, they have mostly been content to squeeze blood out of the impoverished cabbages like you and me, but if they are sincerely attacking each other, then maybe they've realized there isn't any more cash = blood available down here, so now they just have to attack each other for MORE. (And of course I'm also thinking of a couple of other blood feuds in the news...)

But I get to include the ancient joke as obligatory:

Question: Why won't sharks attack lawyers?

Answer: Professional courtesy.

Now if I was an actual comedian I would either update the joke in some relevant way or combine it with the thing about "No honor among thieves".

And a relevant citation? How about Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie? Mostly relevant because I'm sure someone paid him for the hit job on science. I can't figure out how to pan the book hard enough... Perhaps "A lot of good mixed with a tiny bit of not so good is the enemy of the perfect" or something about projection from his own field of psychology. Or the hype? One example is his hyping of the list of bad-science authors when I think he should have included a list of bad-science fields...

Only funny on the topic? The low-hanging joke I was looking for was some sort of reverse spin on short-term focus on "profits" as defined by idiots with MBAs...

But I get why you were modded funny. Not how it works these days. If your profits aren't sufficiently obscene, then simply making a few honest bucks will lead to your corporate demise. Funniest when a vulture capitalist (with an MBA) borrows money against your own assets to acquire your company to cannibalize the most profitable bits. Actually it's a two-step process of shuffling assets to put all the valuable bits into marketable stuff while concentrating the negative stuff into bits that can then be declared bankrupt.

ACK but only partial concurrence. I think we can build secure software. If it is small enough. And if only there were ANY liability for the consequences of flagrant incompetence.

Every new feature should be considered against its security implementations. Rather than implementing any new feature that might bring in a few bucks leading to an unending stream of patches for security problems mostly in software that provides features I am not using. Actually NO one is using ALL of the features floating around, so I imagine a situation where people would install ONLY the software for the features they personally want and there would be no huge monolithic targets. Like the handful of "dominant" OSes we have today. Which are constantly being patched for reasons that have little or nothing to do with any of my work or play...

Basically the ACK though I think perverse incentives are at the root of the feeping creaturitis that will probably destroy us...

Mod parent funny, though it's currently modded insightful and meta-moderated overrated. And though it isn't clear if he understands his own joke:

If these YUGE liars say UBI will never happen, then that PROVES that UBI is inevitable.

Me? I'm not convinced. Long, long ago UBI was actually the main debate topic for the high schools of America for an entire school year. I never did hear a compelling affirmative case for the UBI and after all these years I think the evidence remains mixed. I just started reading Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman. Same guy who then wrote Humankind as an optimistic history of "we, the people" who do so many stupid things... And I remain unconvinced by the early pages.

Okay, I actually mostly agree that most people are nice enough and most impoverished people will use UBI money to survive. I even agree that spending stimulates the economy. But those "primary targets" of the UBI aren't the people who are calling the shots. The people with the "agency" to make the rules about who gets the money are mostly super-greedy and super-nasty and they seem to be getting more greedy and more selfish every year. If not every month and day.

(Me? I never had enough detectable agency to notice losing it. But my main objective today is reviewing Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie. The problems are real, but mostly I think he is projecting from the problems in his own field of psychology while also mostly ignoring the psychological motivations his own field so often claims to understand. (Ditto the sociologists and economists and now the computer scientists trying to explain why AI is so good at writing fiction.) And of course I have a delusion of a solution by linking articles to their own future even as they are published... Hint: It can be implemented with a QR code.)

"The issue isn't that AI doesn't need any regulation. It's that we have no idea how we should regulate it..."
...
"Right now regulation would just end up being based on ideas from sci-fi films."

Real winners fight harder. The losers just complain about the rules and refs.

The YOB is trying to remake America in his own image. A nation of whiners, not winners.

Me? I used to think we had better computer security experts than they did. Or maybe we did and chased all of them back to China? That could explain a lot of what's going on now...

Took me a minute to realize you meant "feed" where you wrote "feel".

On the main topic, I forgot to mention one other group, but it's a tiny one. It's the rich puppeteers who can afford to pull the YOB's strings. Numerically minuscule but getting YUGE returns on their investments.

I suppose it's intended as a funny FP thread but I don't feel like laughing. What if the robot is delivering a bomb? Or has "self-defense" capabilities even in the absence of any "self".

In solution terms I want some kind of robot repellent or electronic fence to make sure no one can send me any package from Amazon. I decided decades ago that if Amazon is selling it, then I don't want it. Especially not if it's an exclusive offer and part of the evil monopoly under development.

Sometimes freedom isn't free. Or even available at a lower price on the Internet.

Should have been the FP rather than the AC brain fart that took FP.

However, I can't tell from your post if you are mostly for or mostly against.

I think my main take that seems to be related to your unclear take is that AI is not helping us become better people. I still dabble with the toys from time to time, but it used to feel like playing with a loaded gun and now it feels more like juggling hand grenades with loose pins.

And as regards ye olde Turing Test, the AIs definitely lie bigger and better than many actual human beings. The main difference is that the humans usually have motivations and the AIs still don't. At least not that I've been able to detect yet.