Yes it’s important to always update to make sure you also have the newest security holes in addition to the old ones that nobody’s noticed. /s

Hobbyists are working in the billions or tens of billions. Trillions is insane. I’m sure some people can run it, but not many.

It’s used as a test of basic intelligence, but it’s also seriously incomplete and maybe a test of more advanced intelligence would be to have someone explain at least some of the many ways in which it’s incomplete.

If I told you to let me have your 5 treats later so that I can turn them into more treats than there are particles in the entire universe and I’ll give you half, you should probably call bullshit on that.

If I’m starving to death and I’m not going to survive until however much “later” is unless I eat one of those treats right now, then choosing “five treats later” would actually be the wrong choice.

This is not always a clear choice, either. The test is interesting, and it tells you a lot about how certain people think, but it isn’t universal, and it doesn’t actually prove anything. You need to understand and interpret why the answer makes sense in each context. And the context is always changing. We live on a changing planet. It is time to start thinking about how the context of “5 treats later” might have changed, and whether we are going to survive until whenever “later” is, and whether it is actually physically possible to provide all of those 5 treats in the hypothetical future that we are imagining.

Or is it money that has now been turned into fictional non-existent money, because it was stolen from our own future, where it was previously being held (we thought) safely in trust for us. They’re stealing the money from us. From our taxes, from our government funds and institutions, from our pensions. It’s our money. At least it nominally was, before all this happened. We’re being looted. The robbers are in our vault, they are packing our money into bags labelled “AI” as we speak.

Correct. There’s no direct way to prove they are or aren’t using their own open source server code, but if they weren’t, the behavior could still be proven to match or be different, and as soon as the behavior is different, that would prove they’re not running the open source code, and if hypothetically they aren’t running their own open source code and they intend on avoiding detection of that fact, then they still have to make their closed-source infrastructure exactly match the behavior of the open source software. And as long as they’re doing that, then the open source functionality remains a perfect predictor of the behavior of their infrastructure. So it’s still pretty transparent in that sense. But technically, of course, we don’t really know, and that’s a given.

Self-hosting is still preferable, and the only method I consider personally acceptable.

Memorization is just repetition, and you can build successes and reinforce it for yourself by keeping things very, very small. If even a “simple number guessing game” is too complicated for you to remember at this point, that’s not a mark of shame, it might sound simple but one of most important things you can learn as a programmer is that a lot of things that seem or feel simple really aren’t. There’s sometimes a lot of hidden complexity, and your brain needs to form the internal tools it needs to unpack and untangle that complexity. Eventually you’ll develop the skills you need to see the specific issues making it more complex, but for now, all you can do is simplify. If there’s a part you’re not remembering how to do, discard it. Make it a sidequest. Iterate on one feature at a time, test it and see if it works the way you expect. Refine, and you’ll learn a little bit from each refinement. Keep doing little refinements and you’ll start learning stuff more permanently. It’s like any skill, you have to practice.

If you read through a foreign language dictionary page by page, of course you’re not going to remember all the words. It’s huge. It’s overwhelming. Our brains can’t learn that much in a single pass. It’s all about doing little bits at a time. The absolute minimum required to get off the ground. Gradually, not overnight, you’ll learn it all.

There’s a reason the stereotypical “first program” is:

print(“Hello world”)

It’s actually a good starting point. It’s all you need to get started, plus the workflow you need to compile/run it, which shouldn’t be changing a lot once you’ve got it established. Other than that, you can build tiny baby steps on top of that. How do you print “Hello again” after “Hello world”? Does it print on the same line or does it print on the next line? Try it out and find out. Learn what it does. Play with it. What’s next? How do you let the user type something? Maybe you need to look for some examples. Try them. Not just the first one that works, try them all. See if they do anything differently. Don’t copy and paste huge complicated messes of code blocks if you don’t understand them, because you’re getting back into the “reading the dictionary” problem, but a line here or there is something you can start to pick apart and understand what it’s doing as you go. Use your programs to explore and understand what the program is doing, not to create a “finished product”. Nothing’s ever really “finished” except by accident when at some point in the distant future you realize you haven’t needed to modify it in ages. Otherwise, programs are things you change as you go, and you learn something each time you change them.

I use open source to avoid mysteries.

No, AI psychosis has done so much damage to open source and software engineering as whole already, the professional thing to do is to start to call it out for what it is. And sometimes that means intentionally making people mad, like that project that instructed the AI to put self-disparaging remarks into the author’s PR to both mock the author and make it obvious they used AI. He may not be the hero we deserve, but he’s the hero we need right now.

Maybe you do get more flies with honey than with vinegar, but vinegar is useful too. Fuck AI (at least in many of the forms it is currently being used and pushed in)

Hopefully. If Yahoo were also republishing other sites articles without permission, that would be rather ironic, given how similar that feels to the topic in question.

You’re absolutely right!

/s

Jesus Christ, does every country’s leaders have AI brain slugs? All hail hypnotoad? How the fuck is this AI cult actually spreading so effortlessly? I knew all politicians were stupid and most of them were corrupt but really? Has it really gone that far in the entire world that there is no safe haven from this shit? Literally everyone is bandwagoning on this nonsense?

The story was probably pretty horrifying before Elon was born too, from what we already know of his father.

How many hoops will they have to jump through? Will those hoops change over time to continue to make it difficult or they still find ways to monetize those hoops while technically complying with the settlement? Will they still hold ultimate control over the ecosystem and use lawsuits and deliberate engineering to drive third-parties out?

Spoiler: The answer to all of the above is almost certainly going to be yes. These sort of agreements are toothless because they’re meant to be. The fight for right to repair is not a fight that is going to end as long as it’s more profitable to do the opposite.

I just tag it with the same ticket I was working on when I discovered it needed cleanup. My logic is, it IS directly related to that ticket because that’s when the file was being touched, which implies it’s time is due to clean up some of its technical debt. Nobody’s ever challenged it and I see other people doing similar things. It depends on the company culture, obviously, but it’s not necessarily a no-go.

The solution to all the billionaires taking everyone’s money is not going to be solved by finding the right billionaire. Nobody with a billion dollars gives a shit about you. They aren’t going to help you. They don’t even have the personal human context to have any understanding of anything you need help with, and even if they can afford to have someone tell them, and have the empathy to bother, they’ll still end up trying to fix in ways that don’t actually help you. They don’t get it. They won’t get it. They can’t. They’re living in a totally different universe. Money doesn’t measure success, it measures privilege.

Revenue and profit/loss are not the same thing. Revenue only counts the money they bring in BEFORE any expenses or losses, and is used precisely to avoid the issue you raised. That said, it is still possible to get around it, but it’s not quite as trivial as just spending more.

DuckDuckGo did a site-wide poll about 6 months ago asking their users if they wanted AI or not. It was on their homepage. 90% answered “no”.

What did they do in response? … nothing. It didn’t fit their preconceived notions and apparent agenda, so they’ve just completely ignored it. The customer is always right, except when they don’t want AI, then they’re just wrong.

The difference, unlike a Playstation console, is that you also control the hardware and OS on a PC (mostly, and for now, at least; they’re working on fixing that)

This means that you don’t need to “jailbreak” it with a modchip to gain access to basic functionality like simply deciding to make backups and other copies for yourself or to simply not to run the DRM requirement since you don’t want to run that on your hardware that you own and you should not be obligated to. They call this piracy and cracking and say it’s illegal, but I say it’s a fundamental right. When it’s convenient they’ll tell you that you own the games, and when it’s inconvenient they’ll tell you you don’t own them and they decide what you can do with them. It’s like saying I can’t photocopy pages from or write in the margins of a book I bought and own, whether it’s digital or not. I reject that principle and refuse to abide by it, and you should too, and PC allows you to. Playstation does not, at least not with a nontrivial amount of work and a lot of penalties. It only requires a trivial amount of work on PC and generally will not allow the enforcement of any penalties (it shouldn’t require any work and shouldn’t enforce any penalties, but DRM and laws and always-online content are doing their best to make it difficult as much as they can)

The reality of the encroaching enshittification is real, but that is still the fundamental difference that a PC gives you, and I suspect it will always remain so. Never give up on this platform, defend it like a fortress and do not let anyone entice you away from it, only suffering leads down those paths.

Don’t forget about might makes right. What, you didn’t want to live in a world where big burly dudes with guns protecting wealthy pedophiles tell you what to do?

Morally I think it’s reasonably clear in many (not all) cases, but it can become complicated. Who is responsible when the inherently ineffective safety guardrails fail? What about someone who intentionally uses a bypass technique to jailbreak and escape the guardrails? Who is responsible for an open weights model that had some of the guardrails removed or rendered even more ineffective either intentionally or by accident?

Legally, it is an entirely different story, and it is absolutely and entirely unclear. Several cases are already before the courts and I don’t think we’ll know where any of them end up within this decade, and even if they do receive some token legal judgement against them eventually, that just sets the stage for those legal responsibilities to be overturned by new legislation. These are companies that are positioning themselves as bulwarks in the new frontier of economic warfare, information warfare and physical warfare, they are critical national security and geopolitical assets, they have infiltrated governments at all levels and are receiving direct protection from same.

Do you believe they will ever be truly held accountable for the damage they’ve already done to society, much less the damage they will do over time? That’s part of responsibility, and it needs to be debated because that’s the only way to even start to hold them accountable for anything. We need to hold them accountable with words first if we want to have any hope of holding them accountable in any other way. And these are my words to help start doing that.