Madonna - Like a Prayer

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Arrival

I dunno, sounds like communism to me. They are basically opening the door for Russians to just take over. /s

Careful, back in the future we might all identify as attack helicopters from then on

I was a trainee in Japan at the time and had spoken in an IRC channel about how I was going home to Sweden for Christmas.

Then I ended up in a disagreement with some Norwegian guy about affirmative action. I felt that in the computer science field it could be a good idea for a time to “jumpstart” female participation in the field, and once prejudice had been torn down you wouldn’t need affirmative action anymore.

He vehemently disagreed and said he would drive down to Stockholm’s airport to kill me with his rifle. There weren’t that many flights from Japan to Sweden so based on what I had said earlier he was able to figure out what flight I would be arriving with. But, well, I’m still alive. It taught me to be more careful with what information I volunteer on the Internet.

Technically it’s a bunch of LANs that are connected to each other

I know how it must sound but it wasn’t like that when I graduated around 2002. 80% of my classmates were self-sufficient and had gained experience and self-esteem through various demanding group projects and their thesis work. Many of them already had more value to offer than the tired self-educated colleagues they met on their first job.

When you have developed and simulated your own ad-hoc wireless routing protocol, implemented distributed two-phase commit algorithms and built your own compiler, you don’t need to ask your colleague fifty times how to use React state. You google it and figure it out. You’re trained to always learn new things and be comfortable with it.

My experience as a senior dev who is often involved in the recruitment process (admittedly in Sweden and not Silicon Valley) is that there are hundreds of people applying but they all lack sufficient skill. We still have a severe shortage of people who can actually do the job without requiring so much hand holding that they have a negative impact on productivity. There seems to have been a surge in “quick-fix” educations that are a couple of months long, and the new iPad kids are already behind when they start the education because they don’t understand how a computer works. They have no interest in the craft and don’t enjoy it, they just want to check off a detailed todo list and get a fat pay check. We need people who can think, extrapolate from unclear requirements, and ask smart follow-up questions.

The demand is still there, the supply isn’t. Half of these applicants couldn’t even implement FizzBuzz.

In sci-fi, AI devices (like self-driving cars or ships, or androids) seem like an integrated unit where any controls or sensors they have are like human limbs and senses. The AI “wills” the engine to start. I always imagined AI would be like a single organism where neurons are connected directly to the body.

Given the development of LLM:s and how they are used, it now seems more likely that AI will be an additional “smart layer” on top of the dumb machinery, and actions are performed by emitting tokens/commands (“raise arm 35 degrees”) that are sent to API:s. The interaction will be indirect in the way that we control the TV with the remote.

The boars they feast on at the end of every Asterix comic.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6874b9ed-0c0c-8000-9932-df4f9ba248b6

The key feature is that there’s a mechanism that limits supply. Other than that, value only exists because enough people agree that it has value. Fiat currency is exactly the same in this regard.

I think your questions indicate that you don’t have sufficient understanding of how “ordinary” money works. It’s just a promise of being able to exchange it for goods & services in the future, and its value hinges on people trusting that promise.

Nyan

“Nice beaver!”

“Thank you! I just had it stuffed.”

I am serious, and stop calling me Shirley

The answer to your title is yes, it is unhealthy.

At first I thought the title was a foreign language

It’s AI but a specific use case of AI: an android at home to take care of the housework. Cleaning my dishes, doing the laundry, vaccuming and putting stuff away where it belongs are obvious use cases. But also:

• Go through your fridge and throw away everything that has expired or gone bad.
• Take care of your cat while you’re away on vacation.
• It’s your personal fire fighter.
• It paints your house or does any kind of house maintenance.
• Let’s say you’re in the middle of playing a board game on your dinner table but need to put it away for the night. Ask the android to memorize everything and put it away. The next time your friends come around to play, it can place everything in exactly the same spot.

Possibilities are endless.

This is the key to so much. Worried about Nestlé monopolizing freshwater? With nuclear fusion we can just take any old seawater and remove the salt. Worried about the war with Russia? With nuclear fusion we can become independent of all gas from Russia and cut off one of their biggest income sources. Lots of special materials are expensive because electricity is expensive - with nuclear fusion electricity is practically free. Over time we can get rid of any coal plants etc. that produce CO2.

I’m 100% convinced their internal testing is flawed and possibly suffers from confirmation bias. The strategy might work for a couple of years but in the long term they are killing their brand. Once people start migrating to other search engines Google will be beyond rescue.

Guess it’s time to start thinking about Android and Chromecast alternatives because when Google becomes desperate they will turn everything they touch into shit.