When you give a government power, there are people in place who can and will abuse that power. If not now, then next year, or in five years. After all, power granted to the government rarely goes away.

This is the reason that you should always consider the worst case, when governments gain power. The power to ban a specific technology? What could go wrong? How could that be abused? Let me count the ways...

Anyway, anecdotally, I find Copilot shockingly awful. It makes random changes to files that have nothing to do with the problem. Call it out, and it makes other changes to other irrelevant files.

ChatGPT and Gemini are both much better. Grok also isn't bad. Claude, I honestly haven't tried yet on these issues. Perhaps I should...

Claiming people objecting to this are "racist" is completely missing the point. It's not "far right" to want to protect your society from a literal invasion of incompatible people.

It's crazy that companies just stick their head in the sand, when confronted with serious security issues.

Second, I submit that money laundering should not be considered a crime at all. Monitoring it (for example, banks required to report large cash transactions to the government) just leads to mass surveillance of innocent people.

Transferring money from A to B - why should that be a crime? The point of anti-money-laundering laws is that the money generated at point A may have been generated illegally. It isn't the money transfer that is the problem, it is the illegal activity. The police need to put in the effort to prosecute that illegal activity.

This is reminiscent of the continual pressure to break end-to-end encryption. The police want an easy way to do their (admittedly difficult) job. But the price is just too high: mass surveillance, and many false positives, affecting the general populace.

My suspicion - for which I have no proof - is this: With search results, Google marks the ads. The marking has gotten ever more subtle over the years, but it's there. If you want to avoid clicking on ads, you can. With AI, Google wants to integrate ads seamlessly into the results. If you search for widgets, and Acme Corp. has paid Google enough, the AI summary will praise the virtues of Acme's widgets. And the user will have no idea that this is paid placement, instead of a summary of product reviews, etc..

You ask AI for a product recommendation. It says "Buy X from Acme". Is that paid product placement? Who knows?

I am so tired of M&A. Buy instead of competing or - heaven forfend - cooperating.

That is purest hyperbole. Data centers use a lot of electricity, but they are hardly looting local communities. The water issue is wildly exaggerated, unless a data center is located in a desert, because most water is recirculated.

And why do you think no one will allow an AI to certify someone on certain topics. Their knowledge at the moment is roughly the average of people in the field. Is an average person in your field not able to certify others? In any case, AIs are improving very rapidly, so what is not possible today will be possible tomorrow.

As an example, let me point out the Tesla FSD. On a per-mile basis, self-driving Teslas have a massively lower accident rate (less than 20%) than human-driven vehicles. That is a very physical activity being handled by an AI.

I haven't looked into any sort of "agent" mode, just because I don't yet quite trust the AI not to do something dumb. Also, I don't use M365, where Copilot is integrated, so I suppose I would have to set it up myself.

That gives me a starting point. Of course, I modify it. Maybe I bounce back and forth to the AI for further refinements and suggestions, but ultimately I have to be happy with the result.

When prepping the individual lessons, the biggest time saver is coming up with examples to illustrate particular points. I could do this alone, but sometimes that involves staring at a blank screen for a while. It is faster to ask the AI for suggestions, pick the one I like, and refine it further myself.

AI is a tool. Use it appropriately.

Look, as an IT professional, I build dry stone walls. Could a professional do it better? Probably. So what? I have the satisfaction of having built them myself, exactly how I want.

AI had enabled something new, and us only going to get better.

He didn't spend a fortune. This wasn't "agentic", eating zillions of tokens. It was the standard stuff anyone could do with a personal subscription ($20/month or so) to a couple of AI services.