VirtualBox is really bad about this.

Anything that attempts to maximize engagement will inevitably optimize for outrage, anger, and disgust. You will end up handing the platform over to trolls and propagandists. Platforms need to optimize instead of quality and sanity, but unfortunately that is expensive will never get as many views and advertiser dollars as cheap outrage content. It's a big reason why our current media landscape is so hellish, the other main reason being the continual takeover of more and more media outlets by billionaire aligned interests.

Content creators are a slave to the algorithm. It's so easy for Google to just not show put your video on the feed, even your subscribers. That's why every video looks the same now, if you refuse to play you don't get views.

Even the "programmers are now obsolete" predictions have really not panned out as more people discover that while AI is an absolute boss at solving college homework level problems, it entire falls apart completely or requires a ton of babysitting to work on problems larger than homework exercises.

It's certainly useful at times, but you always have to keep problems about homework sized and generally focused on a single thing that has been done many times before or you'll have a bad time.

Good uses of AI: Asking it to implement a GStream Webp to backing store module in a GTK project.

Bad use of AI: Asking it to implement a libnftables interface for adding and removing firewall rules. The AIs completely hallucinate the entire API and output useless garbage. Plus the API is high level so even when you try to input it into the context the AI engine gets very lost. You can fight with trying to get it to understand, but in the end it's faster to just write the code yourself.

How is this better than training the next Google by having the bots do Google searches?

I'm not saying that it is impossible to surpass human intelligence, all I'm saying is the AI has the same set of working data that humanity does. Unless Plato was right all along it's going to be hard for the AI to discover too much more from that data than humanity has already discovered. Sure there are some less well explored niches that the AI can help fill in, but the part where it makes the next step above humanity seems unlikely given the constraints.

Do we expect the AIs to develop entirely new branches of mathematics? To discover new physical phenomena? Come up with an entirely new way of thinking? That seems to be what these AI companies are promising and I'm skeptical.

Our current AI is more like a fancy Google search than some kind of machine God.

This is exactly the sort of scenario where I do not feel bad at all tracking down an online crack that disables the certificate check.

That said, it is probably not in Microsoft's best interest for people to have a legitimate reason to discover how much easier life can be if you pirate software.

I bet the author doesn't know about FTP's ASCII mode, and especially doesn't know that it is the default.

ASCII mode was a nifty feature, but it never should have been the default. Especially when you consider that most text files are small and easy to re-download if you forget, while binary files are often quite large and the damage done by the line ending conversion is close to impossible to repair. Also, if you forget to convert a text file you can trivially do it on the host afterward.

But this belies the fact that the workers had to grow more skilled to operate and maintain those machines. They took on additional costs in education that are not being compensated. They're being asked to get more work done by being higher skilled, but the bosses are collecting all of the additional revenue generated.

The building code stuff is more of a bugbear.

That said a layperson probably won't know the new code requirements in their jurisdiction and if you sell your house you'll have the inspector tut-tutting the work for one reason or another.