As others noted, only the Chinese sector has a chance to fill the space for consumers in this nightmare scenario.

Their ethos is boiled down to ”we’ll do everything to stop AI from killing us all! However, on the path to AI world domination, we don’t mind helping with killing people here and there :)”

I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.

Take control of what your kids play, and you can help them find more beneficial uses of electronics which is not an endless loop of bite sized low quality entertainment! :)

It’s made worse when they are not a decision-maker, but someone who gets forced to push me to do something. As a trusted expert, it’s easy to say no to bad ideas when the client is the one doing them, but when the orders come from their boss who you never interact with, you’re placed in a position where you either appear as a useless cost, or a yes-man who’ll leave behind a monstrosity.

I sometimes envy some of you guys who worked primarily internal gigs where you could at least try to reason with someone up the chain.

When these hopefully go to the next generation Formula E cars, we’ll see some crazy improvements in cornering. The newest generation already has active 4WD. I imagine this can bring even better torque adjustment improvements.

It’s pretty depressing to be honest. I don’t know how I could work in any of these military industry companies.

Technology has politics, and it often serves to reproduce terrible modes of operation instead of something that could be described as "good progress" for humanity. The renewable energy landscape is the best example of a space that has had to fight against the old world's financial interests, even in the face of obvious monetary and technological supremacy.

The software world unfortunately has followed adtech + social media companies' operational structures, and we lost decades of "good progress" to attention-funded software.

I have a feeling this is why very few novel companies are springing up from this LLM shift: the relationship of a) lines of code b) solving problems to achieve progress c) getting paid for it has been decoupled for so long, because attention has been the main currency online.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese technology market leap is fueled by a focus towards the "physical" (raw materials, manufacturing) and it's no surprise that a highly educated population is beating many Western economies in the electronics market (from small gadgets all the way to cars and energy). It's not impossible to try catching up by educating our people to reorient money to industry that brings "good progress", instead of industry that brings virtual money in the form of stocks or tech that mainly serves vices and/or entertainment.

This blog probably covers my exact headache [0]. In summary, "Etc/GMT+6" actually means UTC-6. I was developing a one-off helper script to massively create calendars to a web app via API, and when trying to validate my CSV+Python script's results, I kept getting confused as to when do the CSV rows have correct data and when does the web app UI have correct data. LLM probably developed the Python script in a manner that translated this on-the-fly, but my human-readable "Calendar name" column which had "Etc/GMT+6" would generate a -6 in the web app. This probably would not have been a problem with explicit locations specified, but my use case would not allow for that.

When trying to debug if something is wrong, the thinking trace was going into loops trying to figure out if the "problem" is coming from my directions, the code's bugs, or the CSV having incorrect data.

Learning: when facing problems like this, try using the well-known "notepad file" methods to track problems like this, so that if the over-eager LLM starts applying quick code fixes – although YOU were the "problem's" source – it will be easier to undo or clean up code that was added to the repository during a confusing debug session. For me, it has been difficult to separate "code generated due to more resilient improvements" vs. "code generated during debugging that sort of changed some specific step of the script".

(Do note that I am not an advanced software engineer, my practices are probably obvious to others. My repos are mainly comprised of sysadmin style shell/python helper code! :-) )

[0]https://blacksheepcode.com/posts/til_etc_timezone_is_backwar...

I'm gonna speak on behalf of language models' capability of making online communities better. In recent times, the frustrating forum phenomenon of "learned helplessness" is making me too annoyed to participate. Even in a fantastic subreddit as /r/LocalLLaMA, there are people posting replies in the vein of

> user1: please help me understand this acronym the post title speaks of > user2: (explains in detail what it means)

In the "good old days", a low effort, surface level question would result in someone either muting or banning the person to keep the discussion high quality.

There I am, browsing a forum dedicated to LLM enthusiasts, and an unbeliavable number of people are asking LMGTFY/RTFM-level questions they could even find an answer to from a free Google Search AI summary, and people are rewarding them by actually responding to them with effort.

Thanks to models being quite intelligent at answering basics, the ban-hammer should be used more swiftly if people keep polluting forums with low-quality posts. There's no need to feel bad for them not having the time or capabilities to read through years of forum posts to feel qualified to answer.

Maybe even these sloppy posts authors can be outright muted or banned with a heavier hand for the sake of quality.

The only other alternative I can think of is a screen strap (some companies make those screenless ones, Polar, Whoop) around the bicep, as it’s relatively close to the shoulder and chest areas which gently move with our breath.

Their obvious dual-use nature makes them tempting, and a military target if a large conflict will take place in the near future. I hope their lower orbit will help any space junk burn up fast.