> The ethical issues around AI don't seem any different than the rest of modern capitalism.

Let's fix that while we're at it too. I'm a bit tired of the "we already ruined this much. What's one more broken window" handwave. Let's start fixing windows instead.

>It's difficult to escape the conclusion that the difference is that the harm from those other industries mostly accrues to the poor and the working class, whereas AI is threatening the livelihoods of rich, educated westerners who thought their social status insulated them from economic shocks like this.

If you somehow assume that these people never cared about fossil fuels, manufacturing, unethical farming, etc. Yes. It can be easy to make that conclusion. Yet somehow, those have all been hot button issues for 30+ years at this point. Maybe they simply see an old pattern emerging to repeat yet again?

The weird line is for knowledge lookup, which is sadly becoming more and more the case to make up for the very intentional enshittification of 10's era search tools. Given the recent walking elephant(-ish thingy) in the room for games, would I be using Ai if I consulted to claude on an issue and saw (didn't directly use, but saw) a snippet of code? Many would say no, but the environmental angle would suggest I am still contributing to AI pollution and the ethical side would suggest I am ultimately relying on a fountain of unlicensed code to get that answer.

But if you think that; how would you begin to enforce such matters? There wouldn't be any trace of AI contributions in a repo. Some theoretical perfect AI detector wouldn't detect anything because I synthesized the scripted into my own mind and figured out an approach to fix my problem. But the "damage" was done, nonetheless. That's what this current situation is having me consider.

Potentially. Probably not in my lifetime, but it's not impossible given how most sci-fi works depict it. You can argue we had a bit of that paradigm shift already with specialized machinery. I'm sure people can still do hand surgeries, but existing tools and sensors increase the precision.

it is a bit sad comparing that to "I can't check for bugs without an AI", though.

Really makes me wonder how much some programmers really understood programming 5 years ago if this is the reaction to a very recent knowledge center being down.

I suppose the equivalent would be Google search being down 10 years ago and being forced to read man pages again. Annoying but not literally "snow day" levels of lost productivity.

I did an experiment with some co-workers around a decade ago, and one of the results was most of that group learning for the first time it was possible to train yourself to read code more easily. I was self-taught and had been doing it for so long, combined with some very specific pressures as a teacher's assistant for years, that I learned to read code in programming languages I understand about as easily as I can read English - something they had never even considered possible before.

I never did find out how they see code, but I have to imagine the right verb for them was "deciphering" instead of "reading"...

Software documentation was a little different when it went through a publication process as a part of a larger waterfall. I was going to say better but I'm not sure about that part, but it was certainly verbose.

To be fair most code in most shops I worked for since 2011 was crap with some notable exceptions. People came and went, teams forgot why code was written or what it did, or randomly rewrote stuff that just worked to replace it with crap that didn't, over-enthusiastic rookies wrote over-complicated code to impress their seniors, early code debt was calcified into impossible monstrosities that couldn't be refactored without bringing entire systems down, etc.

But I'm sure in a few years AI will be so good we won't have to worry about any of that anymore. After all, it's not like those systems learn how to code by reading our code, is it?

>"why now?" why is the PR spectacle happening at this moment and who is benefitting from supplying the NYTimes with this compromising information.

Best theory I heard is fairly simple: Howard Lutnick acted as a shield towards this stuff to keep the money flowing. Midterms was a huge blow to republican power, and that shield will fall very quick as an entire cobweb of corruption will be discovered. I won't say "cleaned out", but we're going to have a lot f light shed on how deep this web goes.

As for why now: you can say some people want to get ahead of this before the new congress comes in. I think it was just pure happenstance. Someone who wasn't easily bribed was in the right (wrong?) place at the right/wrong time and the word spread like wildfire because this is pretty much every soap opera staple happening IRL. People love drama, so the spread is the least surprising part.

Whether you think the spark was coincidental or coordinated will only be revealed with history. but decades of crime scene investigations will reveal to you how utterly sloppy supposed masterminds can be in becoming discovered. Mere seconds of care away from getting away with it all.

>harden our systems, not to foster some illusion of independence.

Let me know when the tech industry workers stop doing this and gains some solidarity, and I'll join you in that sentiment.

Until then, I pretty much need to bolster myself on the idea that one day I will need to switch frameworks, IDE's, and even OS's themselves. I'm the ones guiding the tools, not vice versa.

>We simply need to work harder for more of these 9s

The only 100% thing I will guarantee is that these tools will align to the incentives of their leadership over time, not the customers using it. add 10 9's if you want, that just guarantees that humanity is the weakest link.

The emporer was naked the whole time. Someone finally pointed it out. This is the fallout.

Not particularly new situation in the recent US times. Far from the last time this will happen.

Yeah, this is pretty much peak eyeball soap opera drama kind of "tea", as they say. It has my parents talking about it, and they couldn't be less in tune wih tech and AI and GPUs. And apparently US intelligence was aware of this for over a year; they were simply told to not dig deeper.

Hanlon's razor seems to apply here, so I don't really think it's a psyop. Simply information many (top secret) parties were aware of for a while that other people who are incentivized to tell everyone eventually caught up on.

If it's all an act, then American leadership these last 10 years has done an amazing acting job of pretending to be stupid.

Yes, there is malice in the actions. No, I don't think there was some grand conspiracy to reveal it now. That's the Hanlon's razor.

>I hold you to account like a criminal if you act like one.

I agree. Stupidity is the reasoning for the actions being revealed, not an excuse for the actions. Even if he was "one of the good ones" I still want billionaires held accountable for crimes they do.

I just realize these dsys that these aren't some grandmasters being beaten in some political game of wit. Just people who live a fundamentally different lifestyle who never "got in trouble" because they believe money will bail them out everytime.

>So everything is vibe coded.

Given the sentiment that software is getting worse, buggier, and overall less stable, that isn't a comforting statement.

Blame anything except the thing that makes them money.