lol… playing russian roulette with one’s own feet there.

You think that’s bad? Back in the day normal people had to have a physical address to get a telephone number, and people would come around and run wires into your house. They’d smile and say thank you as they drank your coffee and ate your cookies, but we all knew they were just another arm of big brother.

You are assuming the military will intervene to defend the US constitution? They might be a bit busy, by the looks of it…

Organized force and the subsequent compliance of the masses is what gives authority. The rest is theatrics to give the illusion of legitimacy and popular support. This works quite well…until it doesn’t.

The question becomes: What will the police and military do, when push comes to shove? What will citizens do, and what will the response be?

The Musk Effect.

It has a Musky smell? Pass.

There must be at least one track in Esperanto, or I’m not buying.

Indeed. Additional context will influence the response, and not always in predictable ways… which can be both interesting and frustrating.

The important thing is for users to have sufficient control, so they can counter (or explore) such weirdness themselves.

Education is key, and there’s no shortage of articles and guides for new users.

Bio and memory are optional in ChatGPT though. Not so in others?

The age guessing aspect will be interesting, as that is likely to be non-optional.

The LLMs aren’t being assholes, though - they’re just spewing statistical likelihoods. While I do find the example disturbing (and I could imagine some deliberate bias in training), I suspect one could mimic it with different examples with a little effort - there are many ways to make an LLM look stupid. It might also be tripping some safety mechanism somehow. More work to be done, and it’s useful to highlight these cases.

I bet if the example bio and question were both in russian, we’d see a different response.

But as a general rule: Avoid giving LLMs irrelevant context.

I agree. What you get with chatbots is the ability to iterate on ideas & statements first without spreading undue confusion. If you can’t clearly explain an idea to a chatbot, you might not be ready to explain it to a person.

They rolled this update out mid-journey, and I had to scramble to swap seats with the manequin driver. Not cool, Elon.

Not. Cool.

You will need more than a month to figure out what its good for and what not, and to learn how to effectively utilize it as a tool.

If can properly state a problem, outline the approach I want, and can break it down into testable stages, it can be an accelerator. If not, it’s often slop.

The most valuable time is up front design and planning, and learning how to express it. Next up is the ability to quickly make judgement calls, and to backtrack without getting bogged down.

But I wouldn’t run my production apps—that actually make money or could cause harm if they break—on unreviewed AI code.

Here’s the thing though… if you design your system and security boundaries well (which isn’t always easy), you can run non- or poorly reviewed code relatively safely. It’s standard security practice to design for minimal privilege.

What you don’t ever want to do is give AI agents - nor inexperienced engineers - admin permissions and let them run wild. Both AI and human will do something stupid at some point, leaving you at risk.

For serious companies, the risks are more likely to be on the developer’s own machine, when they give it admin credentials and unsupervised access. For example, when “Fix this bug” leads to it testing in production, because it has both prod credentials and configuration at its disposal.

Lesson: Give agents and humans safe playgrounds that limit the blast radius, both during development and in production.

Many people have “itches to scratch” and some interest in development but little time to learn, so AI coding tools will allow them to scratch many of those itches without paying $ to others or investing that time (for better or for worse). Even as an experienced (but no longer full time) coder, I use it to scratch itches when I don’t have the time/lust.

Often enough, you’ll find some customizable app that does 90% of what you want, with a bunch of features you don’t care about. Writing personalized apps is a cool new thing, giving you exactly the functionality that you want. Many times these will be based on OSS or open libraries, which the AI just glues together.

Will this personalized development result in new quality OSS apps, though? I doubt it. We also don’t really need more sloppy code on github.

There are a lot of personal apps that just happen to have an OSS license… and then there are OSS projects, built and maintained as OSS community projects. It takes dedication to run a real OSS project, build a community, handle issues, websites, etc.

Will AI coding tools assist developers of real OSS projects? Sure… many are already using it to varying degrees. We’ll increasingly see it being used to find and fix bugs and security issues ahead of time - security researchers & blackhats are already having a field day.

There is an incredible amount of BTC that is just not traded actively on open markets, and some that will never be traded. That means that much smaller trade volumes are needed to affect market prices over any defined period.

USD can fix its economy with policy changes anytime it wants to.

Some whales decided to cash out their BTC as it didn’t go higher, and the snowball started to roll. There will always be the next pump & dump. It might take a few more years to reach the same highs, or it could fall to 0, but I personally doubt it.

And yet, agentic coding is here, and is not going away.

There has been and will always be those interested in understanding and learning more, along with those who prefer to invest the bare minimum.

There will be good software created by people using it, along with plenty of crap, with organizations and individuals paying for both. Similar to today.

As for a lack of learning/skill development due to AI … it’s a challenge for sure, but such challenges are nothing new.

In the end, code has been a convenient medium to express software/system design, but it’s not the design itself. People think, learn and understand differently to each other, and it might just be that code takes a back seat to other design mediums going forward.

We have always been at war with eurasia?

You just have to avoid the coastal cities.

There is plenty of consumer hardware that is supported on Linux, or will be as soon as a kernel developer gets their hands on it, reverse engineers the protocol if necessary, and adds support. For things like keyboards, there are often proprietary extensions (eg. for built-in displays, macros, etc.). It pays to check for Linux support before buying hardware though. Sometimes it’s not the kernel drivers, but supporting software (eg. Steam input) that might not support it.

First class vendor support for Linux is more common for niche/premium hardware designed in the west, than cheap chinese knockoffs that follow it. Long term customer support is not their strong suit.