Nice! I should have looked first. Screw it, I’ll keep my version up too.

This may be from the meme graveyard, but it has never been more appropriate:

Of course Japan decided to use robots. But why not use a big dog instead? Maybe it’s a humanitarian concern since they’d be facing off with bears…

:: looks at image from article ::

Oh. It’s a fucking robot yokai-cyber-demon-dog: pure nightmare fuel. They’re clearly on to something here.

To add to this: escalating to violence can indeed end with armed conflict. But that concept has a radically different meaning here than anywhere else.

The USA is also the home of the biggest, most well-armed, most battle-trained, most nuclear-asymmetric-warfare equipped military, with large numbers of retired veterans all over the place. Then there’s all the federal agencies that also have guns, armored cars, bodyarmor, riot gear, prisons, etc. And lastly, the police that have been buying/gifted military surplus equipment since about 9/11. Oh, and a bunch of those retired vets are also cops and federal agents. Meanwhile, normal people have hunting rifles and home defense weapons, if they have any at all. Plus, our houses are increasingly made of plastic, wood, glass, and paper; not exactly great cover if things get real ugly.

This isn’t Japan, where the cops would have to figure out how/where to get guns, and the military is mostly a civil defense force. This scenario is much more like if Russia’s military turned on its own people to crush mass dissent, instead of picking on their neighbors. Escalation brought to the scale of civil war that, say, Myanmar recently faced could easily be a one-sided bloodbath.

Assuming that happens, I think we can look to Detroit, starting 50 years ago, for a good example of how awful we are at scaling down and retiring infrastructure at anything approaching this scale. Especially when the state doesn’t care to require companies to clean up their mess.

You say that, but that is (or at least was) a real problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture)

(X) Doubt

As a Sr. Engineer, I completely get that my situation may be wildly different from what’s cited in the article.

Right now, I’m using AI “in the loop” rather than “as the loop”. That’s a big difference. And I’m getting my ass kicked routinely on review for dumb-ass things that I’m letting slide from AI generated output. And rightly so. Plus, models routinely lead me down sub-optimal blind alleys while dreaming up really stupid ways to fix problems. The level of (re)prompting I have to provide to suggest to get decent quality results converges on a post-grad that has encyclopedic knowledge of software engineering as it exists online, but with zero real-world experience. It’s both impressive and dangerous as a replacement for software engineering.

In the mode I describe above, I’m not losing the ability to do anything. I can see how one could surrender some coding chops or familiarity with a whole language or stack, in favor of automation. But all you have to do is not do that.

I will say that as a rapid-prototyping technology, It’s nothing short of miraculous. I’ve watched junior engineers knock together medium-weight applications, complete with browser UI/UX and decent workflow, in less than a week. This is great for showing value or putting something semi-functional in front of management and/or customers. But pivoting those prototypes into something maintainable is an utter nightmare. Depending on how beholden to AI and forever prompt-looping with “skills” and MCPs you want to be, I suppose it’s possible to just keep mashing the AI button. But at some point, you’re going to need to get inside there to fix security problems or bugs that elude this workflow. What then?

I think it’s possible (theoretical at least) that greed can be harnessed in specific ways to do good and even empathetic works; it’s a potent motivator after all. IMO, there’s likely a balance. But the overarching market and financial governance can’t ever be on the side of greed for that to work. Otherwise, the people in power pull all the stops and the experiment is rendered moot.

This always happens.

A company that acts without empathy for their customers will invariably act the same towards their employees. This is because the behavior is usually driven by personalities in leadership that (dis)function this way rather universally. Add the fact that empathy limits one’s ability to make money (in this economy), and that psychological modeling is a thing in the workplace, and it’s easy to see how we keep getting into trouble like this.

There really isn’t an “at the right hand of the devil” scenario. Everyone is in his path, especially if you’re close.

It also makes sense if you subtract empathy from the picture. Sprinkle on a little “zero-sum game” with respect to tax money and it tracks even better.

I would love this to be an unintended outcome from all this. However, I don’t think that’s where we’re headed.

I, for one, think there’s a lot of slop in and around the engineering of phones. We might see a lot more software, storage, and overall activity crunched, compressed, and crammed into our portable devices instead. And with more stuff in the cloud/SaaS realm, they can also become (even) thinner clients at the same time. :(

It’s “heavier” gear like laptops and desktops that’ll probably get pushed into the pro and “prosumer” market.

I’m calling it now. Streaming services are going to continue to double-down on artificial scarcity for flagship shows until we 100% converge on cable. They’re going to reinvent broadcast schedules after slow-drip weekly episode rollouts and half-seasons (you are here) don’t get the results they want.

We should have taken this sentiment for the (industry) warning it was.

I really don’t like where all of this is going. All the integrated pay-to-use, cloud-enabled, surveillance (and surveillance-adjacent) tech was bad enough. Then there’s the runaway average pricing for cars and increasing loan terms. And now we’re getting AI foisted in while we’re at it? At what point does it implode, with everyone just sticking with older tech and sticking to the used market?

Shit. They’re going to make old cars illegal, aren’t they?

Palantir itself is enough of a case to be against the whole thing and anyone involved.

We already did half of it for you!

The thought-exercise I’m currently trying to resolve is: what happens when a US citizen applies for one of these? Let’s say you scrape together the cash and buy one. Will that matter if ICE throws you in a cell anyway? Now let’s consider what happens if the same happens for an immigrant? I’m gonna say that these aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on; right now I don’t think there’s any such magic talisman (short of being a celebrity) that will help once you’re inside US’ borders.

I was gonna say. Complaining about Apple not working well (or at all) with 3rd party hardware and software has always been an exercise in futility. Like since the late 1980’s, always.

Long ago they positioned themselves as a premium brand with an image to maintain. Can’t let the plebs skate by with cheap add-ons.

It’s a tad worse than that. They also control all the debt. You can’t invent a new currency and use it to pay a mortgage, car payment, student loans, credit cards, etc.

Well, at least not before it develops value that those institutions will recognize. I can’t say that Bitcoin made that leap, but it can be readily exchanged for other currencies these days so maybe there’s hope.

they have a 180 day period to define the regulation and a year for it to be contacted and implemented.

This has a familiar smell. The 3d printer “gun printing prevention” bill(s) that are floating around have the same “we’ll figure out the actual law after the bill is approved.” And here I thought that punting congressional authority to executive agencies was bad. Now they’re not writing laws, but instead, blank checks for vague things within even more vague legal outlines.

In a more general sense, it also resembles the work being done to level this requirement at online services as well.

Ultimately, the only way to really enforce any sort of age verification system is to force all content providers to have an age verification step.

My biggest fear here is that this will have teeth, and will be crafted so that the only feasible way to make it work is to be 100% cloud connected behind federally approved vendors (e.g. Apple and Microsoft).