From the POV of a non-programmer, I'm wondering if using AI effectively might be at least as much about having it answer questions as about writing the code. Note that those questions may include having one AI check another AI's homework.

Just recently I've been using AI a lot for the programming-adjacent project of putting LineageOS on a Pixel phone. I was using ChatGPT, and some of its advice didn't smell right so I decided to search for primary info beyond what was on the LineageOS site. I tried DDG, but its results sucked, possibly because I have the AI feature turned off. So I went to Google, where AI is pretty much unavoidable.

Google contradicted ChatGPT, and its answers seemed more in line with my past and present experience. It also assumed that I was asking for instructions. The ones it gave were clear and seemed quite sane. So I ditched ChatGPT and ended up using GoogleAI to guide me through the process of installing the OS and dialing in the system to my liking. It took some wrangling and a few trips down dead-end alleys, but overall I've been very happy with the results.

I can easily imagine that in other cases, ChatGPT's output would be better than Google's. So maybe using one AI to check another AI's output would also be worthwhile when doing real programming?

So far I'm thinking of it as a zero-sum game. One side makes gains in exploiting vulnerabilities, while the other gets better at finding and closing them.

But then again there's the unknown of using AI tools to write code. (Unknown because it's still early days). Will that result in a lot of buggy, vulnerable, half-baked apps just begging to be exploited by AI and non-AI alike? The returns aren't all in, but results so far make me think we may be in for a world of hurt on that front.

Presumably, said police departments "need" that arsenal to make them feel safe, powerful, and relevant. I'm sure those arsenals are, at least in part, merely teddy-bears for insecure assholes who never quite grew up. It's an emotional need, not a practical one.

As for the Flock cameras at the heart of the discussion, they fulfill a part of that so-called need by allowing creeps to stalk former wives and girlfriends. The fact that the cameras occasionally help police track down and convict average criminals is merely a convenient bonus.

That this is considered newsworthy - never mind that it happened at at all - is a stellar demonstration of just how fucked up things are in America these days. There's a US-supported genocide in Palestine, a grifting administration robbing the people blind as it engineers coups and starts wars that it can't win, and a bunch of other sycophants alienating the country's closest neighbour and former ally.

The fact that these men's lips are wrapped around the cock of the nasty, stupid, dementia-ridden, war-mongering old pedophile who engineered all this shit, just underlines how far the country has fallen.

IANAP, so please tell me if I'm off base here: to me this has a flavour of SaaS. FTA:

Replace "Infrastructure" in that last sentence with "A computer connected to the internet", and it seems to me that you have a situation in which the machine I'm typing these words on might be refused access. I know that's not true in the current description, but it wouldn't take much scope creep for many people reading this to be unable to do what I'm doing right now.

I suppose they might consider me a "toy use case", but again, scope creep or regulatory overreach might turn that into "forbidden use case" on a whim.

I think you're largely right. But long before Trump came to power I was seeing YouTube videos suggesting that you're only partly right.

In those videos I saw young - and sometimes not so young - Americans who were ignorant of even their own geography and history and cultural diversity, never mind the rest of the world. And they seemed proud of the fact, as if there was no possible reason for them to be concerned about the people and lands beyond their borders.

I suspect that American exceptionalism - combined with the insularity of a nation which is the big kid on the block - has been eroding Americans' critical faculties for many decades. And I think the ultra-partisanship you mentioned is merely the inevitable result of historical factors dating back at least as far as WWII.

That is utterly fucking scary. Even the lying, predatory scumbag execs and owners I knew way back when I was working in hardware development could and did read, think, and analyze. What you described is really alarming, and if it holds true across the board then the world is headed for the edge of the cliff even faster than I thought.

As a Canadian I find it hard not to America-bash since Trump slithered into power. So I don't fully trust what I'm about to say, though I feel that it's accurate: I think the story you told is much, much likelier to occur in the USA than in just about any other country in the world.

I dunno. Look at Project 2025 and see how far it's progressed. Then consider how it a) helps the people that Drinkypoo calls conspirators and b) was probably at least funded, if not shaped, by the parasite class. In that light, if I say that "everything" is a conspiracy, and more than 50% of the shit going down IS in fact a conspiracy, then maybe I'm less in need of that mental health professional than you are.

Dismissing what Drinkypoo said as a mere conspiracy theory may be less accurate than saying "yup, it's probably a for-real conspiracy". It's also less safe, because in this kind of situation a false positive is less dangerous than a false negative.

I'm an old fart so I may be totally out to lunch on this one, but I get the impression that most of today's schools really don't teach students to think, question, analyze, and synthesize. I think this applies across all subjects, not just in technical ones.

Part of me thinks that the ones who DO know how to think and analyze are tilting the table against subsequent generations by under-funding education, healthcare, and nutrition. If you look at today's parasite class - many of whom are in the tech field - you see that their political attacks on taxpayers getting any of the benefit from the money they've paid are increasing. The broligarchs want it all for themselves, and I think they see AI as a stepping stone toward making the bulk of humans now living on Earth expendable. I think that it's in their plans to expend a whole lot of us.

Measuring AI token usage is far, far easier though. Reminds me of the drunk looking for his lost car keys - "Are you sure you dropped them under the streetlight"? -- "No, but the light's better here".

How about AI to write the AI query you're about to launch? ;-}

Why "ethnic" cohorts specifically? I've seen plenty of white North American-born folks who 'play the game' instead of competently 'producing'.

Shit-eating unethical opportunists know neither racial nor cultural boundaries.

With a little less context your statement would be deliciously ambiguous; my first fleeting thought was that you were referring to the LLMs. Then my eye caught the word "malice", and I understood.

I've been having a LOT of interaction with GoogleAI and ChatGPT lately. At first glance they seem human - as do the aforementioned C-suite occupants. On deeper examination though, it becomes obvious that both groups are - in a very disturbing way - not quite human.

The models have a valid excuse for living in Uncanny Valley. But the parasite class? Not so much.

Thanks for the insight - that rings true to me and sounds like a major piece of the puzzle. It has me wondering if maintainers of the open-source software critical to so many companies could find a way to be more public about what they do. If more people in high places understood how important the maintainers' work is - and how little money it would take to keep the software they provide solid and secure - maybe the projects would be better funded.

It strikes me that they could do this with the help of LLMs. They have LOTS of documents as references; the AI could possibly use them to help with replicating Microsoft's house-of-cards magic tricks, even going so far as reverse-engineering the executables.

They could create a two-way translation suite which could both import and export all Microsoft formats faithfully. Thanks to LibreOffice they'd have at least a leg up on that process. Replicating the collaborative part might be harder - but I suspect that kludgy workarounds would get the job done, though less efficiently, for long enough to put a proper home-grown solution in place.

I think the problem here might have been not having an IT guru with programming experience heading up the project. Maybe they should have poached from the IT sector instead of from the tobacco sector. Maybe they thought that Big Tobacco, being more evil than even Big Data, could help them win the fight. But (something something) dogs, (something something) fleas...

The only way that will happen is for a really BIG chunk of users to just cancel their subscriptions and move on. Otherwise, inertia rules. Money also rules, and Microsoft has obscene amounts of it. That's the real problem here. Allowing corporations to become too big to fail and too rich to govern was a big mistake, though admittedly a hard one not to make.