Wobbles42

This is the real point that needs to be made.

You can argue that many parents are less than ideal parents, but that is not sufficient to justify having the state step in. You also have to show that the state is less bad.

Decades of data on the foster system strongly suggests otherwise. The state, by any objective measure, is terrible at raising children.

I was almost certainly never going to be a parent for other unrelated reasons, but you have just given me a whole other list of confirmations for that decision that I hadn't thought of before.

Thank you for that.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Undermining data protection and privacy is clearly the point. The fact that it's happening everywhere at the same time makes it look to me like a bunch of leaders got together and decided that online anonymity is a problem.

It's not like kids having access to adult content is a new problem after all. Every western government just decided that we should do something about it at roughly the same time after decades of indifference.

The "age verification" story is casus belli. This is about ID, political dissent, and fears of people being exposed to the wrong brand of propaganda.

Likely it wouldn't get written at all. The most useful aspect of layered approval processes is people treat them like outright bans and don't blog at all unless it's part of the job description.

It was more fragile 20 years ago than it is today.

It was more robust 5 years ago than it is today.

Or at least that's been my impression. I can't back that up with hard data.

"Ideas for AI to help reduce headcount" sounds like the title everyone should start using on resignation letters.

If anyone still resigns that is. They seem to have automated that too.

Imagine explaining AI to 1997 you.

"It's like PKZIP, but backwards"

Their tools are very useful. To their customers. Not to their users.

The killer app for AI might just be unenshittifying search for a couple of years.

Then SEO will catch up and we'll have spam again, but now we'll be paying by the token for it. Probably right around the time hallucination drops off enough to have made this viable.

I kind of want to become Amish sometimes.

They have investors that paid for training of these models too. It could be argued that R&D for the next generation is a separate issue, but they need to provide a return on the R&D in this generation to stay in business.

And knives apparently.

I recently encountered this randomly -- knives are apparently one of the few products that nearly every household has needed since antiquity, and they have changed fairly little since the bronze age, so they are used by economists as a benchmark that can span centuries.

Source: it was an aside in a random economics conversation with charGPT (grain of salt?).

There is no practical upshot here, but I thought it was cool.

It has stopped. Demand is now rising faster than supply in memory, storage and GPUs.

We see vendors reducing memory in new smart phones in 2026 vs 2025 for example.

At least for the moment falling consumer tech hardware prices are over.

Are LLMs slowly evolving to be more appealing to narcissistic personalities?

Given the dynamics here that could be the main selection pressure on them.

This is exactly what is happening from a levels of abstraction standpoint.

The difference being that compilers and related tools are deterministic, and we can manage the outputs using mathematical proof of correctness.

The LLM's driving this new abstraction layer are another beast entirely.

I feel the same.

Frankly, I am not sure there is a place in the world at all for me in ten years.

I think the future might just be a big enough garden to keep me fed while I wait for lack of healthcare access to put me out of my misery.

I am glad I am not younger.

Companies aren't evaluating on "keeping an eye on technical debt", but then ARE directly evaluating on whether you use AI tools.

Meanwhile they are hollowing out work forces based on those metrics.

If we make doing the right thing career limiting this all gets rather messy rather quickly.

I sometimes wonder if the economics of AI coding agents only work if you totally ignore all the positive externalities that come with writing code.

Is the entire AI bubble just the result of taking performance metrics like "lines of code written per day" to their logical extreme?

Software quality and productivity have always been notoriously difficult to measure. That problem never really got solved in a way that allowed non technical management to make really good decisions from the spreadsheet level of abstraction... but those are the same people driving adoption of all these AI tools.

Engineers sometimes do their jobs in spite of poor incentives, but we are eliminating that as an economic inefficiency.

I wonder if there is a point where signal to noise in advertising gets so low that the industry itself collapses. Many people actively ignore advertisement at this point, but there is still enough attention to make paying for them profitable. I don't see any reason that couldn't change in a sufficiently noisy environment.

If demand for advertising drops too low as a whole, and ad supported content goes away as a result, is there enough of the internet left to maintain critical mass and keep existing?

Maybe spam really does win in the end.

If the LLMs don't start producing positive revenue soon, the consequences for society will be rather short term.

Translation:

People want to use a tool and not be liable for the result.

People not wanting to be liable for their actions is not new. AI hasn't changed anything here, it's just a new lame excuse.

If the five year old was a product resulting from trillions of dollars in investments, and the marketability of that product required people to be able to hand guns to that five year old without liability, then we would at least be having that discussion.

Purely organically of course.

How can you give an agent a token without cryptography being involved?

The only hallucination here is the idea that giant equation is a mind.

"Agentic action" is just running a script. All that's different is now people are deploying scripts that they don't understand and can't predict the outcome of.

It's negligence, pure and simple. The only reason we're having this discussion is that a trillion dollars was spent writing said scripts.

I don't understand what has changed here.

AI is just branding. At the end of the day it's still just people using computer software to do stuff.

There is going to be a person who did a thing at the end of the day -- either whoever wrote the software or whoever used the tool.

The fact that software inexplicably got unreliable when we started stamping "AI" on the box shouldn't really change anything.

This is primarily an article about restrictions that all makers are going to have to deal with. Gun control is just the casus belli.

The comments here have already turned into a spirited discussion about gun control itself. This is a valid discussion, but may be a distraction in this context.

This doesn't bode well for defeating legislation like this. It's directly adjacent to an emotional issue that will drive a wedge between people who otherwise agree on the bill.

If I was more conspiracy minded, I'd even suggest this is intentional.

That is the root of most arguments I have seen, both pro and anti gun.

If people fundamentally disagree about whether the government should have a total monopoly on violence they are unlikely to come to agreement on the issue of gun control.

I'd rather recognize a fundamental values difference with someone than try to argue a bunch of rational points in bad faith, though. No sense raising blood pressure in a discussion that is doomed to be unproductive for both people.

Full disclosure: I am personally on the "Belt fed machine guns should be dispensed from vending machines in elementary schools" end of the spectrum. My views probably don't matter to my point above, but more openness about bias is better.

Best defense against rats and mice is a ferret friend. Their odor is far more effective at deterring rodents than felines are.

So much this.

Putting these walls up also makes life harder for actual customers, who now have to prove they are such every time they need to access said docs for whatever reason.

As an individual engineer, if I have to jump through hoops just to login and view docs... yeah. I won't be going out of my way to make sure you get considered in trade studies at my next job.

This would be hilarious. I would support that change for entertainment value alone.