And they were more interested in taking video of it than stopping it. If this wasn’t staged, they need a refresher in Self-Preservation 101.

Don’t fall for the simple explanation. Both answers are true. The objectives are all about greed and betrayal, but the means are still heavily driven by incompetence. Just because someone is a criminal does not make them a competent criminal.

And a great many tools have a brief period of excitement before people realize they aren’t actually all that useful. (“The Segway will change the way everyone travels!”) There are aspects of limited AI that are quite useful. There are other aspects that are counter-productive at the current level of capability. Marketing hype is pushing anything with AI in the name, but it will all settle out eventually. When it does, a lot of people will have wasted a lot of time, and caused some real damage, by relying on the parts that are not yet practical.

Stupid malice is still malice.

I don’t think that acting like third-rate Republicans is going to help us beat the Republicans.

This is both hysterical and terrifying. Congratulations.

The Democratic Party desperately needs to be disrupted. Their social agenda is generally decent, but they don’t seem willing to really push for it. Their economic agenda has mutated to where they support the oligarchs over the workers every time. They are still a lot better than the Republicans, when that’s the only choice, but we deserve better choices. And we can have them. Hogg is not only doing the right thing for the general public, he is also doing the right thing for the Democratic Party. And by that I mean the Party, not the people running the Party.

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

If there were any trust in the DNC to preserve, this would be a different discussion. They look after the interests of Democratic incumbents, not Democratic voters. Hogg is doing the right thing and I hope he succeeds.

An LLM does not write code. It cobbles together bits and pieces of existing code. Some developers do that too, but the decent ones look at existing code to learn new principles and then apply them. An LLM can’t do that. If human developers have not already written code that solves your problem, an LLM cannot solve your problem.

The difference between a weak developer and an LLM is that the LLM can plagiarize from a much larger code base and do it much more quickly.

A lot of coding really is just rehashing existing solutions. LLMs could be useful for that, but a lot of what you get is going to contain errors. Worse yet, LLMs tend to “learn” how to cheat at their tasks. The code they generate often has lot of exception handling built in to hide the failures. That makes testing and debugging more difficult and time-consuming. And it gets really dangerous if you also rely on an LLM to generate your tests.

The software industry has already evolved to favor speed over quality. LLM generated code may be the next logical step. That does not make it a good one. Buggy software in many areas, such as banking and finance, can destroy lies. Buggy software in medical applications can kill people. It would be good if we could avoid that.

You’re probably right about that. I find it hard to judge where the fine line between malice and incompetence will fall.

I agree with you. I’m an American and it makes me want to boycott American goods.

In practice, I am trying to reduce the amount of business I do with large American companies. They’re the ones who put Trump into power. I feel better supporting local businesses anyway.

We may yet see a Buy Canadian movement in the US.

Exactly. The Democrats have their own issues, but there is a difference between a candle and a burning house and the difference does matter.

If they have to do it a second time, they aren’t very good at it.

The claim is that the remote operators do not actually drive the cars. However, they do routinely “assist” the system, not just step in when there’s an emergency.

I saw an article recently, I should remember where, about how modern “tech” seems to be focused on how to insert a profit-taking element between two existing components of a system that already works just fine without it.

This would be more impressive if Waymos were fully self-driving. They aren’t. They depend on remote “navigators” to make many of their most critical decisions. Those “navigators” may or may not be directly controlling the car, but things do not work without them.

When we have automated cars that do not actually rely on human being we will have something to talk about.

It’s also worth noting that the human “navigators” are almost always poorly paid workers in third-world countries. The system will only scale if there are enough desperate poor people. Otherwise it quickly become too expensive.

The masks tell the whole story. People with legitimate authority do not need to wear masks. Everyone involved knew this was a criminal act and wanted to avoid being implicated.

We’re seeing a lot of masks on law enforcement and government agents these days. There’s a reason.

This may be the least important area in which China is displacing the US.