They won't test everyone on a regular basis due to the cost and because it would be politically unpopular. Heck, I saw someone in their 30's go ballistic about losing their license after having two seizures while driving (both of which resulted in collisions).
Enforcement is another issue. I don't even bother reporting being hit by cars anymore because the police refuse to do anything about it. That is after an incident and with a plate number. Enforcement of people driving without a license would be next to impossible unless there is an incident.
As for "don't bother looking", well, you cannot really test for that since it is usually the result of some form of distracted driving or carelessness. Both of which are unlikely to show up when someone knows they are being assessed.
Thank you for the link. It is enlightening for someone who likes to play the game, but is not obsessive about a particular version. (I like the idea of Civilization, and will play it for that reason alone. More often than not, I will choose an older version simply because it is faster to load and play than for the intrinsic merits of the ruleset itself.)
I loved the wedding photo. It also left me wondering if they played "Bicycle Built for Two" at their wedding. It would be appropriate, both for the bicycle angle and because Dr. Fell moved over to a computer science department.
The license says it's free for personal or educational use. The only real restrictions prohibit commercial use, redistributing, reverse engineering, disassembling, and decompiling without permission. While that is a a lot less restrictive than most licenses, most of those restrictions are also rather curious. It pretty much negates the value of the software as an educational tool, reducing it to a technology demo.
Prohibiting disassembling is worth about as much as "do not open, no user-serviceable parts inside" warnings ---- you are a true hacker only if you ignore them.
Captain Planet always bothered me as a kid, even though I was (and continue to be) supportive of environmental protection. There was too much evil for the sake of evil. People don't destroy the environment because they want to. The destroy it because they don't care. They don't care because they are driven by greed, or some other motivation that is ultimately damaging to the environment, society, and civilization.
This. Most cartoons produced on the 80's/90's were made to sell merch like toys. You can thank Gi-Joe. The irony here is a TV show about environmentalism generated pollution in the process of making plastic action figures and branded clothing which mostly wind up in the dump.
I was under the impression that Captain Planet was sort of Ted Turner's pet project who wanted something a bit less violent and more educational. And if I'm not mistaking it also led to the end of Swat Kats.
A lot of people are making general statements, and I'm not sure how valid they are. For example, in my neck of the woods (Canada), I have flown without ID and without passing through security. I would be surprised if the same wasn't true in the US. What I left out: the flights weren't through an international airport and didn't connect to an international airport. Same airport, different flight (one that did connect to an international airport) and passing through security was a requirement. In that case, as well as domestic flights through international airports, ID checks were the domain of the airline.
We do have smaller regional airports in the US, but those smaller airports do still have TSA-staffed security if they serve commercial flights. The TSA considered eliminating security at those smaller domestic-only airports back in 2018, but after it hit the media, they reversed course on it.
The only exception would be airports solely for things other than commercial flights, like hobbyist pilots/flight schools where people are flying their own planes, or airports serving only government/medical/whatever "essential" traffic. Airports that don't have TSA-staffed security are still under TSA jurisdiction, and have to pass regular inspections by TSA to ensure their own security's at a sufficient level.
Within the Schengen area, you don't really need an ID to get on a plane either. In fact you can go through security screening in many places without an ID or a valid ticket.
> It's the same reason the IRS gives you a spot to declare your bribes and other illegal income.
The California example makes sense. They aren't asking a question that would lead to the admission of a crime. The IRS example doesn't make sense, since they are asking a question that would lead to the admission of a crime. Even if the answer was legally protected, a government who does not respect the law (or one that changes the law) could have nasty repercussions.
The IRS doesn’t ask for specifics so I don’t think it’s legally an admission of a crime. Saying “I took a bribe” doesn’t make you legally guilty of taking a bribe. You’d have to say when, from who, and for what.
The accepted legal method of declaring illicit gains on your tax documents is pleading the 5th amendment for specific questions related to the source of the funds. Fun fact, you can also take deduct business expenses for many expensees related to illegal activities if you otherwise qualify for them, for example legal fees. There are specific restrictions but they are surprisingly narrow.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
One of the advantages of open source software is the ability to distribute said software with relatively few restrictions. It simplifies life for the maintainers of Linux distributions, those who manage Linux systems, the end user, and software developers. Making a package manager a retail product store would complicate things for everyone.
That said, the only thing preventing the distribution of proprietary software by most Linux distributions is policy. If a distribution wanted to do so, and the vendor's license allowed for permissive software distribution, they could do so. The vendor could implement their own mechanism for selling and distributing license keys. The advantage to them would be using a common software distribution method without having a middleman taking a cut. (Think shareware, or even physical software that included a license key.)
> when LLMs can build you an custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?
Because software developers typically understand how to implement a solution to problem better than the client. If they don't have enough details to implement a solution, they will ask the client for details. If the developer decides to use an LLM to implement a solution, they have the ability to assess the end product.
The problem is software developers cost money. A developer using an LLM may reduce the cost of development, but it is doubtful that the reduction in cost will be sufficient to justify personalized applications in many cases. Most of the cases where it would justify the cost would likely be in domains where custom software is in common use anyhow.
Sure, you will see a few people using LLMs to develop personalized software for themselves. Yet these will be people who understand how to specify the problem they are trying to solve clearly, will have the patience to handle the quirks and bugs in the software they create, and may even enjoy the process. You may even have a few small and medium sized businesses hiring developers who use LLMs to create custom software. But I don't think you're going to see the wholesale adoption of personalized software.
And that only considers the ability of people to specify the problem they are trying to solve. There are other considerations, such as interoperability. We live in a networked world after all, and interoperability was important even before everything was networked.
> Because software developers typically understand how to implement a solution to problem better than the client. If they don't have enough details to implement a solution, they will ask the client for details. If the developer decides to use an LLM to implement a solution, they have the ability to assess the end product.
Why do you think agents can’t do that? They can’t do this really well today but if the distance we went in 2025 stays similar it’ll be like a year before this starts getting decent and then like another 1 year before it’s excellent.
> Sure, you will see a few people using LLMs to develop personalized software for themselves. Yet these will be people who understand how to specify the problem they are trying to solve clearly, will have the patience to handle the quirks and bugs in the software they create
Hallucinations are not solved, memory is not solved, prompt injection is not solved, context limits are waaay too low at the same time tokens way too expensive to take advantage of context limits, etc. These problems have existed since the very early days of GPT-4 and there is no clear path to them being solved any time soon.
You basically need AGI and we are nowhere close to AGI.
All of the issue you talk about are true, and I don’t personally care about AGI it’s kind of a mishmash of a real thing and a nice package for investors but what I do care about is what has been released and what it can do
All of the issues you talk about: they aren’t solved but we’ve made amazing progress on all of them. Continual learning is a big one and labs are likely close to some POCs.
Token costs per unit performance rapidly goes down. GPT4 level perf costs you 10x less today than two years ago. This will continue to be the case as we just continually push efficiency up.
The AGI question “are we close” tbh to me these questions are just rabbit holes and bait for flame wars because no one can decide on what it means and then even if you do (e.g. super human perf on all economically viable tasks is maybe more of a solid staring point) everyone fights about the ecological validity of evals.
All I’m saying is: taking coding in a complete vacuum, we’re very very close to being at a point where it becomes so obviously beneficial and failure rates for many things fall below the critical thresholds that automating even the things people say make engineers unique (working with people to navigate ambiguous issues that they aren’t able to articulate well, making the right tradeoffs, etc) starts looking like less of a research challenge and more of an exercise in deployment
My experience with LLMs is that you can’t get them to clarify things by asking questions. They just assume facts and run with it.
My experience with software development is that a lot of things are learned by asking probing questions informed by your experience. How would an LLM understand the subtle political context behind a requirement or navigate unwritten rules discussed in meetings a year ago?
> If they don't have enough details to implement a solution, they will ask the client for details.
but LLMs are chat bots. Surely eventually someone will set up an LLM based coding system that can ask architecture and design questions before starting to code.
Yet we have seen, time and time again, that those who do things for the love of money will cash out. Heck, even those who do so for the love of creating will cash out when they want to move on. While open source doesn't eliminate this possibility, at least it disincentivises it.
While I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions, exceptions that we rarely hear about because they are smaller companies that don't monopolise our attention, it is important to realize that capitalism is just a high level theory. It says things that sound good. over a long enough time period and a large enough samples it may be roughly correct. Yet it has no value over short time periods, small samples, or when it's underlying assumptions are violated.
That last bit is particularly important, even though it probably isn't applicable to Nova Launcher. Everything from the asymmetry of information, to anti-competitive actions of the business itself, to regulation will disrupt those assumptions.
Enforcement is another issue. I don't even bother reporting being hit by cars anymore because the police refuse to do anything about it. That is after an incident and with a plate number. Enforcement of people driving without a license would be next to impossible unless there is an incident.
As for "don't bother looking", well, you cannot really test for that since it is usually the result of some form of distracted driving or carelessness. Both of which are unlikely to show up when someone knows they are being assessed.
reply