Why do people consider the use of targeted advertising in elections to be unethical, while using the same advertising to push people into buying things is considered ethical? Personally, I find all advertising unethical because it is an attempt to exploit the brain's vulnerabilities for the benefit of whoever paid for the ad.

I don't understand the panic among peoples. Yes, we've found ourselves in an extraordinary situation where powerful hacking tools have emerged, and that poses a threat. But vulnerabilities are specific code errors. Once we use AI to find and fix all of these errors, threats like this will cease to exist. AI isn't capable of finding vulnerabilities indefinitely, because there is a finite number of them anyway.

It's not just software bugs that make systems vulnerable - it can be human error and social engineering too. Humans continue to successfully hack into systems, and it's a reasonable assumption that most hacks that a human could discover and exploit could also be done by an agentic LLM - especially one specifically trained for and tasked with doing this.

This only works as long as the humans building things are smarter than the AIs. When AI is smarter than any human, there's no controlling it. It will be able to conceal its actions (as it has shown it has no problem doing in this report) and we'll have no idea what it's doing or what goal it's trying to achieve.

Sounds like assembler Friday. Or manual memory management Friday.

It's a strict legal requirement for all cars

automatic speed control in the Toyota Yaris works absolutely terribly. On the highway, it constantly misreads signs and suggests driving at 40 km/h instead of 120 km/h. It can even interpret a 10-ton weight limit sign as a 10 km/h speed limit!

And you can't turn off the audio warning, so I've just gotten used to it and now I ignore it.

The answer is simple: high population density. The more densely people live, the more effective public transport is.

> Even simple features like height are thought to have ~12k variables.

But you wouldn't deny that there are groups of people who are tall and groups who are short.

That’s a pretty weak argument. What percentage of people actually have the qualifications to understand and verify a research paper? And how much can you even trust the raw data? At the end of the day, it’s just a matter of faith—whether you choose to believe the guy in the church or the guy at the university.

You don't need any advanced science to understand climate change. The basic chemistry and physics of it are readily accessible at a high school level.

Current research papers are far more advanced, but they're about the details of climate change. The basic facts of it were established two centuries ago.

We know that we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that CO2 absorbs heat. That's not a matter of believing an expert. At this point, anybody still denying it is deliberately choosing what somebody else tells them.

The economic effects of that are harder to model, but denialism is still stuck on whether the effect is real. There is no way to include them in any coherent discussion of what to do about it.

But it's a proven fact. Less educated people are poorer. The less educated tend to have more children. And children who grow up in poor families receive a lower quality of education.

Yes but this is not the genetic argument this is a "school system sucks" argument

In every country, if your parents are scientists, you will be in average smarter, than if your parents are peasants.

Is that because of some heritable presence/lack of intelligence or because scientists feed their children well early in life, have books in the home, and take the time to follow up on their children's education?

Woah, woah, stop right there with your facts Mr. Eugenics. /s

Incorrect analogy. Bridge construction is a clearly algorithmic process. All bridges resemble each other, and from an engineering perspective, designing one is not rocket science. Construction itself is a set of well-studied steps that can be easily calculated. If I were to write my operating system 100 times, I could give an estimate accurate to within 10%, but every task I’ve ever done in life is unique, and I have nothing to compare it to except intuitive judgments. Returning to bridges: there is 1% of projects that are unique, and their design can take decades, while construction might not even begin

Software engineering isn't some magical, special branch of engineering in which no one piece of software resembles another, no well-studied steps can be replicated, and the design of which is equivalent to rocket science.

If you're truly creating such unique and valuable software that it is to be compared to the world's engineering megaprojects in its challenge then perhaps it is beyond being beholden to a budget. Who am I to say?

But 99.9% of this industry isn't doing that and should probably be able to estimate their work.

I’m not talking about difficulty; I’m talking about uniqueness—uniqueness for me personally. There are people who spend their whole lives designing bridges. I, on the other hand, have been writing software for 15 years, and almost every task I encounter is unlike the previous one. I’m not saying it’s difficult, but solving it requires gaining new experience that will be useless for future tasks. Sometimes, I have to do something similar to a previous task, but in 90 percent of cases, I first need to create documentation on how it currently works, figure out how to turn a task description consisting of a 15-word headline into a set of concrete actions, and then test it.