That was worth every second it took to read.

For number 3 and the slip ring. I have always thought, just make the stuff on the end self sufficient. Essentially make two spacecraft. One to run all the experiments in zero ish g. And the other to be like living quarters. You can even make them suit up to commute. But you would need one heck of a long arm to make the 2 palatable. Maybe 3 craft, two way the hell out there attached to some crazy long tethers. One in the middle. Then some kind of speed sled thing to get a person from the outside in or something. Probably need to worry about balancing out the change of weight due to the sled (and person) moving from outside in and such.

Ringworld is solid. Just about everything written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle is good. When they work together, you get some solid stuff.

And books by Andy Weir are all very good. But you can cheat and watch the movies.

I read the chronicles as a teenager because of all the big obscure words that often ended up on the SAT exam. Helped my score. Decent story too, lol.

Yeah, the gatekeeping there was pretty harsh.

Not the the AI we currently have or any llm based AI as far as I can tell. The rich just want an assistant, AI is pretty bad at that.

I read somewhere that SO was using AI to answer questions now. Not enough real people answering or something.

Do people even post questions there anymore? And do they get answers from real people?

I totally agree with you on it being forced where it doesn’t belong. I am just not for abolishing it or whatever was proposed here. I think there is middle ground. It can be useful for somethings. In many cases it is being forced on the workforce so that some senior vp can say they made AI happen and get a nice big raise. In others it’s so they can say it in the earnings call to boost the stock price. But forcing the workforce to do stupid things for these reasons is nothing new.

I’m awake, but I’d rather not be.

There certainly is a group of people who believe in AI strongly. One part of them is just listening to the hype and jumpping on the wagon. Another part however is investing real time to understand it. They work to give it structure and guardrails so that it does what they want it to. And they help others do the same. But currently it still takes a lot of time investment to get good at using. And most people aren’t expecting that.
But as the second group grows, and the methods for them to share the structure they have set up for AI mature, more people will be anle to use it without all the upfront time investment. That is when the pressure on tool vendors to improve their api interfaces will really heat up. AI compliant or whatever buzz word shows up will be a near requirment for a tool to get investor dollars. MCPs were an attempt to put a layer between the apis and the AI. But if the underlieing api sucks, MCP can’t do much. I am not sure what will come next, but something more about the apis themselves is bound to spring up. Maybe even several standards. Thats ok, there can be several because AI can handle the context switching better than humans can.

There are absolutely some economic factors that can have serious impact on it. And they are impossible to predict. If you really could, you would be rich. But, I don’t see it likely to be an assistant. It’s actually pretty terrible at that. My thinking is that it is a tool like any other. It will take a person significant investment to get proficient with it. Down the line, hopefully it will be more streamlined to distribute learnings and such that make it more accessible to those who haven’t invested the time. There is lots of work happening in that area now, but much more needs doing.

My new (to me) “revelation” is that AI needs a ton of structure. It’s like a child who when presented with too many options stops thinking and just randomly chooses one to do so they can be done with whatever it is. From what I can tell, the people who make the most use of AI have it tightly controlled. Rules, hooks, and various other tricks to essentially herd AI into doing what it should do. Kinda like herding cats.
Right now the tools and such for setting up that structure are immature, and best practices are hard to define when the base AI is still changing a lot. For people who are just trying to use AI casually, they have heard the hype, and they think they should expect it to work like a person. When it doesn’t, they just say it sucks. And as a person, it does suck. It’s a tool. And a complex one at that. Seems it requires significant investment to get the most out of it.

Star trek has transporters, holodecks, and amazing medical technology. There are other usniverses that have some of these, but not all 3 in one place. But basically, that is what I would go for.

Well, grafana is an example. They want their own AI agent that you can pay for. So they still need the apis to be good. But they don’t make it easy to get your AI it own api token. Each user would essentially have to have two accounts. Which they probably charge for too. It’s not impossible to work around, but it’s a barrier. I would expect more of that kind of thing. Any tool that doesn’t have a way for AI to work with it is going to be selected against for a while. So there is pressure for them to be accessible.

So I am so ewhat pro AI. But hear me out. I sometimes refer to myself as an automation engineer. I spend a lot of my time automating the set up and use of various software tools. For those who know the term Infrastructure As Code is a part of my job too. And soo many tools have shitty UIs and even shittier apis. The rise of AI is going to add pressure to have better apis because that is what the AI uses. So even if AI falls flat on it’s face in a few years, any improvements in apis is a vig win for me. And since the automation I write is for my coworkers, not external customers, anyone in tech benefits from this.

Now for me personally, I work ina lot of different languages and DSLs. I rarely spend enough time in any one of them to really memorize the syntax. I pretty much can’t write a working program without some sort of reference. So, I can tell AI exactly what I want it to do, and it can code and test until it runs. Then I can use that as my syntax reference and make it do what it is supposed to do. That ends up being much faster than me having to google various syntaxes to see where I need a semicolon vs a comma, or where I need to use [] instead of {}. So it helps me.

And I do love using AI to file my jira tickets. Works great for those of us who’s work is interrupt driven. We often file the ticket after we’ve solved the problem.

Lol. Been there. And it actually can be rough. The company I stupidly spent 15+ years working for refused to use new tech. So while I got a large severance, I didn’t have experience with the tech people hired for. I had to learn new stuff on my own, then structure my resume so that it didn’t make it clear that I had not used that tech in a professional setting. That at least got me interviews here and there. But in the end, it was basically just luck I was able to get a new job.
I often wonder what my life would be like if I had listened to the people who advised me to work a few years at my fist company and then change companies a few times early in my career.

And I bet that 8k was after tax. The unemployment is taxed later. Which is always fun come tax time. Cause if you didn’t make quarterly payments, you might owe a tax penalty. I know it’s a 1%er type problem, but still annoying.

Well, they can make it required like they do for health insurance. Then it will be like a forced group savings account, but they get the jnterest, and they control how much you get out of it no matter what you put in it. Thats the capitalist dream.

Lol, I didn’t post it on X, should be safe from Elons eyes.

True. But in theory, those are for people who have jobs. And technically that’s a loan. I am surprised that we don’t have private unemployment insurance, where like health insurance you pay into it even when not collecting. I believe in most states everyone pays into unemployment insurance that is run by the state. But since it is state run, it doesn’t cost much. If they privatize it, the cost will have to go up. So they are missing an opportunity. Which capitalism doesn’t tend to like. Thus my suprise.