I'm sort of in the middle on this.

Some pages have somebody guarding the party line, anything that goes against that gets reverted. (How can putting an accurate link behind a piece of text be wrong??)

Pages without such guardians I've never had an issue.

What in the world is the author thinking?

We have detect/analyze/slew as three separate steps that must run in order. You don't consider whether the item is a decoy until you have plenty of tracking on it?? And if slew is even a step (I am aware of no US missile in this realm that moves it's a launcher) you can likewise do that while confirming your target.

And he's assigning a fixed flyout time--but flyout time is entirely a function of where your launcher is relative to the missile target. It's coming down your throat (launcher next to the target), flyout is nearly zero. Note that we saw Iron Beam successfully engage Iranian ballistic missiles. Targets aren't up in the sky, the missile has to come down into the envelope of the weaker weapons in order to actually hit something. (The original issue of targeting ICBMs didn't consider this because the warhead would salvage fuse. Useful if the payload is nuclear, basically useless otherwise.)

It's California. Not the first time they've gone bonkers with firearms dreams. (Microstamping--the firing pin is a wear item! Biometric--ever see a system that's fast enough authenticating the user?)

There is exactly one use case for a home 3D printed gun: get it past a metal detector. It's bulky, inaccurate, fires only once and even then with some risk to the person firing it. And I can't imagine a filter that could remotely reliably distinguish "gun" if an effort is made to disguise the parts.

The actual ghost gun issue is with CNC milling machines, not 3D printing. It used to be that while building a zip gun wasn't a big deal but building anything resembling a modern semiauto (or even full auto) firearm was in the skilled machinist realm. Now CNC machines can bring this down to merely requiring someone who knows their way around tools--which comprises an awful lot of people.

Unfortunately, the politicians routinely treat these two radically different things as if they are one.

I'm in the position of being shallow in the domain I code for--and I find it a very big help. Knowing what the real world implications of what the numbers become is a great help in understanding what truly is being requested. Just ran into that not too long ago--my code suddenly started slamming a side-cutting bit into the wood. Look into it....years ago there was a bug upstream of me that slammed the bit into the wood. Simple fix: spot the offending pattern, replace it with something sane. The upstream bug was "fixed" (not fully), my simple (lack of true knowledge of what was happening) fix proceeded to undo their fix. Then it got rewritten the way it should have been, a more general recognition of unacceptable movements and how to fix them.

I very much agree here--the true job of us programmers is determining exactly what the problem is. The domain expert will fail because they haven't attempted to refine the details enough, they probably don't have the skill to anticipate the edge cases.

I've spent most of my career working with the same people--even people who have some coding experience but they never catch the low probability stuff. Or even not so low probability: business procedures were that the customer was quoted an all-inclusive price. Try to work backwards, what is the pre-tax amount? Um, that's not guaranteed to have a solution. My concerns get ignored, I go ahead and implement with code that will catch the offending penny and label it roundoff correction. While I'm not sure what happened I think some auditor hit that. I ended up having to walk them through the calculation, okay, what's the answer here? Only when they couldn't solve the problem could they accept that what I had done was the only answer. (The actual odds of such a failure are equal to the tax rate. I had not originally worked that out, just saw success was not guaranteed.)

The domain experts make this sort of mistake routinely in dealing with code. AI won't fix that.

Absolutely - and there are bad actors here that we should be mad at since they are abusing the law enforcement system but the default goal in situations should always be to de-escalate to prevent violence. I think the cops could have done a better job at explaining next steps and routes to approach a civil resolution but anyone objecting to the police officer removing Ben from the store property after a trespassing complaint doesn't understand how abusive it can be on the receiving end of stalking or harassment.

Separating parties in a civil dispute is always a good idea.

Some *thing*, no, but we have seen the same thing with a slower feedback loop before: every conspiracy that comes along. Adherents fall into a trap of believing each other, getting more and more extreme. And losing the ability to rationally consider relevant information. An example I hit: 9/11 truthers. I wanted to put some scale to numbers, compared the energy of the fall to a small nuke. He seized on that as my admitting the towers were brought down by a nuke and I had a hard time explaining that it was simply a comparison.

It used to take filtering through a group of like-minded nuts, now we don't need a slow filtering through other nuts.

Yep, and the emergence of social networks became a real catalyst for that. But that still requires humans in that feedback loop, it takes time and attention. And people also have different opinions, even if they believe in roughly the same conspiracy (was it a plane, a truck bomb, a nuke?).

ChatGPT provides an instant sycophantic reply. I think they toned that down a bit, but it's still completely unparalleled.

I feel like I live in a weird other world. I find AI super useful. Then I read in forums like this how bad it is. I guess I am on the AI bandwagon. Obviously there are places where it still needs improvement but if you asked me a year ago if AI would be able to do what it does not I would have said no. So far I have really underestimated its potential.

I feel the same way, down to the "weird other world" feeling. AI has infinite patience, which means that you can ask and refine intricate questions. You can't always trust their answers, but you can't do that with people either. My favorite use for it is rubber ducky 2.0.

It is surprisingly good at rubber ducking and also that phase of code review which is more of a sanity check than a full review. I also like using it to build an index of source code in a new (to me) project. It is a tool and, like all tools, has things it’s better and worse at.

Except that due to a bias toward agreeability what actually happens is that it will subtly affirm all of your preconceived notions.

I would agree with this if the AI was actually a reasonable partner. But the AIs are heavily slanted towards agreeing with the user and thus very prone to leading them down rabbit holes rather than keeping them out of rabbit holes.

And the problem with incels is that they have been lead down the rabbit hole of hate. Which is, unfortunately, quite understandable given how much disdain the romantically challenged get.