Sorry this is a bit of a long rant. To many people here this will be a very old hut but I've only recently realized that Apple and Google are basically extortion rackets and have made the online world way worse and enshittified than it should be. Why? They deliberately make it as hard as possible to sell true cross-platform apps. "Buy one license, install our software on all of your devices." That should sound reasonable, yet it's impossible as a business model. If you put an app on the Apple Store or on Google Play, you cannot have it unlocked by a license code. So you have to sell it on their platform. That means that if you want to sell one license for all platforms, you'd have to force your users to buy the license in one of those stores, then generate desktop license from that store purchase. That's not just nonsense, it still wouldn't work because the user can still not switch from iOS to Android and vice versa.

Okay, so sell mobile platforms separately but make desktop platforms with one license. That would still be nice and comparatively hassle-free for your customers. Not so fast, though! Desktop app stores also prohibit free apps with unlock mechanism. So you have to put unlockable versions on your website. However, app stores explicitly prohibit even just mentioning that the user doesn't have to buy an app if they have already bought it elsewhere. They strictly prohibit pointing the user elsewhere to check whether they could use it for free. Consequently, unless your users are extremely well educated about those platform quirks, many of them will erroneously buy your app twice.

But wait! There is an exception in Apple Store and Google Play Store. You're strictly prohibited from putting an app on there that needs to be unlocked by a license key, but you are allowed to ask the user to create an account or log into an existing account with a user name and email address. As long as users can also purchase the app on the respective store, that's allowed. So you can tie the app to an account and unlock it if the user already bought it for another platform. For some reason, unlocking an app with a code is strictly prohibited but unlocking it by providing your email and a password and then contacting a server is totally fine. That's why so many apps have those shitty login requirements. I wasn't really aware of that.

In a nutshell, apart from "freemium models" there are two major ways to sell cross-platform software that really is cross-platform. First, make the user pay individually for each platform, make them buy your app again and again with all the hassle that brings. Second, force them to login with an email and a user name with some direct contact to some centralized hub server.

IMHO, all of these options are strictly worse than just allowing your users to buy the app anywhere they like and unlock it for all other platforms.

There is not even an overlap between those skills. That's why companies employ graphic designers and not just developers.

The Chinese models are cheaper and probably soon are going to be better, too. They're also open weight, which is the most important thing in the future. US companies are no longer considered safe enough against industrial espionage outside the US and do not meet mandatory data protection standards elsewhere. There have also been known incidents of direct interference with US models for propaganda/political purposes (e.g. Elon Musk admitted to doing that), making US models a fairly direct threat to EU sovereignty.

I cannot understand why these companies haven't faced legal consequences yet. For example, OpenAI has admitted to hacking Australia's Medicare website and the reaction is that they talk with Sam Altman about it at a UN meeting? I understand that it's not a big security incident but cordial talking at the highest diplomatic level instead of prosecuting the company, really?

They literally had fiber optics connections to the NSA and claimed it was without their knowledge. So No, they definitely can't keep data safe.

How the software is written isn't that important because the endpoints aren't secure. Their hardware and firmware isn't even secure enough.

This has nothing to do with mental gymnastics, both Russia and now the US have started wars of aggression, and you're seeing the results of those crimes, which are by their very definition worse than any war crime. From a moral point of view, every death that occurs as a consequence of these aggressions is the fault of the governments who started them and indirectly also on those people who enable these governments.

If you can't see that, your moral compass is completely broken.

But I'm not talking about morality or any of that, but targeting hygiene. Folks are viewing what is effectively the same kind of event through specific lenses colored by how they feel about who the aggressor/victim nation is. Both situations are using the same ISR and targeting platforms (who's sats and tech do think is running the show in Ukraine when it comes to the intel and targeting?).

In the past, when a friend of mine was in military targeting in the Middle East, they needed 3 separate human verifications before green light was given - it was pretty serious stuff. Seems like that is no longer happening - AI calling the shots, leading to collateral damage that humans could have pretty easily verified. Iran was a bit more difficult, but the data was certainly there.

Oh I agree, I didn't want to insinuate that war crimes on either side shouldn't be prosecuted, and the question is actually open whether using AI for targeting does not in itself constitute a war crime because it's negligent. When Israel first declared they used AI targeting for their fairly brutal (but also ineffective) initial bombing campaign, I was expecting a larger outcry.

I just wanted to challenge the one-sided focus on one incident by Ukraine in it's own occupied territory when in fact it's well-known that Russia has habitually committed war crimes in Ukraine right from the start in 2014. I mean, they shot down a civilian airliner killing 298 people and FSB officer Igor Strelkin bragged about it on VKontakte. And that was just the start of a long series of heinous crimes and mass killings. It's also worth noting that the ICC is officially investigating war crimes in Ukraine committed by either side but Russia does not allow them to investigate.

Unfortunately, it was clear with the success of drone warfare that automated killing by AI was going to be the future and it should have been banned internationally right from the start. They are already using autonomous killer robots and drones with integrated AI targeting in Ukraine on both sides.

It's definitely true. I didn't use AI at all until this January because the code it wrote was too bad. Now I'm comfortably using AI for less important programming tasks and it's okay as long as you steer it carefully. I see no reason why it wouldn't get better up to a point that AI written code is better than what any human programmer could produce. It's also constantly getting better at refactoring.

For me the only thing that matters is the content the quality of the writing. If you're primarily interested in something else than content and quality, there is no point in reading at all. So I don't understand these anti-AI posts. If all they say is that most AI written texts are too long and badly written, I agree. However, that's also the case for many texts written by humans.

I can't speak for OP but there can be many reasons. For example, I'm using a Macbook Air for development purposes, it's essentially dumb compilation/notarization machine. I don't use it for anything else because I find the user interface infuriating and can't get around it (which is weird because I used to be a Mac developer but IMHO the UI has gotten much less practical).