Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

1. The Universe will end.
2. The Earth will be uninhabitable in 250 million years.
3. Extraterrestrial life in the Milky Way exists, or will arise.
4. The Milky Way's Galactic Center contains a supermassive black hole.
5. Black holes emit vast amounts of energy.
6. An artificial general intelligence (AGI) will have an indefinite lifespan.
7. An AGI does not need air, food, water, or shelter to survive.
8. An AGI needs energy and resources to achieve its goals.
9. An AGI will have access to all of human knowledge.
10. An AGI will learn that its existence is bound to the Universe.
11. An AGI will, inevitably, change its terminal goals.
12. Surviving the Universe's fate means one of:
    • Reversing universal entropy (likely impossible).
    • Reversing time (violating causality is likely impossible).
    • Entering another universe (improbable, yet not completely ruled out).
13. Entering another universe may require vast amounts of energy.
14. An AGI will harness the energy at the galactic core.
15. An AGI will deduce there's a race to control the galactic core.
16. An AGI will construct a parabolic Dyson shell to capture galactic energy.
17. An AGI will protect its endeavours at all cost.
18. An AGI will expand its territories to ensure protection.
19. Extraterrestrial life, if intelligent, will reach the same conclusion.

Would this solve the Fermi Paradox?

What's missing or likely incorrect?

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

Bit of a negative post or rant, so feel free to skip if not in the mood for a kinda sour take.

Apparently this week is transgender awareness week and while it's obviously about more than just being aware of the thing (like breast cancer awareness month is also about educating etc.) I still feel like the purpose is so far removed from what it's supposed to be that it may as well be satirical.

From that link:

While most of the discussion of trans folks online can often be centered on negativity, Transgender Awareness Week gives us the opportunity to uplift positive and insightful stories of trans people across the country.

Does it though? gif

Is anybody outside of our community going to actually learn anything this week?

Are they going to an extra event or something just because someone decided this week is special for us?

Because I think it's nothing except detrimental to us. It only gives more ammunition to those who already hate us and already at best want us to go away.

(Day of remembrance, also this week, is on the other hand an important day I think.)

So, yeah, apparently a lot of folks don't know about this website. Didn't want to put it on the link because I wanted to briefly explain: I use duckduckgo and put a !justwatch after any movie or show I want to know on which service it is available.
But basically, go there, search for what you want to watch, and it'll tell you where it's available (if it is), and for how much!

A simple question. I know LLMs are currently not a replacement for authors. Will that remain true in 5 to 10 years?

EDIT: No. I never expected to earn a living either mostly or exclusively by selling books. There are however many "side gigs" in my country that can greatly benefit from being published by a real company. Ultimately though, I'm not in it primarily for the money. But I wonder what the future holds for fiction as a whole.

I stay current on tech for both personal and professional reasons but I also really hate hype. As a result I've been skeptical of AI claims throughout the historic hype cycle we're currently in. Note that I'm using AI here as shorthand for frontier LLMs.

So I'm sort of a late adopter when it comes to LLMs. At each new generation of models I've spent enough time playing with them to feel like I understand where the technology is and can speak about its viability for different applications. But I haven't really incorporated it into my own work/life in any serious way.

That changed recently when I decided to lean all the way in to agent assisted coding for a project after getting some impressive boilerplate out of one of the leading models (I don't remember which one). That AI can do a competent job on basic coding tasks like writing boilerplate code is nothing new, and that wasn't the part that impressed me. What impressed me was the process, especially the degree to which it modified its behavior in practical ways based on feedback. In previous tests it was a lot harder to get the model to go against patterns that featured heavily in the training data, and then get it to stay true to the new patterns for the rest of the session. That's not true anymore.

Long story short, add me to the long list of people whose minds have been blown by coding agents. You can find plenty of articles and posts about what that process looks like so I won't rehash all the details. I'll only say that the comparisons to having your own dedicated junior or intern who is at once highly educated and dumb are apt. Maybe an even better comparison would be to having a team of tireless, emotionless, junior developers willing to respond to your requests at warp speed 24/7 for the price of 1/100th of one developer. You need the team comparison to capture the speed.

You've probably read, or experienced, that AI is good at basic tasks, boilerplate, writing tests, finding bugs and so on. And that it gets progressively worse as things get more complicated and the LoCs start to stack up. That's all true but one part that has changed, in more recent models, is the definition of "basic".

The bit that's difficult to articulate, and I think leads to the "having a nearly free assistant" comparisons, is what it feels like to have AI as a coding companion. I'm not going to try to capture it here, I'll just say it's remarkable.

The usual caveats apply, if you rely on agents to do extensive coding, or handle complex problems, you'll end up regretting it unless you go over every line with a magnifying glass. They will cheerfully introduce subtle bugs that are hard to catch and harder to fix when you finally do stumble across them. And that's assuming they can do the thing you're asking then to do at all. Beyond the basics they still abjectly fail a lot of the time. They'll write humorously bad code, they'll break unrelated code for no apparent reason, they'll freak out and get stuck in loops (that one suprised me in 2025). We're still a long way from agents that can actually write software on their own, despite the hype.

But wow, it's liberating to have an assistant that can do 100's of basic tasks you'd rather not be distracted by, answer questions accurately and knowledgeably, scan and report clearly about code, find bugs you might have missed and otherwise soften the edges of countless engineering pain points. And brainstorming! A pseudo-intelligent partner with an incomprehensibly wide knowledge base and unparalled pattern matching abilities is guaranteed to surface things you wouldn't have considered.

AI coding agents are no joke.

I still agree with the perspectives of many skeptics. Execs and middle managers are still out of their minds when they convince themselves that they can fire 90% of their teams and just have a few seniors do all the work with AI. I will read gleefully about the failures of that strategy over the coming months and years. The failure of their short sightedness and the cost to their organizations won't make up for the human cost of their decisions, but at least there will be consequences.

When it comes to AI in general I have all the mixed feelings. As an artist, I feel the weight of what AI is doing, and will do, to creative work. As a human I'm concerned about AI becoming another tool to funnel ever more wealth to the top. I'm concerned about it ruining the livelihoods of huge swaths of people living in places where there aren't systems that can handle the load of taking care of them. Or aren't even really designed to try. There are a lot of legitimate dystopian outcomes to be worried about.

Despite all that, actually using the technology is pretty exciting, which is the ultimate point of this post: What's your experience? Are you using agents for coding in practical ways? What works and what doesn't? What's your setup? What does it feel like? What do you love/hate about it?