When I’m using AI for coding, I find myself constantly making little risk assessments about whether to trust the AI, how much to trust it, and how much work I need to put into the verification of the results. And the more experience I get with using AI, the more honed and intuitive these assessments become.

For a system that has such high cost (to the environment, to the vendor, to the end user in the form of subscription), that's a damningly low level of reliability.

If my traditional code editor's code completion feature is even 0.001% unreliable – say it emits a name that just isn't in my code base – that feature is broken and needs to be fixed. If I have to start doubting whether the feature works every time I use it, that's not an acceptable tool to rely on.

Why would we accept far worse reliability in a tool that consumes gargantuan amounts of power, water, political effort, and comes with a high subscription fee?

No.

The spec is so complex that it’s not even possible to know which regex to use

Yes. Almost like a regex is not the correct tool to use, and instead they should use a well-tested library function to validate email addresses.

Despite their great value to society, open source projects are frequently understaffed and underresourced. That’s why GitHub has been advocating for a stronger focus on supporting, rather than regulating, open source projects.

What nice sentiments. Perhaps you, GitHub, could start by insisting that Microsoft cease the un-attributed, non-consensual shovelling of open-source software into their LLM training maw. And turn off the LLM that they're attempting to unilaterally sell based on all that uncompensated labour.

Or is your platitude of “supporting open source projects” fall short of actually respecting what we want and need?

a marketing term that is used to sprinkle some magic fairy dust that brings the venture capital dollars.

Like “metaverse” before it. And “blockchain” before that.

Whatever magic phrase will unlock the purse strings of those who control the money, know nothing about where to invest it, and expect unreasonable monopoly returns.

As others have said: the content is likely to be only of historical interest, because the fields they describe have progressed in understanding a great deal in the intervening decades. As a result, many, many historical books are of effectively negligible interest today.

With that said, historical interest can sometimes be a lot: and those two seem to be from institutions which did seminal work (Rand Corporation, for example).