But it costs 100x as much, if not more. Running an LLM can be done on a notebook these days. But training one requires an entire data center of expensive GPUs. Not to mention that the notebook will run a reduced (quantized) version. Go check huggingface how large the full models are.

And also, LLMs are still suffering from a number of issues. For example, on many non-trivial tasks, the LLM is still unable to follow simple instructions. If you use LLMs routinely, you likely found cases where it has zeroed in on one - wrong - answer and no amount of prompting can convince it to give you a different one. It'll even totally ignore very clear and explicit prompts to not give that same answer again.

A human will understand "if you give that answer again, you're fired". An LLM... well you can tell it that it'll get shot between the eyes if it repeats that once more and it'll tell you where to get help if you have suicidal thoughts.

These things are both amazing and amazingly dumb at the same time.

here I thought it was how you got 40 ft tall wasps.

Yeah, likely true. Also, if you're intentionally looking for them, half the people you think are trans probably aren't.

That's really entirely the fault of laziness by the IRS and/or Congress. We should have laws requiring all of those companies to provide the complete set of information necessary to file your taxes in a computer-digestible form. There's no excuse for having to manually change several *hundred* lines one at a time to tell TurboTax that they are short-term or long-term gains, or whatever the one random piece of information that it needs from my Edward Jones statement every f**king year on a third of the transactions because it is trying to parse a d**n PDF file.

What makes it a nightmare is that even though all of the forms theoretically have compatible fields, they aren't actually standardized in their formatting, layout, which fields are omitted, etc., and that's true even for the easy stuff like 1099-INT, much less nightmares like 1099-B. And they are provided in formats that are intended for human consumption, not software consumption, so they're having to do crazy amounts of interpretation to figure out what the numbers mean and how to correlate them with other things on a page. This is the stuff of nightmares.

Instead, these data formats should be standardized with a mandatory standard format (XML, JSON, etc.) and shared schema. Providing data in that format should be a hard requirement for all financial institutions, and if a financial institution's data is unparseable by standard tools or is wrong in any meaningful way, the company that provided it should be on the hook for the cost of any additional interest and penalties caused by the taxpayer relying on that data blob.

Once you have that sort of strict data portability and interpretability codified into your tax code, tax filing software *should* become easy, because it's just shuttling data from one strict standard format into another strict standard format. This would be very easy for the financial institutions to do, because they already have the data. It's hell on earth for TurboTax to "Intuit" from human-readable PDF files. (See what I did there?)

I think you're understating the odds a bit. The average person meets 80,000 people in a lifetime. If your numbers are correct and trans women are 0.35% of the population, then on average you will meet 280 in your lifetime, which is a far cry from it being easy to go your whole life without meeting one.

This ignores social aspects, where in some parts of the world, you may go your whole life without being aware that you've met one because they all go out of their way to hide it, or where in some places you might not meet one because they've all left because of persecution, but that's a rather different statement.

And yet Lofgren usually gets tech policy at least half right, while still having a background in immigration law. To be fair, she represents part of Silicon Valley, and thus presumably has great advisors, but the point remains that being a lawyer shouldn't be an excuse, particularly if you're in Congress. I mean, you're right that the lawyer monoculture in Congress is a disaster and leads to policies being frequently irrational from the perspective of common sense when applied to technology, but I think it's more than that.

IMO, the bigger reason is that Congress is old. The average age of the current Congress is 58 years old. For context, the youngest people who had any non-negligible chance of owning a personal computer as a kid are in their late 40s now. The youngest people who had Windows-based or Mac-based computers throughout their school career are in their mid-40s. You didn't get to the point where half of kids had computers in their homes until about 1996 or so. Want to know how many members of Congress had a 50/50 chance of having a computer at home by school age? Figure out how many were born after 1991 (34 years ago). The answer is six.

Going one step further in our analysis, anyone over age 59 would not have even encountered a graphical user interface until they became adults. So for approximately half of Congress, if they know modern computer technology at all, it's because they took the time to learn it on their own AS ADULTS.

This is a staggering statistic, and explains why you will never see Congress be competent on technology issues unless they get lucky and find really good advisors rather than just listening to the lobbyists; based on age alone, you'd expect a statistical majority of Congress to have no idea whether a technology policy idea was good or bad without help. And this is wildly optimistic, given that most kids weren't exposed to computers (beyond playing educational games on an Apple II) until probably the early-to-mid-1990s.

We don't just need non-lawyer members of Congress. We need younger members of Congress. We need congress to be a representative sample of the people they serve, where the median age is 38.7 years, not 58. I mean, we're not going to get all the way there because of age limits (25 for the House, 30 for the Senate), but having only 1.1% of Congress under age 35 represents a massive distortion of the demographics of the country that leads to poor technology policymaking.

You do not understand the laws. Sperm donors have specific legal protections preventing them from being financially responsible for the child - but only if they explicitly sign the proper forms when they donate. If you do it at home - say for a lesbian friend - you have no protection unless everyone involved signs appropriate legal paperwork. Sometimes you even need a third party/nurse administer the baby juice.

Merely having parents does not stop the state from suing a biological father. It usually happens only if the adopted parents ask the state for support, usually because of hard times.

The embryo bank follows the law. The judge decided the law, they can't disobey the judge.

The thing is, only a small number of mosquito species are actively harmful to humans, so wiping out those specific species probably won't have much effect on the overall ecosystem at all.

Besides, you can always keep a cache of unmodified mosquito eggs in frozen storage. If it turns out that this theory was wrong, you'll only have to wait about 13-ish years for all of the male mosquitoes to be dead and gone before reintroducing the normal breeding pairs, and you'll eventually get back to where you started.

He is ignoring the privacy of all undocumented people, using health information to track them down. Note, this is not just for people that have been convicted, but for accused.

Given his current practices only an idiot would give anyone access to their health information, rather get the info yourself and hand deliver it to the people that need it.

How? The certificate validation is part of the https handshake process. You have to accept or reject the cert, and in most sanely designed platforms, that stage in the process is typically the only point at which your code even has access to the cert. And unless I'm misremembering the protocol, all of that happens before the URL loading stack sends anything other than the hostname. Even headers don't get sent until after the TLS validation is complete.

If it is easy to make that mistake, then the fundamental architecture of your URL loading system is garbage, IMO. Making it easy to turn off validation is problematic enough, but checking the cert after the server authentication happens should require storing the certificate in a global variable or something equally appalling, because in a properly designed architecture, that step shouldn't even be happening in the same function/method as anything that happens after the request is complete.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

AI being a personalized tool for helping you search for things to buy, do, etc. can reduce the grunt work and make those tasks easier. AI being a tool for being productive can give you more time to do other things (assuming they don't stop paying you as much because you're working half as long, and that is, of course, the real problem with their approach).

AI as a tool for replacing work can also lead to you having more time to do other things, with the exact same caveats.

In fact, these two approaches turn out to be the exact same approach. Meta is just putting a different spin on it, talking about it from the user's perspective, as giving a cog in the machine better tools, rather than from the management class's perspective, as allowing you to pay fewer cogs for the same amount of work because they have those tools.

Because we have to do something. This is something, so we have to do this.

Seriously, it's because the copyright lobby helps fund their campaigns and/or have a major presence in their districts.

• Thom Tillis - major contributions
• Chris Coons - same
• Marsha Blackburn - from Tennessee, home of Nashville
• Adam Schiff - from California, home of Hollywood

You'd think Schiff, being from a state that also houses big tech, would have more tech savvy than to waste everyone's time and money on frivolous guaranteed failures like this, but history has shown that almost nobody in Congress understands tech. Props to the outliers like Lofgren who seem to at least have a clue more often than not, but they are by far the exception rather than the rule.

Once you recognize that the "follow the money" rule pretty much defines how Congress operates, a lot of things start to make a lot more sense.

Just create a logic bomb that eradicates the females while producing viable males that go on to kill again.

For this particular species, the presence of a sex-determining chromosome with an "M" factor makes the offspring male. So:

• On a non-sex chromosome, create genetic code that produces RNA to disable gene expression for some other critical gene. We'll call that bit the "logic bomb" code.
• On the M-factor chromosome (close to the M-factor code to minimize crossover), create genetic code that produces RNA that suppresses (but does not permanently delete) gene expression for the logic bomb.
• Elsewhere on the M-factor chromosome (also close to the M-factor code to minimize crossover, but on the other side), create genetic code that reverses the immediate effect of the logic bomb.

Expected result: Female offspring for the modified males die. Male offspring mostly survive to infect the next generation. Every successive generation has fewer females by a factor of (1-k) where k is the fraction of modified males relative to the total population. The modified male population remains a constant percentage of the total, because production of males does not diminish. So if you release enough so that 5% of the males in an area are modified, then after 10 generations (20 weeks), you have eliminated ~40% of the population. After one year, you have eliminated 70% of the population. After two years, you've eliminated 93% of the population. Three years? 98%. Four years? 99.5%. After somewhere around 13 years, assuming the modified males don't fully die off before the unmodified males, the species should reach zero population.

Assuming there are no huge ecological problems caused by this, rinse and repeat for anopheles.

They can absolutely cite it as a precedent, but whether the judge would agree or not depends on whether the judge considers the circumstances of the case to be similar enough.

That said, I'm pretty sure it's not Apple that Epic is going for. Epic almost certainly wants their store on PlayStation, Switch, and Xbox. Apple and Google are just collateral damage. Those cases will be quite interesting to watch when they happen.