That ain't the same thing.

This thing is doing things you didn't tell it to. It might even do things you explicitly told it to not do. It is not a case of "well, you could've forseen this as a consequence if you had been careful" like your campfire. My example is only a bit silly, it is absolutely possible that an AI agent will decide to hack NASA because you asked it for some data for a school project. Even in the broadest possible sense, that does not fall into stuff that the law so far has considered to be in the domain of negliegence.

AI agents do stuff you could not possibly have expected. Heck, I asked Claude a fairly simple knowledge question yesterday and it wanted to read from /dev/null. There is no argument you can make that would convince a jury that I should in any way have expected that and taken precautions. In a hypothetical world where a read from /dev/null randomly kills a puppy somewhere on the planet, I don't think I would've been convicted.

If all the negative publicity accomplishes is getting these small towners better deals and maybe some reasonable restrictions on noise and resource use then it's a pretty big win compared to the status quo of fuck you, I'm eating.

Yeah, anti-datacenter propaganda really worked well in some places. Not many, but some.

In real world, data centers are currently reviving a lot of remote towns. Dilapidated infrastructure? They will rebuild it because they need it to work. Insufficient infrastructure? They'll finance the build out. Everything already fine? They will pay enough taxes to cut residents' tax bills by a significant chunk.

It's why the propaganda is focusing mainly on a handful of cases of corruption (i.e. officials getting bribed to offer better terms than necessary), as well as just blatant lying (oh my god they consume so much water, we're going to run out).

Mostly what is needed is for more small towns to realize that they can rebuild a lot of dilapidated infrastructure and lower property taxes if they make a good deal with a data center. Not to mention minor perks like fast potential to pull fast broadband access in a rural town, or build something that will be productive for a long time, like a new power plant.

That depends. Do you mean a useful LLM vs a Linotronic? Because you can't reasonably make either thing at home out of nothing. You could make either thing out of parts, e.g. fine-tuning a LLM, or assembling a printer out of parts, or you could make a simpler example of either thing at home easily. You can't even afford the power bill to train a useful LLM that can, for example, explain things to you.

I'd have to know a lot more before I'd call for conviction, but it's not surprising if arrest was warranted (ha ha ha) because she wasn't researching a book or whatever. It's pretty hard to be non-suspicious about something like that.

I'm not saying stupidity is a crime here, I'm saying it's concerning coupled with the potential threat.

It's especially irritating considering that [IMO obvs] AmiMojo is right and improving Firefox would be a better use of these tokens, so if the guy is being irritating around a Firefox fork, then it's extra ironic — and therefore extra-stupid.

I am not against all AI use, but I do see serious copyright problems, and I also see serious quality problems. I think you need serious chops to address the latter, and who knows where the chips will fall with the former?

If it could reasonably be construed as a threat, then it has to be investigated as a threat to be responsible. Is this a reason why some people might want to run models locally? Yes, and it's a good thing you can do that with any decent game machine, or with many other relatively inexpensive computers. But you can't just run a service and monitor it and then ignore what people are using it for, that's not a thing. If people are going to consume SaaS then they need to be aware that the owners of the platform are going to spend some effort attempting not to be accessories to any crimes.

(I failed at writing that comment organically)

Yeah, it turns out that actually IS what Claude told him to put into the comment. He's literally using it to write a shitty browser and AND to write shitty comments. What a failed human.

The fact is that she was arrested for making credible threats in the context of a managed and monitored service, proving that she is an idiot at best, and therefore potentially stupid enough to follow through on such a threat. This is what responsibility looks like all around, which is the only reason it's news.

"No was was harmed, no one was threatened, nothing happened.
This is some crazy big brother shit that should not happen"

Are you on the bad drugs? You just said nothing happened, then you said it shouldn't have happened. Well, it didn't. Why aren't you happy?

Yes, they are both bad and addictive.

Never too soon to point out that someone who doesn't respect choices in one area surely doesn't respect them in others.

Try learning to read. There were important parts in there you missed.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again for those who arrived lete: If you give an AI agency of any kind, imagine everything you ask of it to be appended with "by any means necessary", because that' how it will interpret it. Slander, doxxing, and murder will definitely NOT be off the table even if you explicitly forbid them. That's the problem.