AI trained on AI hallucination will irreversibly and irreparably collapse. That was well-documented here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticle...

It gets worse when nation-states like russia and China are actively trying to make that happen. We cannot devalue human intelligence and human contact with reality, and we have to whitelist verifiable information. I believe we're going to need to slow down training of the largest models and work on human-legible knowledge bases for highly vetted reasoning agents.

The industry needs a reality check, and ethics need to assert themselves, to find solid ground and lasting usefulness. Throwing vast amount of funding and energy at building foundations on sand is not the way forward.

Meanwhile in China: a patent on a cheap way to cut undersea cables. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fchina...

Cable cuttings in the Baltic Sea and Taiwan Strait are becoming a regular thing. This is what failed deterrence looks like.

Does the substantiated content of this very article match the headline?

Who is going on the record, versus those speaking anonymously? Are the intelligence officials who say it's just accidents ever named in the article, versus the extensive part of the article where identified experts speak out to say there's extensive evidence for sabotage, and vanishingly small probabilities for it all being accidental? Named versus unnamed sources don't just tip the scales of credibility, they bring the nature of the source and the media relaying it into question.

Don't forget that when the sources are all "anonymous officials" who cover for Moscow's propaganda, you get a Seymour Hersch "poor waif in his underwear" where an extremely russian idiom makes it into English, and part of the damage control is "a translation error" when he's supposedly speaking to US officials. That is exactly how Kremlin propaganda gets laundered into the English media space.

Meanwhile, cable cuttings in the Baltic Sea and Taiwan strait are now a weekly occurrence.

Meanwhile: in China, there's a patent filed for a cheap device explicitly designed to cut seafloor cables. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fchina...

This is especially a shame because crushed glass can easily be rough and jagged enough to meet the same requirements as high-quality sand.

Even neurotypical people complain how difficult it is to maintain their attention span in focused mental labor. For those who live with ADHD, ad blockers are non-negotiable.

Ads are hostile to rational thought generally, but they are anathema to neurodivergent people with sensitivities or a focus-related disability.

Anyone whose business model is to afflict disabled people more than others deserves to fail.

The more greenhouses gasses are in our atmosphere, the more the lower atmosphere warms, and the upper atmosphere cools. Stratospheric phenomena that used to be confined to the polar regions are now global. This was consistently predicted as a component of industrially-induced climate change.

What are the odds that alien life has crossed space just to pester and confuse the locals, versus the odds that this is camera artifacts, misidentifications, and psy-ops? All of the latter are far more likely; in fact, they're confirmed to be happening.

Everyone knows that if you fuse four protons, you get two positrons, two neutrinos, an alpha particle, and SATAN. :D

My god, this is a horrible idea. Ever been in the kind of company where a top-notch HR director quits over openly voiced "ethical concerns"?

I was. My work was key to the company's success, and yet I got trashed by novice mid-managers and people who slept their way to the top. These were corrupt liars. A few decent people got out of there while they could, and they've been some of my most reliable references.

But can you imagine what crooks would do with this kind of database? I hasten to add, the ability to retaliate against workers who go on strike would only grow.

A great many CEOs do not understand or care about the people they employ, period. This would allow them yet more dirty tricks to all they have already.

It's amazing that people still write games and demos for an old machine that lacks basic features, like sending users notifications, and stealing their data. How quaint! Where's the Amiga demo with a like+subscribe model and backing everything up to the cloud?

I guess none of us kids in the 80s and 90s realized the importance of hardware-accelerated ad-optimization. No executive would have ever killed that!

As is, I haven't heard a single report of Amiga users' credit cards leaked from an insecure S3 bucket. Sounds pretty dead.

"What's that, Big Tech? You've allowed your platforms to spread medical disinformation and racial hate and conspiracy theories enough that people are already living in an alternate reality and making it impossible for us to work together to solve the big issues and now there's a metaverse? Great, let's put the goggles on. You're clearly the ones to trust with our perception of reality."

This whole thing makes me want to unplug more.

Trees are no different than any other species. You have to establish their habitat before you can expect to plant a lot of them and see them thrive.

What's missing here is landscaping to retain the right amount of water, and regulate its flow. Rainwater has got to be captured, retained, and allowed to move slowly through the landscape, and this usually means swales, berms, and lightly angled ditches. The next important part is the soil biome. We need to be farming for soil microbes to unlock its nutrients. Particularly promising are the anthropogenic carbonaceous soils, like Terra Preta in the Amazon and similar soils the native tribes used to start with char and compost. This created a microbial culture that actually absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere and adds its mass to the soil, effectively making the char "grow" as a structure to trap nutrients and create habitat.

This alone could do a lot of the work of sequestering CO2, and then, trees could thrive and top it off.

Adama: "It is an integrated computer network, and I will not have it aboard my ship."

Melting ice and glaciers, dry rivers, and ever more greenhouses in the air guarantee we'll see this headline again soon. This is going exponential.

Given how absolutely clown-shoes our response to COVID is for years running now, given headlines of yet more fracking and oil wells being funded, it's pretty inevitable. We're about to leave the Permian-Triassic mass extinction in the dust.

Better study what you need to know how to save an ecosystem in critical condition, because otherwise, only archaeologists will know we were ever here.