At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

They were just brown people anyway. So far as peety, alexi, peety, and donnie are concerned, that's just a bonus achievement unlock... more points to score from the base and a nice bronze trophy icon to go with their gamertags.

My grandfathered-in HBO Max account was the last thing keeping me on AT&T. So now I can bail to T-Mobile for their more international-friendly plans and their willingness to actually support ALL of the new iPhone's features.

Unfortunately, if that were true, the likes of Cellebrite, NSO Group, Anduril, and Palantir would all be long-since dead and buried.

While that is certianly a very nice thought, I don't think it's accurate. If self-interest were the determining factor, we wouldn't be where we are in the first place. The fact that the man was elected even once, much less the second time, demonstrates quite clearly that there are vast hoardes in this country who hate brown people, immigrants, and LGBT people far more than they love their bank accounts, IRAs, and 401ks.

Cripes.

Just what IS it with the GOP's obcession with silencing Talarico anyway. I watched the Colbert interview they also tried to suppress. And the guy is hardly a progressive and barely liberal at all. Before maga, the guy would have been running as a republican or; if he claimed to be Democratic; he'd be denounced as a DINO.

It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.

While the energy source of wind and solar are free, building and maintaining the plants is not free.

If all they were building were a single 100MW data center, sure: renewables would be cheaper to build. But they evidently are planning a major campus that will consume most of the plant's 615 MW output over the next 25 years.

A solar installation, in a favorable location, capable of supplying 600MW around the clock (with battery backup) would have to be roughly 1800MW in capacity. It would be among the largest inthe world, on the order of ten thousand acres in size at a build cost of maybe 2 billion. The battery backup system to ensure 99.9% uptime would be 9x the size of the largest li-ion grid storage system ever built, and set you back on the order of 4-5 billion dollars.

While it's probably cheaper to go renewable than build a *new* nuclear plant, if you can reactivate and one for just two billion that looks like a bargain, if you have a use for all that power. Inability to save money by load following is the financial Achilles' heel of this generation of reactors, but if you have a guaranteed customer for most of your output, years in advance, that's as close to an ideal economic case for them as anything could be.

ToS is the strongest argument, but the distillers are not parties to the ToS. They get their data from data brokers. It is possible that data brokers are violating the ToS, but it would be hard to write ToS that precluded running queries for third parties without creating problems for consultancies and other businesses. Even presuming the ToS could be written to preclude the data brokers doing that, it doesn't affect the resulting model.

But the general shape of the argument brings us right back to unclean hands: we worked hard on this model and it's not fair for you to profit off our work in a way that doesn't have our permission.

I think the fair-minded position is to see what people think when the documentary comes out. You're essentially arguing a negative here -- that there *can't* be anything of value that hasn't been said yet.

Also, I don't think saying something *new* is necessarily critical. Sometimes saying something obvious but in an interesting way is worthwhile.

In this case, Holmes gave access to the filmmaker. Obviously she has an agenda. If the filmmaker is smart, he has an agenda that's different from hers. If he knows his business he'll find something interesting to show you from that conflict.

Now looking at the trailer -- holy shit that woman gives off batshit crazy vibes. That's new to me. I expected her to be slick, persuasive, like Saruman in Lord of the Rings: someone. you'd need real strength of mind to resist being persuaded by. If I'd just handed someone like that my business card, I'd get it back on some pretext then head as fast as I could for the door.

It doesn't make it *right*, but it does make claiming it is *wrong* inconsistent with their own behavior. This could prevent the US companies from suing the Chinese companies seeking an injunction (due to the "unclean hands" doctrine), and probably blocks them from seeking monetary damages in most US jurisdictions.

And suing may undermine the US companies own intellectual property claims by exposing their shaky foundations. An AI model isn't *expression*, so it can't be copyrighted. Insofar as the service allows the underlying model to be deduced through regular usage, trade secret protections don't apply because that's *reverse engineering*, which trade secrets don't prevent.

This leaves violations of terms of service. But setting aside the dubious enforceability of anti-reverse engineering provisions, the Chinese companies may not even be parties to the ToS agreement if they are obtaining the model data through a network of contractors and shell companies.With only moderate paranoia, they can effectively shield themselves from some kind of US tort claim.

Which leaves them with the model they've created from the US company's model, but which the US company has no IP claim upon. If I download a DeepSeek model that's been (hypothetically speaking) trained on Claude, Anthropic might not like that, but what can they do about it?

It's a strange situation. US investors are spending cumulatively on over half a trillion dollars a year in the hope of owning a breakthrough frontier model that is the end of the economic world as we know it. But the essence of the model might not be intellectual property at all.

That's absurd. It's an app designed to find the optimal route from point A to point B. This is just a feature flag to determine if this method works in real life as it does in simulation. It's nothing different or unusual from any gated feature flag that any company uses to roll out new features to a subset of the user base first. That's not "unethical experimentation on human subjects", it's bog-standard app development, the way everyone does it.

Because latitude doesn't matter to xenophobes who think the rest of the world doesn't matter. Those same people with such a myopic image of Africa will also usually look at Scandinavia and stop at: Swedish bikini team, Muppet chef, Volvo, and Vikings. Or, mention Hokkaido and Ainu and you'll get a blank stare.

And let's be real... it's not just Americans who tend to be incurious about the world. See, for example, Denmark's little subterfuge with the naming of Iceland and Greenland, and the fact that it WORKED.

How much of that is due to the map projection? And how of that is due to the fact that most Americans are very poorly educated about Africa; and we tend to compress things with which we're not familiar in our minds. Even I'm guilty of it. Just this year I re-discovered the fact that not every country of okay with endless suburban sprawl. So they build their cities BIG; such the population of San Francisco, which is "the" city to me, could be a mere neighborhood. And no amount of studying the map and photos so I'll know where stuff is prevents me from being startled at the actual scale when I get to what the rest of the world calls a city.

And let's be real. There are more than a few Americans whose entire concept of Africa is: ancient Egypt, The Lion King, Sally Struthers, the Sarah desert, Busch Gardens, if they're a particular chest-thumping sort they'll know about the "great white exlorer/hunter" era and Patton's North Africa campaigns, and terrorists.

Until you've actually been to a place, that place compress in the head very easily even if you know better and try to fight the tendency. A lot of people neither know or try. To them, the whole continent probably fits on a largish GTA map.

But still... inflated poles notwithstanding, it is clear that Africa spans something like 70 degrees of latitude. That's frikkin huge, and quite obviously so.