Phase 1 trials can consist of as few as twenty subjects, although fifty is more common. It's basically there to make sure you don't kill or injure hundreds of test subjects in the larger trials with the dosage and protocol you intend to use. Only about a quarter of drugs which are rejected as unsafe are rejected at Phase 1. There have been drug trials halted because they killed dozens of people *in phase 3*.

Ultimately just 10% of drugs that pass Phase 1 get approved. The rest are either too dangerous or too ineffective.

The compassionate use exception carved out by the Federal Try Act is specifically targeted at people who have little or nothing to lose. It kills a few people who were going to die anyway, but in a few very rare cases it may have saved a few individuals. So you can argue from a utilitarian standpoint that it's ethical to make this exception for terminally ill patients because the exception does more good than harm. But extending the exception to people who aren't terminally ill will do more harm than good, just going by the number of treatments that prove unsafe *after* Phase 1.

That's why I'm not investing in AI stocks. I don't believe the pitch the companies are making to investors. That doesn't mean that LLMs aren't a tremendous technological achievement that could be very useful.

Whether it's a net good for mankind, I'm skeptical. But as long as it exists, use it cautiously and wisely.

What I've been saying all along is that the biggest problem with the technology isn't going to be the technology per se. It's going to be the people who use it being lazy, credulous, and ignorant of the technology's limitations.

The bottom line is that as it stands LLM isn't any good for what these bozos are using it for: saving labor creating a brief. You still have to do the legal research and feed it the relevant cases, instructing it not to cite any other cases, then check its characterization of that case law for correctness. In other words, you still have to do all the hard work, so it's hardly worth using if all you are interested in is getting an acceptable brief quickly.

But if you *have* done all that work, it's quite safe to use AI to improve your brief, for example tightening up your prose. You can use it to brainstorm arguments. You can use it to check your brief for obvious counter-arguments you missed. There's absolutely nothing wrong with lawyers *who know what they're doing* using AI to improve their work. It just can't *do* their work for them.

I thought of provisioning as an obstacle, but it's not necessarily a difficult one for an actor with "national means" to overcome. Most likely none of the low-cost service providers who provide service for things like GPS trackers would bat an eye if you had a shell company set up a few hundred or even a thousand devices. Just tell them you're doing vehicle tracking or something like that. China's MSS could even set up a bogus cell tower near their target sites, stringray style. The main target of such an attack wouldn't be the device itself, or even the facility, but the grid, possibly in conjunction with another type of attack to impede recovery.

That said, I don't think that's what these things are there for. I think it's just a case of the vendor finding it convenient to sell the same SKU to all its customers. But you're right, this is all just a conjecture. The possibility merits investigation, even if it's not likely.

While steel is one of the most recyclable materials there is, concrete isn't that great. Most concrete "recycling" would be more accurately characterized as "downcycling" -- using old crushed concrete for road beds for example. It is possible to reuse old crushed concrete as aggregate in new concrete, which does technically count as "recycling", but it doesn't address the single most significant environmental impact of concrete, the carbon emissions of cement production.

Anytime you propose replacing X with Y, both X and Y will have environmental impacts; you just think that the impacts of Y aren't as bad. This is a new material, and we can't quantify what its impacts will be, but they'll be there. Service life plays a role here too and we don't know what that is. If a beam made out of this stuff lasts as long as a steel beam, that'll almost certainly be a carbon footprint win, but if you have to replace it ten times it might not be.

Sure, industrial infrastructure commonly has remote monitoring and administration capabilities. Grid storage systems for example have to monitor battery and inverter health. EV chargers can often communicate to determine the most economical charge times.

In this case the devices included cellular radios that could bypass site network administrators completely. Again this is not necessarily nefarious, because there are legitimate use cases for this.

But if the capability is there, it should be shipped totally disabled unless the customer requests otherwise. A competent engineer could determine whether that's the case. Even if the cellular modem isn't provisioned with a data carrier, if it is operational an agent with national means could communicate with it stingray style. If it is physically possible for an unauthorized person with knowledge of the system to gain control of this equipment, somebody has some explaining to do.

You shouldn't have to resort to cleverness and effort to find this out. AI training bots should log the URLs they ingest, and anyone should be able to query those logs to see if their site has been used to train the model. Given the vast sums companies are spending on training their models, the marginal effort of maintaining a public log wouldn't add any significant cost, other than the litigation costs they'll face when sites discover their TOSs have been violated.

The whole "move fast break things" ethos counts on creating a new status quo faster than regulatory bodies can respond. Tech startups rely on creating a fait accompli before government even notices the problem, but if they fail in that a well-funded company has recourse to deceptive PR, then lobbying, then lawyers to gum up the works. In AI, companies are already racing each other as fast as obscene gobs of money can propel them forward; it wouldn't take much to slow down any public regulatory response so that it will have to be mounted against the winner of that race, a company that will be in a much more commanding position to fight back.

In the meantime your hypothetical whistleblowing engineer probably is compensated to a substantial degree with stock options, and his continued employment prospects after ratting out his company are bleak in an industry where everyone is doing the same thing.

I'm not saying its impossible, but I'm a lot more pessimistic than you about it being *easy*. I suspect that enabling private actors to move against AI companies would be a lot faster. Since damages are hard to prove or quantify, simply creating statutory damages would allow intellectual property owners to take the initiative against infringing AI systems. It would help if there were transparency regulations which aided IP owners in detecting unauthorized training. Of course the downside is the volume of litigation that would follow.

How does the fact that 85% of the chips in question are manufactured in Taiwan affect this? It seems like if you want to keep AI chips out of Chinese (meaning PRC) hands, you're going to have to be ready to put boots on the ground in Taiwan.

Back when nerds drove technology, not plutocrats.

One can date the exact point at which this stopped being fun, it was the day Mark Zuckerberg said "Privacy is dead. Get over it."

The political scientist and longtime US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

Now Canada is remarkably culturally and economically similar to the US, but it is also starkly different in ways that bear on controversies in US politics: socialized medicine, gun control, support for science and university education, immigration and refugees, queer and transgender rights. Canadian politics and public life are also far more secular than the United States, and while atheism is a minority position (about one in five) its still five times more common than in the US.

If Canada were *not* a hell hole, then all those hot-button culture war political issues in the United States would be demonstrably bullshit. This means a lot of people would need new issues, or freshly fabricated "facts".

I think that's the wrong question. The correct question is: why does the *vendor* want you to have smart glasses without AR?

The answer is to capture in more detail than ever before your attention and consciousness. The devices will likely be able to tell what you are looking at, and be able to correlate it to things like buying behavior and, possibly in conjunction with a health tracker, your physiological responses. They might even include eye tracking.

Two different things. Tesla only provides driver-assist technology, like you'll find in any luxury automobile these days. "Full self-driving" is a total misnomer, bordering on fraud. WAymo, on the other hand, is truly self-driving, and to do that it relies on tons and tons of mapping and telemetry data. I'm not even sure how it plans to adapt its technology to highway environments, but Tesla is nowhere close.

It is physically possible to replace petroleum based lubricants with synthetic lubricants created from vegetable feedstocks, it's just not economically feasible in any near term time frame. However what is economically feasible depends on circumstances and alternatives. In a world in which we did this, the circumstances would have to be very different from present.

Imagine a hypothetical world powered by thorium fuel cycle nuclear where electricity was so much cheaper than it is now that it eliminated the use of petroleum for fuel. We'd still be extracting oil for lubricants and plastics, but these materials would be more expensive because the costs of extraction and processing are no longer being paid by fuel users. The high price of lubricants would be OK because we're getting a huge break on energy costs, but that high price would make bioplastics and biolubricants more attractive for research and development.

Such a scenario would happen overnight, it would take decades, but over decades things change so much the familiar becomes unrecognizable.

I think we're still a long way from that. I'm told Waymo has been given permission to start training its vehicles on highways in California, but it has yet to do so. The company rolls its stuff out very carefully and thoughtfully, the way it needs to be.