Manchester, England. I resisted getting a Slashdot ID for a while, as I hated the idea of username/password logins rather than just entering a name. Otherwise my UID would be two or three digits, as I had been on Slashdot a long time before they had usernames.

No, I would have to disagree, for a simple reason.

Humans are capable of abstracting/generalising, extrapolating, and projecting because of the architecture of the brain and not because of any specific feature of a human neuron.

The very nature of a NN architecture means that NNs, as they exist, cannot ever perform the functions that make humans intelligent. The human brain is designed purely around input semantics (what things mean), not input syntax (what things are), because the brain has essentially nothing external in it, everything is internal.

I use AGI to mean an AI that is capable of anything the biological brain is capable of, because the brain is the only probable intelligence to measure against.

This has nothing to do with good/bad, or any of the other stuff in your post. It's a simple process - if there's a model of thought the brain can do, then it is a modern of thought an AGI must do or it is neither general nor intelligent.

In America we have essentially legislated against small vehicles. Our CAFE standards were supposedly designed to push us towards more fuel efficient vehicles, but the reality is that the easiest way to pass CAFE standards is to simply make the vehicle larger. So the United States ends up with larger vehicles, and the smaller vehicles that we do get tend to be more expensive than we should be. We have essentially legislated away the category of a ultra basic small car. That happens to be a pretty popular segment in most of the world. The small cars we can buy are nearly as expensive as their larger brethren and so they make a lot less sense.

EVs are an even better example of how U.S. legislation skews things towards larger ICE vehicles. The most popular EVs in most of the world are the most basic EVs. I personally would love to buy a basic EV to replace my current commuter car. I have a house and a place to plug in an EV. My commute is short and even the most basic EVs would be fine. However, the only vehicles available in the market are essentially luxury vehicles. I can buy a whole lot of gasoline for $30K, which is the least expensive new EV available here, but if I could get my hands on a cheap Chinese EV for $12K I absolutely would do that. For the price of the least expensive EV you can basically buy a Toyota RAV4 that is a much more capable vehicle.

For Microsoft to actually fix a bug, and not merely add a new one, is a feat that is beyond the imagination.

1. Even the AI systems (and I've checked with Claude, three different ChatGPT models, and Gemini) agree that AGI is not possible with the software path currently being followed.

2. This should be obvious. Organic brains have properties not present within current neural nets (localised, regionalised, and even globalised feedback loops within an individual module of a brain (the brain doesn't pause for inputs but rather mixes any external inputs with synthesised inputs, the and brain's ability to run through various possible forecasts into the future and then select from them along the brain's ability to perform original synthesis between memory constructs and any given forecast to create scenarios for which no input exists, to produce those aforementioned synthesised inputs). There simply isn't a way to have multi-level infinite loops in existng NN architectures.

3. The brain doesn't perceive external inputs the way NNs do - as fully-finished things - but rather as index pointers into memory. This is absolutely critical. What you see, hear, feel, etc -- none of that is coming from your senses. Your senses don't work like that. Your senses merely tell the brain what constructs to pull, and the brain constructs the context window entirely from those memories. It makes no reference to the actual external inputs at all. This is actually a good thing, because it allows the brain to evolve and abstract out context, things that NNs can't do precisely because they don't work this way.

Until all this is done, OpenAI will never produce AGI.

if you're looking for long-term utility and support. I made that mistake with the iPad - the first iPad lost support quickly compared to iPad 2 and following.

Apple's design and testing people are good, but you don't really know what people really want until you have feedback from several thousand users.

To the people who bought Vision Pro - thanks for your input on Vision Pro 2, which we won't see until Apple can solve the obvious Vision Pro problems of weight, power, and cost.

Yes, verifying the citations is trivially easy, which is how these people get caught. You will notice that the lawyers in question say that it was an honest citation mistake and not "fabrication of authority" which is a legal term for a crime that carries jail time and fines. The problem with that defense is that the article that they cited doesn't actually exist. They say it has an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors, but I suspect that is legal speak for, "AI made up the article."

Now, if an article exists that happens to say approximately the same thing, and it just has a different title and authors then it is possible that the lawyers in question might be able to pretend that they really did just goof up the title and authors. If not, then what they did actually fits the definition of fabrication of authority. At which point I think that they should throw the book the fools.

The reality is that our current legal system relies heavily on lawyers not pulling these kinds of stunts. The system is adversarial, for sure, but it is generally assumed that the opposing counsel isn't making things up whole cloth. That's why fabrication of authority carries such high penalties. No one has time to check every citation. The assumption is that the person writing the brief is citing correctly and not misrepresenting what is actually said. The fact that these particular lawyers took it a step further and included a citation that doesn't even exist is absolutely ridiculous.

Yes. And they probably need to use Google Messages and not whatever Samsung (or whatever) sets by default. The Apple user also has to have iOS 18 and a carrier that supports RCS for iPhones, this is definitely not all of them, although the big three now support RCS on iPhone.

I suspect that there were lots of cases, in a company the size of Microsoft, where someone didn't get along with their boss, or had problems with a team that they were on, but that still had friends and allies in other parts of the organization. So they might get let go from one part of the organization, but when another part of the organization had an opening they then got rehired.

Like most rules of this type I would bet that the new policy has an interesting story. I would bet that one particularly toxic employee got rehired enough times that management finally created a policy against it. The whole point of the new policy is that people fired in this manner can no longer work for Microsoft for two years, even if some other part of the organization wants them.

Personally I would rather pay a flat rate (even a slightly inflated flat rate) than hand over my location data to the government.

I do agree that at $200 per year that is quite a bit steeper than it should be. The current federal gas tax is $0.184 per gallon. That means that you would have to burn 1087 gallons of gas to spend that much. At 20/24 MPG you would have to drive at least 21,740 miles to spend that much. That's hardly typical. If the price were $100 that would seem a lot more equitable.

More importantly, I don't know why commercial vehicles should get a pass. Commercial vehicles don't currently get a pass when it comes to gasoline taxes, and it is all too easy to get your vehicle labeled "commercial." We can't hardly pretend that commercial vehicles don't wear down the roads. I understand why this was done. A lot of businesses (most notably Amazon) have switched to electric vehicles specifically to dodge this particular tax. In certain parts of the U.S. (including where I live) electricity is cheap enough that a lot of businesses have already made this switch.

If the tax was closer to equitable then this would not be a big deal. Yes, electric vehicles would lose some of their relative competitive advantage against internal combustion vehicles, but at least our roads would get paid for. Electric vehicles still get substantial direct subsidies.

Apple can by default read the contents of your iPhone backups.
I could see them running the moral equivalent of an anti-virus scan over those backups.

You can encrypt your backups, but then you had better not lose your backup keys or you're REALLY screwed.

vast price disparities ($80 per ton for forest projects versus $1,000 for direct air capture)

Plant fast-growing trees on West Virginia mountains
Harvest them
Bury them in local abandoned coal mines
Repeat every 5-10 years

Jobs to replace lost coal mining jobs.
New uses for old coal mines (well, probably not the mountain top removal mines...).

I'm not sure you could grow and bury two tons of wood for $80, but you could definitely do it for $1000.
All that's needed for this to work is a guaranteed price for real not-faking-it carbon sequestration.

This sort of system is only useful because LLMs are limited. If they can be told to farm certain categories of step to middleware, then when they encounter such a step, they should farm out the request. I've found, with trying engineering problems, that LLMs consume a lot of steps finding out what to collect, with a risk of hallucination. That's exactly the sort of thing that can be farmed out.

According to both Claude and ChatGPT, that sort of process is the focus of a lot of research, right now, although apparently it's not actually been tried with reasoners.

I am a lifelong conservative. The first time I didn't vote Republican for anything was the first time that Trump ran. It makes me crazy that the party of free trade has somehow become the party of tariffs.

That being the case, I suspect that Trump is going to Jimmy Carter the economy. Rightly or wrongly, Jimmy Carter was blamed for wrecking the economy to the point where Democrats didn't have a chance of winning the presidency for 8 terms. Not only did Reagan win twice, but Bush won twice as well.

The midterm elections are already going to be rough for Republicans. I suspect that even without gimmicks like Amazon showing us what these tariffs are costing us that prices are going to go up across the board.