The issue isn't that AI doesn't need any regulation. It's that we have no idea how we should regulate it yet that makes sense. All that regulation now would do is create hurdles that prevent small competitors or open-source alternatives and centralize power in the few people deciding what we get to do with AI. That's the truly scary outcome. Right now regulation would just end up being based on ideas from sci-fi films.

I mean the real problems the internet created and we care about now aren't those that seemed important in the 90s (I mean they weren't wrong that people would find porn but it doesn't seem like a big deal anymore).

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

It's annoying that you have to change your mac address every 20 minutes, but yeah. Free wifi (after hoop jumping) has been available for quite a while on many airlines.

First they came for Boeing, and I didn't say anything because I wasn't all fucked up.

Got to be pretty unconventional to count as unconventional in QM.

It's clear the brute force approach works and is sometimes the best way to advance. Once you see the path to getting the job done, take it. I see projects like ITER and ChatGPT4 in this category. Can you learn to do these things more efficiently given a few extra years of R&D? Obviously. But you are also a few years behind, and you have probably spent a lot of effort prematurely optimizing.

Being a hippie never goes out of style.

Not everyone has enough money to do groundbreaking things like put a car in orbit.

I saw it when it came out, and thought it sucked donkey doodles.

Don't they know fake news is what everyone wants these days?

Perhaps I'm being too harsh. For example, if their boss is an MBA who gives out raises on the basis of how many pounds+gallons they produce or sell, they would be quite rational to request a report that shows how many pounds+gallons they have produced or sold.

For some suitable definition of "work".

In my experience, business "analysts" don't know what the hell they want, let alone how to specify it.

I've been asked to create reports that add pounds + gallons, and it's almost impossible to get them to understand why that's nonsense.

Why not? People who think their god will protect them don't need foxholes. People in foxholes are putting their trust in the boring but well-established ability of a thick pile of dirt to stop bullets.

I've been wondering what the authorities would do if I started selling updated accommodations for the afterlife. Want an extra garage or bath? Something closer to the golden throne, or further from all that off-key singing? Or most popular of all, something farther from those people.

Pay now and get it later, of course.