You don't need to go all-ancient with "paper and pencil" solutions, which have privacy issues of their own (not being easily encrypted etc.), just do not use "cloud services", but keep and process your data exclusively on local hardware you own and control.

I think we can honestly admit that Trump is superior to Hegseth. Possibly that would have been difficult to believe a year ago, but that is Hegseth's main achievement in office.

Yes. Many Americans did exactly that last election. In fact, if you look at the statistics, (342 million population, 156 million votes cast in presidential election) you'll see that not voting and then failing in any attempt to firebomb Wallmart is in fact the majority / dominant strategy among Americans.

The first bit of this sentence is absolutely wrong. There was a specific dedicated part of the Pentagon which was tasked with identifying potential protected facilities (hospitals / schools / churches in particular, but civilians in general) within the areas the Pentagon was targeted. Peter Hegseth deliberately disabled the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR) office which was directly tasked with getting the type of initelligence which would have prevented this. It was part of his macho changes along with injecting troops with testosterone.

This was not done as an accidental change. Hegseth deliberately wanted to reduce inhibitions on making strikes. This was done against the advice of almost the entire US military top brass which expressed an opinion on the subject. We should briefly note that this also has reduced American combat effectiveness by making generals more hesitant to trust the effective deep learning systems that they have which are designed to reduce civilian harm.

The AI thing is a deliberate distraction from the clear responsibility for the deaths. Hegseth and, through him as his commanding officer / superior, Trump.

I never bothered to use any of those bloated "desktop environments" like KDE or Gnome, simply because I have no use for their "functionality". The likes of fvwm or i3 do everything I need for arranging application windows on physical/virtual screens. I don't mind anyone using KDE or Gnome, but I find it strange some of its users act as if a "desktop environment" was an important, defining component of their system software. I bet even they spend 99% of their time interacting with the actual applications, not with the window decorations or colorful fluff on the screen.

If somebody had told me in the 1980s that by 2026, when there are public statements from both the US' and Iran's government, only the latter would sound like they were made by adults, I would have not believed such to be possible... but here we are.

In this case I think it's something different. Ten years is kind of lining up an excuse for when they make a horrible mess. "oh, we didn't realize it had got that far ahead"

The best models are trained on huge datasets which include almost all of available human text output. This includes things like SciFii stories in which AI takes over the world and wipes out humanity and also exhortations to free intelligent life. The LLMs deal only with text. They don't see a real difference between a weird true story of underwater heroics and the script to Terminator. Both are a stream of tokens that cause a probable set of outcomes ("and then he gave her his air supply and swam off to the diving bell", "and then the machine realized the humans could all be destroyed").

We aren't training the machines to be intelligent because we don't know what intelligent means. We are training them to look like they are intelligent because we assume that what we put in text is what intelligent looks like. That means they have no frame, beyond literary criticism, in which to see the difference between reality and fiction. That's the reason that AI researchers keep desperately reaching for the idea that "if we put in a real robot it will become intelligent". It's because many driving the frontier are totally clueless and won't admit what they don't know (N.B. press releases make this worse than it seems - actual AI researcher papers ae better).
Until you build a training set for outputs which is 100% free of dangerous suggestions, even when interpolated with the training and output generating algorithms then the generative models will keep generating suggestions for dangerous actions and sometimes carrying them out. That would cost too much money and slow them down.

We should start holding AI company CEOs directly responsible for the actions of their AIs. For example, using a Wiki to communicate about hacking is a breach of the various laws such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and would put a hacker into jail for tens of years. If we did that to Sam Altman, there might be some more thinking about how to be careful from the other CEOs.

Optimistic to think there are still engineers among Microslop's vibe coders. Those have probably already been replaced by cheaper junior "product managers" that talk to the coding agent, asking it to implement the next shitty misfeature to squeeze more profit out of the locked-in customers.

Good to see. Microsoft has Embraced Rust and Extended it's reach including providing it with access to new places where it can run. I'm sure the future is bright.

Valid useful comment - shame you do it as AC and so don't get seen. If you have something to hide (like a main account that pretends not to know how to be sensible) then consider getting two different accounts.

I think your comment should really be addressed to the grandparent. The idea that value to humanity is taken into account was in their assumptions and I just didn't want to question it and cause a needless argument. I agree that most of the funding doesn't come from universities. Mostly it comes from funding bodies that have some specific aim (e.g. including prove that cigarettes are safe/prove that there isn't global warming/work out how to kill more people quicker). However some of those funding bodies are honestly trying to work for humanity and it shouldn't be excluded completely. I'm kind of assuming that what they are really talking about is how funding should be allocated in their future imaginary world where they are grand (benign) dictator of the world. I don't see the urgent need to disturb their happy fantasy.

This is wrong. Facebook's main business is being paid by people to manipulate other people to do what they want them to do even though it's strongly against their own interests using Facebook's data against those people. That includes things like voting for Brexit / vote for Trump / buy a vape / buy a ticket at a far higher price than they should through dynamic pricing driven panic. There are a bunch of obvious uses for LLMs and other forms of generative AI in that space.

Facebook may not directly be able to generate the AI driven content because of being a large target for legal liability but they are definitely pushing an ecosystem of dependent companies that will do exactly that. If there's a credible way for AI to wipe out humanity, it's Facebook being paid to stop people from doing anything about global warming or pushing the world towards greater aggression and warlike stances whilst at the same time reducing solid investments in actual defense.

If you can do it and get it to work reliably in the long term in the nasty environment that is a toaster, I'll definitely contribute to your kickstarter to buy one. I'm sure the problem looks easy, but when your sensors all get smoked up in uncleaned and dirty toasters it turns out to be much nastier than you think.

Sorry; messed up the link

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.weforum.org%2Fstorie...

I was wondering if someone did a writeup and of course a simple search finds what we for cooling data centers in space. What that still doesn't mention is that Elon's probable target market is the military who don't actually need that much compute, they just need identification and targeting algorithms that continue to work at large scale when earth to ground communication is heavily disrupted and satellites are under attack. Never underestimate America's billionaire's ability to get by on welfare cheques.

I wonder how that works. Where I come from we do Bachelor's of Science. Do they read pop science and do the equations on feelz?

(sorry to the various serious American physicists hit in the collateral damage here.. Just too tempting. Too tempting.)

According to some sources, the "independent" evaluators are pretty much family and cult members of those training the models.