iRobot and Amazon say EU approval was the problem. Not sure if they had a specific reason to be selectively truthful and focus on only one of multiple regulatory hurdles; but they don't mention the US.

It also looks like the sale is basically formalizing their plan to gut themselves. Shockingly enough; firing everyone you can and switching to rebadging stuff from an ODM because that's cheaper puts you in "what would you say you do here?" territory pretty quickly.

I'm amazed that 16% of respondents feel in control. I'm just curious if they know something I don't about countermeasures to take; or if it's a matter of what they don't know.

The prior non-core items were optional and relatively clearly marked; but when they decided to go 'AI' that went out the window. Being able to grub around in about:config for anything that has 'ml' in it does, depressingly, put them ahead of the options of some of the competition; but it shipped on by default and without controls in the normal-user UI. Seems like 'AI' really does something to the decision making even of people who should know better.

Kodak's demise is a little overstated just because they have been reorganized several times; and 'Kodak' is sort of the dump entity. There are still a variety of applications for being competent at thin film chemistry, including semiconductor fabrication, just not so much making 35mm film. So Eastman Chemical got most of that. And some of their medical and otherwise higher-end optics and imaging stuff also got spun off, with the business of not terribly optically interesting cameras under heavy threat from apathy and cellphones left at Kodak proper.

They certainly didn't do desperately well; or they'd probably be somewhere more along the lines of Sony in terms of 'who builds CCDs worth disclosing the provider of?'; but the reorgs appear to have been aimed at separating the more viable business units from the liabilities. Probably so the latter could be tied to the pension plan.

It's unsurprising; but I see that the law has several stages of dealing with foreign overcrowding if the 10 million line is breached; but nothing about how locally produced human resources will be stack ranged for headcount reduction should the population remain above the target. Surely anyone who really cares about crowding needs to have a contingency plan for endogenous losers as well?

At least in the current climate (and quite possibly indefinitely; depending on how prudent their investments are and whether they have any uncontrollably expensive hobby) there's not really any reason for the 'AI' guys to take such a servile attitude.

If you actually need the job, or are invested in the company's mission for some reason, it's a good idea to care at least slightly about how your paycheck doesn't bounce; but that's not really the position these guys are in. Exceptionally in-demand skillset and reputation; existing net worth almost certainly already enough to at least keep them comfortable indefinitely if they feel like quitting the rat race or get fired. Why settle for doing sordid adtech if you think that, best case, your boss in the sort of dumbass who would lose billions of dollars on the idea that Second Life would totally have the GDP of western europe, because reasons, and you can keep him paying you a handsome salary and providing you with the GPU compute time and dubiously sourced datasets that you find personally interesting; and worst case, if you lose the fight, you'll just be told to go sling ads, not fired and blacklisted.

Facebook isn't running a charity; but neither are these guys. Why wouldn't they try to take what they can get? Especially when the actually-profitable business units are fat enough that there's plenty of room for boondoggles, so long as you can sell them, rather than there being fairly tight constraints on how much you can waste before the company starts bleeding out.

It would honestly be more surprising if they signed up with facebook out of a genuine willingness to do adtech swill and sordid 'engagement' hacking; rather than on the assumption that there's enough desperate dumb money sloshing around in Zuckerberg's fear of missing out on the next big thing that they can get paid to pursue their pet projects without much concern for having to deliver short term impact on the bottom line.

I assume that at least some of the tension here is that facebook hired these guys to be the hotshot golden boys of sucking less at AI; so it isn't just an it's-only-money thing. I don't know whether or not this belief is accurate; but Zuck and friends certainly hunted down and paid for the various new AI hires as though they were capable of things that in-house or more readily available alternatives are not, so the battle over where their attention will be focused is presumably being waged on the assumption that having someone else do what they aren't doing isn't really a substitute.

What I would be curious to know is why the 'build god-machine' goal isn't being treated as the obvious winner just because you can have the god machine make facebook more addictive and better at serving ads. Do they think that the AI guys are drinking the kool-aide and the only thing they'll actually be able to deliver is incremental improvements; so they want those churned directly into products? Some degree of confidence that they will eventually manage it; but fear of missing out on some sort of short term advantage means that they don't care about what is achievable in 5-10 years? Genuinely zero interest in anything except making social media more of a hellscape; so they simply don't care?

I suspect that, while it would be socially controversial, planetary colonization would be a very strong case for IVF and some population planning.

For the amount of volume/mass required to ship a single human and support them in transit and on site you could ship a lot of embryos in cryo(it's careful plumbing; but a big dewar flask kept at cryogenic temperatures is downright lightweight compared to a full life support system); and shipping embryos gives you the option of bringing massive genetic diversity, thousands to tens of thousands of genetically screened parents worth of embryos in the space a single person would require.

Unless you've got some sort of advanced growth vats you would obviously need people onsite; but instead of dealing with the probably-impossible task of keeping a tiny breeding population's gene pool in order you'd just be defrosting and gestating specimens from a much larger pool of diverse embryos as needed. Presumably you'd initially go with an all-female colony, and only start defrosting males and trying to maintain a viable natural population once you had at least high single-digit thousands to low-mid tens of thousands.

I'm sure that such an arrangement would freak some people out; and you'd probably need to do some reasonably intense social engineering to keep everyone on-mission; but in terms of efficiency of genetic diversity there's a fairly compelling case to be made.

What sort of disaster do you have in mind that would render earth less habitable than mars?

Short of unstoppable replicator nanites turning the entire crust into grey goo; or very long term issues with the sun reaching EoL that will be an issue for basically anyone in the solar system, it's honestly hard to think of ways you could break it more badly.

Plenty of possibilities that will make people deeply miserable; or cause 80+ percent of the population to die horribly; but you'll still have a planet with the right gravity, an atmosphere and magnetosphere, some sort of ecosystem(even if it's just algal scum and cockroaches); some soil that isn't riddled with perchlorates, and so on.

I was going to say something snide about how MCP is a laughably thin standard; but 'agents.md' is literally just a text file(encoding unspecified; I guess UTF8 but nobody actually says) that you put text in and hope your bot will react appropriately to. It describes the contents as 'standard markdown'; without mention of which markdown variant they mean.

Given that the whole thing is just an exercise in getting away with bots being more or less as OK-ish with poorly structured inputs as they are with anything else it's not like it would be a better 'standard' if there were a thicket of XML schema involved; but saying:

:"AGENTS.md emerged from collaborative efforts across the AI software development ecosystem, including OpenAI Codex, Amp, Jules from Google, Cursor, and Factory.

We’re committed to helping maintain and evolve this as an open format that benefits the entire developer community, regardless of which coding agent you use."

About a 'standard' which is 'put some kind of markdown, y'know, stuff you'd tell someone about your project in a text file called Agents.md' is a little grandiose.

So, in order to protect against possible military applications(known for their cost-sensitivity...); we are making the sale legal as long as El Presidente gets his cut? That's in character, sure; but what's the paper-thin excuse for that being a cogent policy idea?

One major difference, assuming you've got full platform support(should be the case on any server or workstation that isn't an utter joke; but can be a problem with some desktop boards that 'support' ECC in the sense that AMD didn't laser it off the way Intel does; but don't really care); is that ECC RAM can (and should) report even correctable errors; so you get considerably more warning than you do with non-ECC RAM.

If you pay no attention to error reports ECC or non-ECC are both rolling the dice; though ECC has better odds; but 'proper' ECC and Linux-EDAC support will allow you to keep an eye on worrisome events(normally with something like rasdaemon, not sure what other options and preferences there are in terms of aggregating the kernel-provided data) and, unless the RAM fails particularly dramatically and thoroughly, will give you much better odds of knowing that you have a hardware problem while that problem is still at correctable levels; so you can take appropriate action(either replacement, or on the really fancy server systems, some 'chipkill'-like arrangement where the specific piece of DRAM that is failing gets cut out of use when deeemed unreliable without having to bring the system down.

Sometimes you'd get a BSOD that was a fairly clear call to action; when the error called out something recognizable as the name of part of a driver; but that is mostly just a special case of the "did you change any hardware or update any drivers recently?" troubleshooting steps that people have been doing more or less blind since forever; admittedly slightly more helpful in cases where as far as you know the answer to those questions is 'no'; but windows update did slip you a driver update; or a change in OS behavior means that a driver that used to work is now troublesome.

Realistically, as long as the OS provides suitable support for being configured to collect actual crash dump material if you want it; it's hard to object too strongly to the idea that just rebooting fairly quickly is probably the better choice vs. trying to make the BSOD a genuinely useful debugging resource; especially given how rare it is for the person with useful debugging ability to happen to be at the console at the time of crash(rather than just an end user who is ill equipped to make sense of it; or a system that mostly does server stuff, quite likely not on actual physical hardware, where nobody has even touched the physical console in months or years; and it's more or less entirely useless to display a message there; rather than rebooting and hoping that things come up enough that management software can grab the dump files; or giving up and leaving the system in EMS so that someone can attach to that console.

What seems most depressing about this isn't the fact that the bot is stupid; but that something about 'AI' seems to have caused people who should have known better to just ignore precautions that are old, simple, and relatively obvious.

It remains unclear whether you can solve the bots being stupid problem even in principle; but it's not like computing has never dealt with actors that either need to be saved from themselves or are likely malicious before; and between running more than a few web servers, building a browser, and slapping together an OS it's not like Google doesn't have people who know that stuff on payroll who know about that sort of thing.

In this case, the bot being a moron would have been a non-issue if it had simply been confined to running shell commands inside the project directory(which is presumably under version control, so worst case you just roll back); not above it where it can hose the entire drive.

There just seems to be something cursed about 'AI' products, not sure if it's the rush to market or if mediocre people are most fascinated with the tool, that invites really sloppy, heedless, lazy, failure to care about useful, mature, relatively simple mitigations for the well known(if not particularly well understood) faults of the 'AI' behavior itself.

There's nothing that screams 'trying to con you' quite as hard as a participant in a nominal free-market scenario trying to preserve ignorance and information asymmetry.