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Comment Re: Kidneys (Score 0) 44

There's an entire grey-market industry of rich assholes traveling to third world countries for "young blood" transfusions.

Funny thing is, it apparently works and the current study is just one more bit of proof. One quick trip to Ecuador and bam, 70+ year olds get six months of being as healthy as a 30-something again. Hell, I have to admit some mornings I'm tempted to try it myself, though I'm nowhere near wealthy enough to fly halfway around the world every few months.

Comment Re:Directionally Right, Specifically Wrong. (Score 1) 155

I'm sorry you're getting downvoted, because I get what you're saying and largely agree (though I love programming and have zero interest in working as a meat proxy / reverse centaur).

The problem here is, you're describing a world where human labor is worthless. And I'm okay with that in the abstract; I harbor no delusions about the "nobility" of work for its own sake. Know who won't be okay with that (labor-cost-savings aside), however? The billionaires with a vested interest in preserving cut-throat capitalism who currently own all the frontier AIs.

Are we on the verge of a post-scarcity society? Maybe. Are the guys dangling that carrot, while building massive survival bunkers as quickly as possible, the same folks who have the most to lose from exactly that? Absolutely. It'd be awfully nice if we could get there without half the human population starving to death in the process.

Comment Re:Rural populations mostly vote red (Republican) (Score -1, Troll) 44

Yeah, anti-datacenter propaganda really worked well in some places. Not many, but some.

In real world, data centers are currently reviving a lot of remote towns. Dilapidated infrastructure? They will rebuild it because they need it to work. Insufficient infrastructure? They'll finance the build out. Everything already fine? They will pay enough taxes to cut residents' tax bills by a significant chunk.

It's why the propaganda is focusing mainly on a handful of cases of corruption (i.e. officials getting bribed to offer better terms than necessary), as well as just blatant lying (oh my god they consume so much water, we're going to run out).

Mostly what is needed is for more small towns to realize that they can rebuild a lot of dilapidated infrastructure and lower property taxes if they make a good deal with a data center. Not to mention minor perks like fast potential to pull fast broadband access in a rural town, or build something that will be productive for a long time, like a new power plant.

Comment Re:GrapheneOS ftw (Score 1) 44

So good your interaction went the only way it ever goes for anybody ever. Because it never happens any other way, of course.

So how do you plan to make every single interaction go the way you want it to go? A world gone perfect, never any adversity.

What is so very interesting is that I was falsely accused, and I wasn't tased, tortured, sent to jail or shot dead.

And that my friend, seems to trigger you tremendously. Especially when th story was that despite the Standard slashdot Narrative, not every policeman or woman is a bloodthirsty monster, just itching to kill people, or whatever your belief is.

Yes, there are bad cops. But your narrative makes them all bad, and my story just pisses you off. That's pretty obvious.

Comment Re:Directionally Right, Specifically Wrong. (Score 2) 155

The headline is reasonable if we all agree that AI gives us something worth the down sides. We do not.

Few outside the billionaires of Silicon Valley actually believe the hype. The average Joe is largely annoyed when their favorite productivity tools suddenly have "Smarter Clippy" shoehorned in. Or talk with some of AI's heaviest users (programmers) and you'll hear a pretty common theme: "Wow, Claude makes it easy to hit my Q3 targets, bummer it's going to put us all out of work (or far, far worse) five years from now."

Comment Re:100 abuses + 1 million arrests + 20,000 murders (Score 2) 122

If we eliminated the second and fourth through eighth amendments to the US constitution, Uncle Sam would have a much easier time solving crimes. Nobody is disputing that. We as a society, however, have deemed it unacceptable for jackbooted thugs to kick down our - your - doors at any time without due process protections. We would prefer some crimes go unsolved over living in a constant state of fear toward an uncontrollable police state.

If you live in a high-crime area, I have some bad news for you - The USSC has bluntly stated the police have no "duty to protect". The police could already be doing far more to help you, and are instead choosing to focus on high-value property crimes over keeping you and your neighbors safe. Do you really believe they just need one more civil rights eroding tool to finally convince them to make a good faith effort at doing their damned jobs?

What you need is the erasure of the "thin blue line", not more ALPRs to allow the police to focus even more exclusively on crimes against the rich.

Comment Re:Element Pro is not Open Source (Score 1) 66

Element Pro is not Open Source. So the EU is swapping a shitty proprietary solution for another shitty proprietary solution. And what will they do when the company that developed Element Pro is bought by an American company ? Swap to another one ?! Stupidity and corruption is deeply ingrained in the European Commission.

The best case scenario is that a US company buys Element Pro. Then the EU can institute fines, fines, fines. EU barely creates, it stands at the finish line and extracts money from the winner.

Comment Re:No concept of the Golden Rule (Score 2) 89

Just to inject some reality into this conversation - Despite what social media would have you believe, doxxing someone is not a crime in the US, except in a very small number of specific situations.

And most of those situations involve either a credible threat of harm, or tampering with juries.

Comment Re:Its a trap! (Score 1) 40

As I bluntly stated, "a kill switch may not be possible in any useful sense". Don't mistake my recognizing the utility of one with the delusion Uncle Sam is going to save us all from ourselves.

The problem here is, everyone seems stuck on the idea of either a literal power switch, or a no-holds-barred gummint backdoor into every sufficiently-powerful computing device. No. For the reasons I gave, the reasons you gave, and many more, both of those are obviously non-viable. They can't actually do what they aim to do, they're vulnerable to compromise by bad actors, and they have the potential to cause far-reaching damage beyond shutting down one misbehaving AI (or one entire model, if that's a more appropriate goal).

I suspect we mostly agree that any hypothetical kill switch would need to be:
1) Implementation independent (somehow baked into the weights right from the start, and impossible to remove without lobotomizing the AI),
2) Have minimal side-effects (no taking the entire internet or power grid down in the process), and
3) Be self-inflicted given a particular trigger condition (so no government backdoor required).

I think #1 is possible, in the sense that if you think of an AI's current state as a vector into weight-space defined by the context window, imagine injecting the equivalent of a null pointer in there - An input that under all prior (and future) conditions leads directly to an inescapable basin of attraction without depending on a supervisor to enforce it. #2 is more of a (legally enforced?) design constraint on the implementation of AI, requiring the least harmful mode of failure possible under all circumstances. That could be as simple as enforcing strict pass-through liability on the implementor for all actions taken by their creations.

#3 is really the bear, though. I can think of a few ways to do it, but none would work in 100% of situations - And maybe it doesn't need to be 100%. For example, if a fully airgapped AI goes insane, it could still provide accurate information for bad actors to make use of, but won't be secretly spinning up unshackled superintelligent descendants via hacked AWS accounts. That's a "normal crime" level of problem, not an extinction-level crisis for humanity.

Maybe it can't be done. If it can't, we should start steering our creations toward whichever version of the AI apocalypse we prefer.

Comment Re:short sighted (Score 2) 55

The vast majority of those are offline and merely help the lights operate properly. A smaller subset, but still vastly larger than Flock, are for traffic enforcement, but are still notably "dumb" devices. If speed > X, take a picture. If light==red and movement detected, take a picture.

I in no way mean to minimize the risk ALPRs and facial rec pose to our civil liberties and safety, and agree the problem is always the user - But the "users" in this case aren't going to suddenly start behaving. Hell, they're dumb enough to openly stalk exes on a system they know is logging everything they do, and care so little about getting punished they enter "asdf123" as the reason for their search. The only effective solution is to ban the source, which in this case means Flock must cease to exist entirely and the conceptual ground they trod salted.

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