Somehow going from $500 to $5000 crosses the threshold of cruel and unusual, and yet executing poor people passes constitutional muster. This incongruity illustrates the intrinsically murky interpretation of the Constitution and how absurd it is to bless a single interpretation based on how political winds happened to blow at one past moment.

He got shot and paid the ultimate price, but at the moment when he walked back toward the other car, he was likely not feeling charitable and forgiving.

That the judge not only accepted the AI video but also liked it is gravely disturbing because the video created by his family is essentially hearsay, but just in an unconventional form.

I don't know how to compare how expensive college was long ago, but it was definitely more affordable. Four decades ago, it was possible to work a part-time job and go to college at the same time. That's no longer possible.

Just like Palpatine, Trump is trying to destroy the Republic. The only thing that will save us and the Republic is identifying who Jar Jar is and preventing his interference.

This makes no sense. These brains you mention have been around for many thousands of years. If the existence of such advanced brains foretell the advent of similarly advanced electronic systems, why didn't these advanced electronic systems appear thousands of years ago.

If the passage of some time was needed, what's the reason for now being the correct time for these advanced electronic systems? We've already needed a few thousand years, so maybe we need a few more thousand years.

I've heard this argument before, but it doesn't make that much sense to me because it implies that the Chinese are either too lazy or unmotivated without drastic economic attacks from the US, or maybe the Chinese are not smart enough to surpass the US without US motivation.

My suspicion is that building GPUs better than Nvidia's is hard and that motivation wasn't a problem the Chinese had. I don't believe that all American companies are so inept that they can't surpass Nvidia (or at least haven't shown that they can after many years of trying), yet the Chinese can do so easily but didn't realize that they could until the US gave them some motivation.

That's also my experience with LLMs. The hallucination rate is low enough to be useful. Plus I treat LLM results the same way I treat Google results, Wikipedia, webpages, and anything I hear, i.e., I filter everything through my own sanity and reasoning process.

When the Uber CEO talks about "exceeding expectations" and exceeding human performance, he's not talking about safety but rather about productivity. After all, machines don't need bathroom or meal breaks or mental/physical rejuvenation time. For Uber, safety only matters if productivity is impacted, e.g., if there is a collision or a traffic ticket (hmm, how does a policeman give a robotaxi a ticket?).

One other thing. Robotaxis don't drive for both Uber and Lyft, so that's another reason the CEO would love robotaxis over humans.

Apple would be the best company to develop an ad-free AI assistant because ads are not a significant revenue stream for them (so far ... cross your fingers). Instead, Apple needs a driver for increase iPhone sales. The Apple exec said something about iPhones going away in 10 years, but what he really meant is that Apple will bet its future on something that looks like an iPhone but is pitched as something revolutionarily different, i.e., a new iPhone moment that paradoxically would kill the iPhone.

In the meanwhile, AAPL stock is going down because the loss of the $20 billion/year Google money would be material. Apple's operating income is about $127 billion, and $20 billion of that comes from the 99% operating margin gift from Google. These certainly are interesting times for everyone.

"70 year old technology" seems like an insult, but it's really the exact opposite. The underlying technology is still used after 68 years because it works and even though most HDD use cases are disappearing, there are still some viable commercial use cases (mainly cold/warm storage). The viability of HDDs comes from its low cost, a cost difference that SSDs still haven't been able to bridge after several decades. Much of this cost difference comes from arial density improvements, which have slowed in the last 15-20 years but which have yet to plateau.

This is the crying shame of the second Trump term. In the first term, Trump was still crazy, but he had quite a few non-crazy people around him that reined him in. So, while the output of the first term would still infuriate liberals and Democrats, the really crazy stuff was filtered out.

Trump realized this mistake and made sure in his second term to vet all people around him as pure yes-men. Now the crazy stuff is unfiltered. It was clear that (across the board, not-targeted) tariffs would produce inflation, job cuts, corporate profit cuts, and supply chain chaos. Any credible economist would have argued against such tariffs, but there were no credible economists or advisors, so this is what we get.

I don't see affirmative action as "deciding between two equally qualified people" but rather as affirmatively giving disadvantaged people an explicit advantage because otherwise they will continue to be at a disadvantage. A society that only gives black people an advantage when everything else is a tie has decided to cement in structural discrimination.

The only somewhat reasonable argument against affirmative action is that the whites being discriminated against by affirmative action usually didn't explicitly do anything to disadvantage black people. However, that type of thinking seems to be somewhat acceptable when applied to racial inequality and but is ludicrous when applied to financial inequality. Imagine arguing that progressive income tax brackets are discrimination against rich people, people that did nothing explicitly bad to poor people. We accept the discrimination of tax brackets because we believe in leveling out the inequality, whether that inequality is a direct result of overt discrimination or not. Yet, some rail against the same thing when applied to racial issues.

This is because the disadvantages are not seen by white people. Traffic stops that turn into prison or death. Home sellers not selling because the buyers have black skin. Job interviews not granted because the name sounds black. There's no way for white people to notice these things, and because they don't notice these things, they often think that such discrimination doesn't exist and such stories are made up. Instead, many white people just see how other white people have more and see that as discrimination against themselves.

Trump is accusing others of censorship. Wow! This from a guy who is threatening and has followed through with universities, law firms, and judges. I guess it's only censorship if others do it.

Congress makes the laws, and the executive enforces that laws. That's all constitutional and good. Then the courts get to rule that the president was wrong and has to do something different. All presidents wrangle with how to go around court decisions to some extent, but Trump doesn't. He simply ignores them because he has realized that the Constitution doesn't give either Congress or the judiciary the power to enforce court decisions.

The entire US constitutional system is based on the assumption that the executive will obey the constitution with no way to force the president to act constitutionally. Trump has figured this out. The only constitutional mechanisms are impeachment and ending presidential terms via elections or term limits. The latter is not possible without broad bipartisan support, and we'll see how well the latter holds up. The US came uncomfortably close four years ago with Trump trying to also avoid that part of the constitution.

You're arguing this from a constitutional perspective. It's interesting that Republicans and the right wing of the current Supreme Court want to interpret the constitution so strictly that regulatory power is essentially unconstitutional unless expressed spelled out in legislation. Of course, at the same time, they want the right to use regulatory power when it aligns with their ideology but at the same time declare it the scourge of anti-constitutionalists when it doesn't align.