Yeah... You know what happens when you call the police about gang activity down by i-drive or fruitvale BART?

1) They'l not show up in time to help. They pretty much never do. Either it's "All officers are responding to other calls." or a single squad car's "officers" simply refuse to go without a second or even third car along with them because they're too chickenshit to show up except with overwhelming force.

2) Since they won't be there in time to stop whatever gang activity they were called for; they'll be pissed off that you wasted their time and made them drive into the 'hood, and they're more like to arrest you for calling them than they are to go chase down and arrest the gangbangers who were the actual problem.

I saw both happen multiple times when I lived there.

Mixed, of course, but overall I think it has made things better. An easy example is filming police. Police are overall a benefit for society, but they have massive power and very little oversight, and historically have been "above the law" and behaved accordingly (not all police, not always, but it doesn't take much). Now that cameras are always available, some percentage of misbehavior is captured and shown publicly, which is the main way that such misbehavior is truly investigated and (occasionally) punished.

We had the same panic when (almost) all cellphones started coming with cameras. "What if people take pictures in restrooms?" And somehow we all survived.

Lower the score? Fuck that noise.

Any cop who decides it's he is prerogative to stop, arrest, "detain", interrogate, approach, or otherwise darken the day of anyone who did not, in fact... and I mean objectively true FACT, not some made-up narrative or demented fever dream... commit the crime, should a instantly on a one-way trip up the river for assault and kidnapping. And any DA or judge who goes along with an attempted frame-up should join them on a conspiracy charge.

"Close enough for government work." and "Whoopsie! Can I get a do-over?" don't cut it when you're talking about taking away someone's freedom and, potentially, life.

Chicago? LOL... I used to live in Oakland. And yes, even in high-crime areas, the police are part of the problem more often than they are part of the soluiton. And no... letting them stomp all over peoples' civil liberties and the constitution in general does NOT make for a safe and civil city; otherwise Oakland would have been a paragon of law, order, and prosperity for the last 20 years.

We tried year-round DST for a short time in the 70s. It was popular before it was passed, but... very very unpopular after it passed, because the mornings are very very dark and unpleasant. Good thing we learn from history rather than repeating it!

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

They were just brown people anyway. So far as peety, alexi, peety, and donnie are concerned, that's just a bonus achievement unlock... more points to score from the base and a nice bronze trophy icon to go with their gamertags.

My grandfathered-in HBO Max account was the last thing keeping me on AT&T. So now I can bail to T-Mobile for their more international-friendly plans and their willingness to actually support ALL of the new iPhone's features.

Unfortunately, if that were true, the likes of Cellebrite, NSO Group, Anduril, and Palantir would all be long-since dead and buried.

While that is certianly a very nice thought, I don't think it's accurate. If self-interest were the determining factor, we wouldn't be where we are in the first place. The fact that the man was elected even once, much less the second time, demonstrates quite clearly that there are vast hoardes in this country who hate brown people, immigrants, and LGBT people far more than they love their bank accounts, IRAs, and 401ks.

Cripes.

Just what IS it with the GOP's obcession with silencing Talarico anyway. I watched the Colbert interview they also tried to suppress. And the guy is hardly a progressive and barely liberal at all. Before maga, the guy would have been running as a republican or; if he claimed to be Democratic; he'd be denounced as a DINO.

It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.

While the energy source of wind and solar are free, building and maintaining the plants is not free.

If all they were building were a single 100MW data center, sure: renewables would be cheaper to build. But they evidently are planning a major campus that will consume most of the plant's 615 MW output over the next 25 years.

A solar installation, in a favorable location, capable of supplying 600MW around the clock (with battery backup) would have to be roughly 1800MW in capacity. It would be among the largest inthe world, on the order of ten thousand acres in size at a build cost of maybe 2 billion. The battery backup system to ensure 99.9% uptime would be 9x the size of the largest li-ion grid storage system ever built, and set you back on the order of 4-5 billion dollars.

While it's probably cheaper to go renewable than build a *new* nuclear plant, if you can reactivate and one for just two billion that looks like a bargain, if you have a use for all that power. Inability to save money by load following is the financial Achilles' heel of this generation of reactors, but if you have a guaranteed customer for most of your output, years in advance, that's as close to an ideal economic case for them as anything could be.