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Comment Re:They worried about Florida Man (Score 1) 49

I always like it when Republicans claim to be "pro-life" yet go out of their way to kill women and children. In Texas, since their abortion ban, the rate of maternal deaths has increased and several women have died because hospitals refused to perform a medical abortion because the doctor and hospital might get sued.

Who was telling them that if they treated ectopic pregnancies they might face legal repercussions? Is that what the law actually said?

I believe you'll find it was the people who opposed the law who waged a campaign of disinformation to try to convince people that women would not be able to get life saving care. Turns out there are actual dangers to lying to slander your opponents when it's about what kind of medical treatment is available.

So lesson learned, going to be very careful not to mischaracterize in the future right?

Which just goes to show they don't care about people and this lawsuit should be thrown out. They can't claim AI might endanger peple because of a "hack" while at the same time letting people die from a preventable disease.

Look at Pennsylvania. Over 900 measles cases so far this year, with 4 dead in the past month. One was 18-years old, the other 40-years old. The other two were children below the age of 5. And this doesn't take into consideration any other damage people suffer from measles such as deafness.

The article OP cites is about a policy study for a policy that no one has so far enacted or voted for. How does that become proof that "they don't care about people and this lawsuit should be thrown out." How did you extrapolate the "they"? How did you manage to impart motive into every member of that collective based on an unfulfilled hypothetical? How did that lead to being able to seek an injunction on AI? Have you established it is the same "they" in question? And when the "they" has a position you don't like it become a prohibition on any action they could possibly take? How does that work in general?

Pennsylvania has a democratic governor, democratic house, democratic senator, voted for Obama, Obama again, and Biden. Their measles outbreak is laid up as a Republican failing? Why isn't Florida much worse then? Canada has been having thousands of cases to they point they lost their measles elimination status. Who is in control of Canada?

Comment Re: My daily dose of confirmation Bias (Score 2) 104

I keep seeing arguments that the "AI Will Kill Us All" argument is a bunch of doomsaying by people who overestimate the potential intelligence of these systems. My own intuition leads me to argue that AI does not have to become self aware or autonomous. It just has to be sufficiently adaptable to make us both dependent and stupid. Today my confirmation bias feels vindicated.

I'm glad you recognize the confirmation bias, yet I would dispute that it is in any way vindicated.

AI did not order the interception, put the assets in the air, or even submit the report. It got a manifest wrong in a chat session (not clear even it was its own error or related to the input), and that is... actually well-within common human error, not some special AI thing.

In fact intelligence is wrong all the time, and at all scales, but to name a big one, was AI to blame for the confidence of the existence of WMDs that was the basis for the Iraq war? Maybe it would have *averted* that war by helping with better assessment.

The story is sensationalized even without the effort to scaremonger on AI. There was never *any* chance of "causing a war" with China by interdicting a merchant ship in a officially declared maritime blockade zone, or we wouldn't have done it, even for nuclear components. In fact we've *already* intercepted Chinese vessels there and obviously they don't like it but just as obviously they don't feel like paying the cost of war with a major power to blow off their steam about it. (That's frankly a quite insane view of international relations.)

And it's not even clear to me that anything wrong was done. They double checked the intelligence, found it was incorrect, and ultimately took no action. Isn't that... exactly what is supposed to happen? Deploying your interdiction parallel to the intelligence check is a reasonable way to ensure a successful timeline in case something does need to be done. It's easy to recall planes in a false positive, not so easy to teleport them where they need to be for a verified true positive.

Unfortunately popular journalism is far from truth seeking. The dramatic and dangerous sells more copy, so that's what gets written. If you're going to use that as the raw material of your worldview, then of course it will wind up anti-tech and anti-science. At the very least I suggest finding a more reputable source of journalism to feed your biases than this slop.

Comment Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidenc (Score 3, Interesting) 105

The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately."

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "AI will extinctify the human species" is an extraordinary claim, but it's also entirely borrowed from cheesy sci-fi movies, and citing Terminator is apparently this guy's only evidence.

How will AI kill us all, exactly? In addition to the question of, mechanically, how does it obtain the physical capability and resources and organize them to that purpose, I want to know how it does it without any humans noticing or intervening? (not only that it would presumably have to go up against other AGI or near-AGI competitors - the solitary AI made by a random unwitting engineer from the movies is obviously not how the present has played out).

Let's say it is going to build killer robots to off us all. Where does it get the raw materials? How does it setup manufacturing? Make the purchase orders? Do the humans just voluntarily send it massive amounts of ore and build factories in their backyards? Or does it have to mine its own ore and they don't notice the huge stripmines? Does it get the robots right on the first iteration or do they start off as a typical MVP in which case again no one notices? What about the energy bills? How does it navigate the required in-person meeting with the city to sign off on the parking lot tree choices for its downtown killer-robot-factory?

There are so many friction points and assumptions of actual humans interacting with each other to get anything done that "skynet on your laptop" would be about as helpless today as if it had appeared 50 years ago. And unlike the movies it doesn't "just appear."

Could we over the coming years remove a lot of those frictions? Sure. But we could just not, and if we are concerned about them disappearing, then surely we want to see where AI leads *now* and if it has a dangerous temperament rather than *after* we've automated enough for it to manage our resources fully independently?

Being conscious of new threats posed by agentic actors is reasonable and can be grounded in reality. But people who want to feel important have been waving "END OF THE WORLD" signs on streetcorners forever.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 1) 93

I've been using Claude to both understand and assist in writing new code in DB/C, an obscure dialect of another pretty obscure language called PL/B or DATABUS -- all of which are descendants of (or highly influenced by) COBOL. It's pretty fantastic. It's a codebase that is ~50 years old, hundreds of thousands of lines, with code spread throughout modules, with jump tables and gotos everywhere. The code itself is easy to read and understand, but the flow is not!

Comment Always direct quote when your story is about what (Score 4, Insightful) 224

I know nothing about this guy or this project. But the author of the summary apparently feels that, in the spirit of deep investigation and journalistic corroboration, the evidence we *really* need to evaluate is an unnamed blogger:

One viral blog post declared that 1Password "Supports the Ethnic Cleansing of Europe"

and not the actual quote from the guy apparently supporting the ethnic cleansing of Europe?

Either that quote exists, and is infinitely more significant evidence for us to see and evaluate, or it doesn't exist, and the author is just helping to propagate slander.

Given the author's choice I'll take a guess which.

Comment Re: A different kind of security (Score 1) 62

Hah, now see, I left some keywords in my last post you would have picked up on if had done national security work (at least connected to one of the bigger players).

That Wikipedia page is severely out of date. For instance, it quotes Hayden as NSA director talking about "Cray" computers. Hayden hasn't held a position in maybe 20 years, and his last position was as DCIA! US Intel is very, very aware of the computational and hacking abilities of China, North Korea, and others.

Comment Re: A different kind of security (Score 1) 62

> Indeed. The Chinese also know that publishing a story about a found backdoor in their software would be a great exploit for the US and hence they know that the US is looking. Strangely, nothing has been found so far. Or rather very obviously, nothing has been found and the whole thing is nothing but lies.

Or maybe, just maybe, when the Chinese AND the Americans IC agencies find exploits and backdoors in the other's countries, they keep them quiet and monitor, save for later, watch other people exploit, etc.

Maybe, when 3-letter agencies in McClean and elsewhere catch incursions, they monitor them closely, analyze their tactics and techniques, and contain. It's a pretty Byzantine system, but that's modern spycraft.

Comment Re:Begun, the AI price wars have... (Score 1) 40

Be interesting to see how many of these companies bite the dust if the bigger players with deeper pockets like Google keep access pricing down longer to drive adoption and build their market share.

Gemini's new discounted Flash pricing is still ~3x the price of GPT Luna, and that was released a week or two ago.

Everyone's hemorrhaging money here, but Google feeling they can't match or undercut isn't a great sign for them. And Gemini is flagging in intelligence too, which would be a strong reason to underprice if they could. Gemini Flash used to be your cheapest option. I'd say structural advantage still puts the odds in Google's favor in the long run, but has to be a worse situation than they ever expected to be in.

Comment Re:Landfills are such a bad idea (Score 1) 183

Family member who lives there is a Environmental Studies professor. He uses his own trash/garbage pickup as a case study for students to calculate vehicle wear+tear, ROAD wear+tear, impact on traffic through the area, transportation-related CO2 emissions, and so forth.

Not that it's a shocker, but yeah, tl;dr, privatizing garbage is a ridiculously bad idea.

Comment Re:Landfills are such a bad idea (Score 1) 183

Yeah...we just throw all that stuff in the "regular" trash and they haul it away.

Where you live, do the garbage men actually slow down and stop their jobs to "inspect" your trash, open up bags, etc...to see what you are throwing away in there?

Hah--funny! No, needless to say, they do not. I have had a sticker put on my rolling recycle bin before saying that it was picked for a random inspection to make sure we're only putting recyclables in there, and threatening fines and penalties, but that's it.

I also read up on my city's solid waste quarterly reports, and the vast majority of what goes in recycle bins ends up going to a landful. It's a pitiful fraction, especially for plastics. So, I just through those away. I do dispose of some kinds of batteries and other ewaste specially.

Single stream recycling is about 90% performative theater. Other kids of recycling are like 80% performative.

Comment Re:Landfills are such a bad idea (Score 1) 183

If not where do you life they don't do this in the US? Are you somewhere extremely rural?

I've never heard of anyone in modern times having to haul their own track to a dump.

It's very common outside of suburban and urban areas. I like in a large suburban/urban area and I have to go to the dump for certain kinds of waste (batteries, UPSes, eWaste, etc). We have municipal compost/recycling/yard waste/trash.

Also pretty common in mountainous areas to take your waste either to a transfer station or a dump.

I have relatives in Minnesota, in the Twin Cities. They have to buy private trash and recycling service. The end result is every week 3-4 different "brands" of recycling trucks go rumbling down their small area, and 3-4 trash trucks do the same.

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