There hasn't been anything worthwhile on AM since Paul Harvey died, and not much even before that. I try to listen to it every time I drive my old truck (because it only has AM) and give up in frustration every time.
There's no reason why Python (compiled from Rust) would be any slower than Python (compiled from C). Both languages compile to native executable code, and both have good optimizers available.
Cameras are not the problem. Everyone has cameras these days. I do not care if the local transportation department or highway department monitors the roads or has the ability to pull up a recording to determine the cause of a crash or some other event in the public space.
The network / database / AI detection of license plates / car color make model and features such as decals / facial features/ TPMS monitors / Bluetooth and WI-FI signals is the problem, and indefinite cataloguing of all of the above compounds that problem. Those are the features which turn the whole enterprise into warrantless mass surveillance.
When NEST or whoever was going to do the same thing with doorbell cameras--to track "lost pets" is also problematic for many of the same reasons: the police can gain access to it arbitrarily.
They hired some uninspired losers to lead their self-driving efforts. They basically were weak, looked into it and figured it's impossible.
There's nothing wrong with knowing your own limitations and acting accordingly. Had Mr. Zuckerberg had that sort of self-knowledge, he might have avoided lighting 80-billion-with-a-b dollars on fire and renaming his social media company after a technology that nobody wanted.
And human drivers are NOT, "on average, really bad".
That is true, but it's a little more complicated than that.
The average driver is pretty good, 99.9% of the time. The other 0.1% of the time, they are tired, or angry, or momentarily distracted, or just looking the other direction from where they need to be looking under those particular circumstances. It's those occasional blips of inattention that cause lead to most accidents occurring.
But I value even a 1 line change that clears a static analysis warning if even in practice it was impossible to trigger the issue in a real system.
Yes, I agree. The problem with thinking "this bug seems harmless, because I can't imagine how anyone could exploit it" is in the "I can't imagine" part; my imagination is limited to what is covered by my mental model of how computers work, but an attackers' ingenuity is not.
In particular, the C/C++ optimizer is a devious beast, and will exploit any opportunity to make the code more efficient, even if that means doing things that are wildly unintuitive to a naive human reader -- and it sees any instance of undefined behavior as an opportunity to exploit.
(C) is the only one of those the AI companies are really concerned about -- they want to stave off model collapse for as long as possible. The problem is that AI generates so much content that the ratio of AI-generated data to human-generated data keeps rising, and sooner or later there simply won't be much human-generated data left to anything to consume. At that point they'll either have to figure out to ingest AI-generated content without causing degradation, or they'll have to accept that AIs have gotten as smart as they will ever get, and it's all downhill from there.
It's really the same problem that we see with quantum physics -- the subject matter is esoteric enough that common sense can't be used to determine whether what you're listening to is really advanced theory or utter BS (or some combination of the two); they both sound the same, and the situation isn't helped by the presence of large numbers of people who think they know what they are talking about but don't.
I think the distinction they are making is between technology that kills people, and technology that entertains people. If someone fitted actual weapons to a Doom engine, they'd probably object.
But here's the part I find interesting: why assume a superintelligent AI would actually want to kill us?
Let's make the hopeful assumption that the superintelligent AIs will not "go rogue" in any way, but will correctly try to carry out their tasks as assigned by the people who designed and trained them.
Pretty much every major nation has military AIs, at this point. So the Chinese AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Americans, and the American AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Russians, and so on. In the final analysis, no matter where you live, there is probably an AI that has been explicitly tasked by its operators with figuring out the most effective ways to do you in. Not because they've "gone wrong", but because they're working as intended.
The size of the universe is increasing...
but the rate at which it is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate is decreasing is increasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate of the rate is decreasing in increasing...
[... and so on, ad infinitum...]
People commonly overestimate the possibility of "all humans dying", and simultaneously underestimate the possibility of "billions of humans dying".
People are like cockroaches that way; a disaster could wipe out 99% of us, and there would still be millions of us left to repopulate afterwards. To truly wipe out all humans would take something more severe than the asteroid that did for the dinosaurs.
Which people? It's owners? The government?
Whoever set up its reward function, really. Could be any of the above. The technology doesn't care, it only follows its algorithm.
But... I'm sure Apple is going to sell* boatloads of these damn foldable phones.
I'm not. $2K is an eye-watering amount to spend on a cell phone, even in 2026, and especially on a design that seems almost guaranteed to start wearing a vertical line into the display at the folding-point over time. I expect a number of Slashdot articles about unhappy Duo users demanding redress over that issue, even if everything else works as advertised.
Maybe in a better economy, people would splurge on something like this, but I don't think that's the zeitgest this season.
n/t
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law. -- Roy Santoro
