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?

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?

I don't accept that premise. If there were, methods would have been open to discussion by the community and one of the actually privacy-preserving alternatives would have been chosen, such as having every website declare the age bracket in the HTTP header, legal determination it cannot be informed incorrectly, parenting tools within devices coming enabled by default and, if not opted-out, which only the adult buyer would be able to do after showing proof of purchase (no identity required), and browsers and the like only allowing connections to online services that matched the enabled configuration.

The way it's being implemented is the reverse of that and gives the government access to deanonimizable tracking. We know it's almost certainly deanonimizable because Snowden's files have shown how intelligence agencies deliberately include very subtle weaknesses in government-mandated cryptographic standards, protocols and methods, so any such must be assumed to contain one or more backdoors irrespective of them being seemingly impossible, as there's no feasible way to prove they don't other than blind trust.

The rule of thumb is that every single time politicians claim "think of the children!" without including in the proposed law objective measurable metrics the law is presumed to improve, plus requirements that if the improvement doesn't happen within a specific period of time the proposal must be cancelled, isn't about children, but it's rather levying popular emotional reactions to induce layers of false consciousness.

You're supposing the EU doesn't like the control this gives them. Consider how they're pushing privacy invasive age verification all around, and tying the process to people using verified iOS and Android devices. With ADC they'll be able to know exactly who made this or that app they dislike, and it will give them another means by which they can request specific apps providing features the EU doesn't approve of can be disabled.

Besides, if they prevent Google from limiting their system in a way similar to how Apple is limited, that argument might down the line be used to demand the same openness from apple, otherwise both platforms aren't competing on an equal footing.

The trick to understand how these things work is to think like a lawyer, not like an engineer.

The EU wouldn't care. Google's model as described is still way less restrictive than Apple's, and they've approved Apple's. If Apple's model was found to be acceptable, so will Google's.

Their answer to F-Droid will be quite simple: change how it works so it's compatible with how the ADC works by either registering for a single ADC key and being liable for all apps on the store, or by allowing every developer providing apps through F-Droid to have its own ADC and liability. And if F-Droid doesn't want to do either, there's always the alternative of becoming an ADB-based store that installs apps via USB cable or whatever after the user unlocks sideloading through the new process.

The EU will look at all this and answer "yeah, that's reasonable", and that'll be it.

That's the limited distribution version of the ADC. It has these limits:

So, not viable for the scale of F-Droid, or for any application that has more than 20 users, assuming each user would install it on a single device. And yes, they've figured quite well what they're going to do.

I found these ToS by searching. I'm not quite sure this is the most up-to-date version, as I don't have a Google developer account and don't want to create a new one to check, but it says these things:

Plenty of apps on F-Droid violate these. Several are illegal in different countries, while others directly violate the ToS of individual Google products. Since F-Droid would be the one signing on all of them, its own ADC use could be cut, and then trying to install apps signed with that terminated ADC key would fail.

The problem with that is that Google says it will ban developers whose apps signed this way violate its ToS, which can have anything they want on it, so F-Droid will have to policy apps uploaded to make sure they comply with their own and Google's ToS, and if some gets through that review and does violate Google's, since it'd be signed by F-Droid, that might mean that one account responsible for all F-Droid apps being banned out of a sudden, and with it all F-Droid-installed apps on a single go.

I imagine an alternative is for F-Droid to stop using its own signature and having developers sign their apps themselves. Reproducible builds would still exist to check whether the user-provided signed version matches the rebuilt version, or however that works, but the signatures would be individualized.

I only purchase phones I know I can install alternative OSes on. When one of my current ones is getting too old and in need of replacement, I research what the current alternative Android OSes are, chose a bunch I find are nice enough, then find the list of devices supported, the chose one from among those that's within my budget range. Those tend to be Motorola, whether officially or via some hack.

I don't buy a phone to play games, which means most any phone is performant enough for my needs, so I go with the cheapest option that does what I actually need. This also means that warranty is irrelevant: if the phone breaks for some weird reason, which is rate, getting it serviced by paying for the service, or buying a new one outright, aren't a big deal. Hence, the moment the new phone arrives I follow the procedure to get it unlocked, then the new ROM into. Sometimes with Google apps, sometimes without, depending on what I'm using it for.

As for bank apps and the like, I keep an old, tiny, cheap phone with stock, years-old Android that banks, due to mysteries of the universe, consider "secure" despite having hundreds of unpatched holes all the way down to the kernel. When I need to do banking I pick it from the docs drawer, turn it on, do what I need, turn it off, and back into the drawer it goes. For everyday use I have a debit/credit card, no app necessary with them.

Streaming is a loss, but eh, YouTube works well enough either with the official app, an alternative one, or a mobile browser, so good enough for watching something on the go. For me that suffices.

But yes, for those for whose use case is way more mainstream that's certainly not a good fit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ToS is the strongest argument, but the distillers are not parties to the ToS. They get their data from data brokers. It is possible that data brokers are violating the ToS, but it would be hard to write ToS that precluded running queries for third parties without creating problems for consultancies and other businesses. Even presuming the ToS could be written to preclude the data brokers doing that, it doesn't affect the resulting model.

But the general shape of the argument brings us right back to unclean hands: we worked hard on this model and it's not fair for you to profit off our work in a way that doesn't have our permission.