The headline is reasonable.

AI is a technology. It doesn't have moral agency. It can be used for good and for bad.

So far, the printing press is responsible for more deaths than AI.

(Printing Press -> Mass distribution of Luther's bible translation -> Protestant Reformation -> hundreds of years of religious wars in Europe)

Despite all of the death that is downstream of the printing press, the usual response in the west has been to ban specific "misuses" of the printing press - not the printing press itself.

The specifics that Altman is saying - that voluntary slowdowns are good, or that external oversight over OpenAI is bad - I disagree with.

Instead, I agree with Aschenbrenner's paper. The AI labs should probably be nationalized for national security reasons.

(Notably, Aschenbrenner claims he was fired by OpenAI for expressing these concerns internally)

Yeah you have to be a special kind of stupid to think permanent DST is a good idea. We should get rid of it all together, not make it permanent.

Or just get rid of daylight savings time instead of making it permanent. Permanent DST is the worst solution.

This is pretty standard when someone leaves Microsoft.

The management above the person leaving sends a nice message about them and their work and NEVER tells the truth about _why_ they are leaving.

At the upper levels I don't think there's really any sincerity about anything said, one way or another. This is just how corporate America operates.

Nextcloud has done great work in terms of EU-Soverignty and offering credible replacements for all the pieces of the the Microsoft stack.

Nextcloud Talk works well for video conference meetings.

MS Teams is a pretty terrible piece of software. The design of it is bad, and the implementation is bad.

Any software that tries to copy it will also be bad.

If you haven't spun up a nextcloud AIO instance yet for your organization(s), you should try it out.

I hope you've all read the Aschenbrenner paper from 2024.

https://situational-awareness....

Never mind Trump's rambling speaking style. He's aware of it and he likes it.

We know that people in the Trump admin have, at minimum, been briefed on the Aschenbrenner paper. I assume some of them have read the whole thing.

The point he's making - that we're on the cusp of ASI, and the USA MUST not get there wildly behind, for example, China, is correct. And that the USA should not be shackled by an international framework that rival nations are going to ignore anyway.

He's directionally correct, even if you think he's too stupid to know what he's agreeing with.

No. I think hollywood has always been subversive and run by foreign pedophiles. For example, look for the interview with Shirley Temple about what they tried doing to her as a _child_,

I think it has produced enough pro-American-MIC films every now and then to stay out of more government trouble.

You usually don't realize (at the time) that the media you watched as a child was subverting you (and your parents desires). And unless you revisit those films a generation later with a critical eye, you may not realize it ever.

But that's how the ratchet effect works. The newer media that is now visibly odious to me is only visibly odious to me because it is targeting the edge of an overton window that has continued moving since my own youth. The leading edge of socially allowable media subversion continues to advance until a historical reset event sets it back somewhat. Or, sometimes, when there is sufficient market rejection.

In the case of hollyweird, the concentration of power has significant drawbacks; destroying that concentration of power will probably be a net benefit. (to be clear, I think It will amplify other problems instead).

In general, I think evil seems to be more effective when it is centralized and powerful, with captured institutions, while maintaining the ability to operate openly, and has de-facto monopoly control over the domain in which it operates, and when most people do not understand what is being done to them.

If Trump had promised to destroy hollywood, I would have voted for him 10x harder.

(And i expect I would be disappointed because he wouldn't actually follow through with it)

Anyway, hopefully, AI gets the job done and finally kills that wretched industry. I look forward to further democratization of movie making.

(fwiw, my knee jerk reaction is to oppose the merger.)

The current generation of these smartglasses devices will fail and disappear.

Let me show my work:

1. women cannot use these smart glasses to take selfies.
2. therefore, women will not wear them.
3. therefore, the only people who wear them will be men
4. anything that men do but which women do not do is probably criminal, but certainly creepy, a red flag, or a cause of the ick
5. therefore, men will be shamed (or arrested) into not wearing them either

QED.

I don't think training a model with copyrighted data is any kind of gray zone at all.

Running inference against such a model _might_ be infringing.

But I don't see the legal argument that model training would be.

Think of model training as lossy data compression. You provide an input, it produces a compressed artifact, and it can no longer reproduce the original when you uncompress it. It can produce _something_. It cannot reproduce the original.

On slashdot, we all agree that format shifting copyrighted works should be allowed and unrestricted, right?

If there is applicable case law here about how lossy a "reproduction" can be before copyright has something to say about it, that would be relevant. Do you know of any?

I think you're repeating something that feels emotionally valid but in my experience, isn't factually (or legally) accurate.

I have found AI models to be frustratingly _obedient_ of copyright.

I'll be in a situation where I ask a specific question about what a document says, and the AI repeatedly says the work is copyrighted and it can't just tell me what it says _verbatim_, but it can answer specific questions for me in its own words (while telling me to check the original).

Two examples from my life are procedural questions about what Roberts Rules of Order would require in a given situation, and, what ASD STE-100 says about how to name/word things.

The applicable US law would appear to be USC 17 Sec 106 and 107, which on one hand limits derivative works, but on the other, allows fair use for purposes of teaching, scholarship, or research.

(USC references provided by AI, btw. Which I haven't read)

I used to agree with you, and then oddly enough, about 25-30 years ago, I came across this signature on another regular slashdot posters postings:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

(AI tells me the attribution is "The Red Lily", Anatole France, 1894)

That was about their opinion shows, not their news shows. That case was specifically about Tucker Carlson.

Those kinds of arguments weren't saving Fox from the Dominion lawsuit, though. If they seemed like to have worked, Fox wouldn't have settled for almost $800 million right before trial.

Hastert doesn't have a law named after him. There's the Hastert Rule, which is an informal rule that no bill should be brought before the House to vote on it unless it already has the support of the majority of the majority party.

Hastert was convicted of structuring withdrawals to avoid reporting requirements and making false statements. The charges themselves were not inherently about homosexuality, though it came about from him covering up his same-sex abuse of a minor, and the indictment didn't mention the sexual abuse, and his allocution under the plea deal didn't initially mention it. He did admit it under pressure from the judge, who seemed to start to lean against accepting his plea without him admitting to the molestation, for which he could not be charged because the statute of limitations had expired decades prior.

Hastert has never come out as gay. Most child molesters, even those who molest the same sex, never identify as homosexual.

Number 7 according to Car & Driver, which I think is much more trustworthy than whatever "Wealthy Driver" is. The Car & Driver list is also applies to 2025 rather than 2023.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.caranddriver.com%2Fn...