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Comment Re: AI Clap (Score 1) 73

This looks like it might be a useful feature for some users. If it is clearly advertised and using it is optional, I'm not sure I see a problem here.

Is there any (non-tinfoil) expectation that any related behaviour in Firefox is not being added transparently and optionally? The description seems ambiguous about what triggers these previews. If merely hovering over a link would be enough to cause a visit to another page then personally that's probably something I'd want to turn off. Others might have a different attitude to risk there. In any case, if there's some kind of active choice where you need to click or press in a specific way to trigger it, that seems reasonable.

Comment Re:Malthus was wrong. (Score 1) 243

That brings up something interesting. According to US Census data, the median age of first marriage in 1950 was 24 for men and about 20.5 for women. But that was an outlier, with a dramatic drop from 1940, when the median ages were about 25.3 and 22.8. Between 1890 and 2010, the median ages were usually much higher -- 25 or more for men and 22 or more for women. In 1890, the median ages were 26 and 23. That really drives home your mom's claim that pregnancies were drivers of a lot of marriages, as the 1950s were an unusually difficult time to get birth control. In 2010, the average ages were about 28.4 and 26.9. That's a lot of time taken out of primary childbearing years, and birth control is more available and reliable than it was.

Comment Re:Careless (Score 2) 113

A company provides a contract that says that the functionality ends when the customer stops paying for the license. If Davis Lu provided software under contract and had terms allowing the software to stop working, yes, it would be legal.

But he was an employee. An employee is expected to leave things running after leaving the company. Leaving behind a kill switch and not telling anyone about it is a criminal act. He's not the first person to do this (look up Tim Lloyd in 1996 and Nimesh Patel in 2016), and he won't be the last. And they all have or will have committed a criminal act. Lloyd got 41 months in prison and $2 million in restitution. Patel was lucky enough to not get charged, but he was sued by his former employer, Allegro Microsystems, for damage he caused. They appeared to ultimately settle out of court.

Comment Re: The days of stupidity in the US are over (Score 1) 224

Oil: good, guns: good! Oily guns: Best! Solar panels: Commie!

You've got to admit, the man is a comedic genius.

He's the no holds barred WWE heavyweight champion of the world in political comedic pantomime theatre.

It will be boring when he's gone... and of course uncomfortably hotter and wildfire smoky or flooded depending on where you live, but hey... that's what Americans voted for right?

Comment Re:Honestly we probably have (Score 1) 243

The birth rate in the US has not significantly recovered from the last peak in 2007. The number of births in the US was mostly gently climbing from 1997 to 2007, rising from 3.9 million to about 4.3 million (10% in ten years). But since then, it generally declined through 2020 to 3.6 million (16% decline in 13 years, and 8% lower than in 1997). The numbers for 2020-2024 are fairly flat at just above 3.6 million. The maternity rate in 2007 was 2.12, while in 2024, it was down to 1.60.

Comment Re:Malthus was wrong. (Score 3, Interesting) 243

I am more convinced with each passing year that the global population is much closer to peak than we think. In the 1990s, the peak was expected to be around 2080-2100. By 2010, the forecast moved to 2070-2080. More recent forecasts have suggested 2050-2060. I'm thinking that some of the more aggressive forecasts that see the global population peak before 2050 are right. After that -- and maybe before it, in some cases -- we're going to have to figure out how the new economy works, because expanding markets will become a thing of the past.

Comment Re:ok? (Score 2, Interesting) 59

This. Most people inevitably respond in these threads talking about "the model's training". AI Overview isn't like something like ChatGPT. It's a minuscule summarization model. It's not tasked to "know" anything - it's only tasked to sum up what the top search results say. In the case of the "glue on pizza" thing, one of the top search results was an old Reddit thread where a troll advised that. AI overview literally tells you what links it's drawing on.

Don't get me wrong, there's still many reasons why AI overview is a terrible idea.

1) It does nothing to assess for trolling. AI models absolutely can do that, they just have not.
2) It does nothing to assess for misinfo. AI models absolutely can do that, they just have not.
3) It does nothing to assess for scams. AI models absolutely can do that, they just have not.

And the reason the have not is that they need to run AI Overview hundreds of thousands of times per second, so they want the most absolutely barebones lightweight model imaginable. You could run their model on a cell phone it's so small.

Bad information on the internet is the main source of errors, like 95% of them. But there are two other types of mistakes as well:

4) The model isn't reading web pages in the same way that humans see them, and this can lead to misinterpreted information. For example, perhaps when rendered, there's a headline "Rape charges filed against local man", and below it a photo of a press conference with a caption "District Attorney John Smith", and then below that an article about the charges without mentioning the man's name. The model might get fed: "Rape charges filed against local man District Attorney John Smith", and report John Smith as a sex offender.

5) The model might well just screw up in its summarization. It is, after all, as miniscule as possible.

I personally find deploying a model with these weaknesses to be a fundamentally stupid idea. You *have* to assess sources, you *can't* have a nontrivial error rate in summarizations, etc. Otherwise you're just creating annoyance and net harm. But it's also important for people to understand what the errors actually are. None of these errors have anything to do with "what's in the model's training data". The model's training data is just random pieces of text followed by summaries of said text.

Comment Re:enough energy to knock something off a shelf (Score 4, Insightful) 30

Not like this with this - the energy here equates to a couple hundredths of a joule. Now, the "Oh My God! Particle" had a much higher energy, about three orders of magnitude higher. That's knock-photos-over sort of energy (and a lot more than that). The problem is that you can't deposit it all at once. A ton of energy does get transferred during the first collision, but it's ejecting whatever it hit out of whatever it was in as a shower of relativistic particles that - like the original particle - tend to travel a long distance between interactions. Whatever particle was hit is not pulling the whole target with it, it's just buggering off as a ghostly energy spray. There will be some limited chains of secondary interactions transferring more kinetic energy, but not "knock pictures over" levels of energy transferred.

Also, here on the surface you're very unlikely to get the original collision; collisions with the atmosphere can spread the resultant spray of particles out across multiple square kilometers before any of them reaches the surface.

Comment Re:xAI, power gobbler (Score 3, Insightful) 11

The average ICE car burns its entire mass worth of fuel every year. Up in smoke into our breathing air, gone, no recycling.

The average car on the road lasts about two decades, and is then recycled, with the vast majority of its metals recovered.

The manufacturing phase is not the phase you have to worry about when it comes to transportation.

Comment Re:xAI, power gobbler (Score 4, Funny) 11

Any sources for this

Anonymous (2021). "How My Uncle’s Friend’s Mechanic Proved EVs Are Worse." International Journal of Hunches, 5(3), 1-11.

Backyard, B. (2018). "EVs Are Worse Because I Said So: A Robust Analysis." Garage Journal of Automotive Opinions, 3(2), 1-2.

Dunning, K. & Kruger, E. (2019). "Why Everything I Don’t Like Is Actually Bad for the Environment." Confirmation Bias Review, 99(1), 0-0.

Johnson, L. & McFakename, R. (2022). "Carbon Footprint Myths and Why They Sound Convincing After Three Beers." Annals of Bro Science, 7(2), 1337-42.

Lee, H. (2025). "Numbers I Felt Were True". Global Journal of Speculative Engineering, 22(1), 34-38.

Outdated, T. (2015, never revised). "EVs Are Bad Because of That One Study From 2010 I Misinterpreted." Obsolete Science Digest, 30(4), 1-5.

Tinfoil, H. (2020). "Electric Cars Are a Government Plot (And Other Things I Yell at Clouds)." Conspiracy Theories Auto, 5(5), 1-99.

Trustmebro, A. (2019). "The 8-Year Rule: Why It’s Definitely Not Made Up." Vibes-Based Research, 2(3), 69-420.

Wrong, W. (2018). "The Art of Being Loudly Incorrect About Technology." Dunning-Kruger Journal, 1(1), 1-?.

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