That ain't the same thing.

This thing is doing things you didn't tell it to. It might even do things you explicitly told it to not do. It is not a case of "well, you could've forseen this as a consequence if you had been careful" like your campfire. My example is only a bit silly, it is absolutely possible that an AI agent will decide to hack NASA because you asked it for some data for a school project. Even in the broadest possible sense, that does not fall into stuff that the law so far has considered to be in the domain of negliegence.

AI agents do stuff you could not possibly have expected. Heck, I asked Claude a fairly simple knowledge question yesterday and it wanted to read from /dev/null. There is no argument you can make that would convince a jury that I should in any way have expected that and taken precautions. In a hypothetical world where a read from /dev/null randomly kills a puppy somewhere on the planet, I don't think I would've been convicted.

Why should I use this NorthStar browser instead of LadyBird?

except on reddit where moderation typically deletes wholesale sections of threads because wrongthink.

And that's why I specified "as practiced here," meaning on Slashdot. I don't visit Reddit or know anything about how it works, and didn't include them in my statement. Please don't assume that I meant anything other than exactly what I wrote.

If you'll take a moment or two to check the state's history, you'll learn that when Spain ruled, the name of the province was "Nuevo Mexico," or New Mexico.

Actually, I think that they scramble the planes while they're double checking. Then they don't have them go past a certain point unless they get the GO signal, and if they do, they're a lot closer. This gives them a head start if it's for real, but also gives them enough time to turn around safely if it's a false alarm.

Exactly. Censorship attempts to make it impossible for people to see and/or read whatever's been censored. Moderation, as practiced here, only makes it slightly more difficult because you can always click on the down-modded post's link and see what was hidden.

You don't get it.

Autonomous AI agents are the perfect no-responsibility card. The AI companies? They trained a general-purpose model and never gave it any explicit instructions to do hacking. The AI services? They are just middlemen and have no control over what people tell the agents to do. The people prompting the agents? Unless you're straighforward dumb, you didn't tell it to do hacking, you just told it something innocent like "find me all data on Mars for my school project" and the agent decided that probably NASA is hiding something so let's hack them to get it.

Since there's no human anywhere executing anything that's a crime - voila, in addition to the victimless crime we now have the perpetratorless crime.

A resounding success. No large-scale demonstrations, damaged cameras, lawsuits or political suicide for those involved. So we can expect this to be rolled out fully.

Crime prevention? Who said this has anything to do with crime?

One part is the desktop search engine nobody uses anymore.

Then why is it still there? If you feel that you must keep it, at least make it optional.

I'd think that under the circumstances, replacing Donald with Daffy would make sense. And in the one sequence where he's turned into a baby, use Baby Plucky from Tiny Toons.

Yes, limited local AI models certainly are going to be a standard feature in the future.

I run both local and cloud AI. There is still a huge difference, because my local machine has to use smaller and quantized models. It takes considerably longer for lower quality results.

The VA uses a form of 2FA that's provided by a third-party (I've run across it on other sites once or twice.) that will use either text messages or email, your choice. What you get by text (I've not tried email.) is a six digit one-time code that you use to confirm your ID. If you run across a site wanting to use ID.ME to authenticate you, it's safe to use. I've been using it for several years and had no trouble.

This is why some of us still use cash and Monero

Those are the politics that brought us the last 80 years of relative peace and freedom

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.