I suspect that a more fundamental problem is what you would need to preserve.

Embryos are clearly the easier case, being small and impressively good at using some sort of contextual cue system to elaborate an entire body plan from a little cell glob(including more or less graceful handling of cases like identical twins, where physical separation of the cell blob changes requirements dramatically and abruptly); but they are also the case that faces looser constraints. If an embryo manages to grow a brain that falls within expectations for humans it's mission successful. People may have preferences; but a fairly wide range of outcomes counts as normal. If you discard or damage too much the embryo simply won't work anymore; or you'll get ghastly malformations; but there are uncounted billions of hypothetical babies that would count as 'correct' results if you perturb the embryo just slightly.

If you are freezing an adult; you presumably want more. You want the rebuilt result to fall within the realm of being them. That appears to not require an exact copy(people have at least limited ability to handle cell death and replacement or knock a few synapses around without radical personality change most of the time; and a certain amount of forgetting is considered normal); but it is going to require some amount of fidelity that quite possibly wont' be available(depending on what killed them and how, and how quickly and successfully you froze them); and which cannot, in principle, be reconstructed if lost.

Essentially the (much harder because it's all fiddly biotech) equivalent of getting someone to go out and paint a landscape for you vs. getting someone to paint the picture that was damaged when your house burned down. The first task isn't trivial; but it's without theoretical issues and getting someone who can do it to do it is easy enough. The second isn't possible, full stop, in principle, even if you are building the thing atom by atom the information regarding what you want has been partially lost; though it is, potentially, something you could more or less convincingly/inoffensively fake; the way people do photoshop 'restoration' of damaged photos where the result is a lie; but a plausible one that looks better than the damage does.

The fraught ethics of neurally engineering someone until your client says that their personality, memories, and behavior 'seem right' is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader; along with the requisite neuropsychology.

Is this the same Klarna that has already been through one cycle of being super bullish about AI and then having to re-hire some actual customer support?

I don't think the US actually enforces anything approaching the spirit of robust anti-trust law now. The goalposts have been moved back so many times, they're on another field now.

Here is the thing, you are posting on Slashdot. Don't tell me you are not sharp enough to find a broker, and buy some long dated at the money PUTS either on the AI and AI adjacent firms or just the market over all with funds like SPY / QQQ.

You If you really had conviction about truly big enough crash for Main Street to feel it to commit 18 or 20K; you'd make enough to keep the mortgage current and food on the table for a year right there after there return of the principle.

The thing is you don't really believe in such a crash. The bigger part of you thinks this will all just blow over in couple quarters, you might not get a great Christmas bonus either for 2025 or 2026 but mostly you don't think your financial life will be all that greatly impacted. I think that bigger part of you is right. OpenAI's investors are going to lose a lot of money, probably Anthropic and anyone else not actually in the business of making the compute hardware, or using the compute hardware to make physical things like drugs, better plastic, etc. I don't think there is going to be any 2008 like crisis..

And we're also smart enough to realize the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Newt Gingrich predicted the dot-com boom will crash... in 1996. It took another 5 years for it to happen.

The 2008 crash was also predicted - you might remember The Big Short. But you'll also remember there were serious issues with cashflow a couple of years before it happened.

If this stuff was easy to predict, I wouldn't be making puts. I'd be investing heavily in it knowing when it wouild peak and then sell just shortly before. Then once sold I would make put calls.

There are many manufacturers that sell all kinds of vehicles in the USA. Some made completely abroad from various different countries. Some domestically. And a lot are a complex mixture of the two. But you think there is a grand conspiracy/collusion among them all of them to deprive consumers of lower-priced/lower-end models?

The big 3, which have American brand loyalty up the wazoo, realized in the 90s they made more money on bigger vehicles. They they've been marketing bigger and bigger vehicles to Americans. It's why the F-150 is the best-selling pickup truck (and how much larger it is now than in the past). Heck, for a few years in the mid 2000's, F-150's were sold with so much luxury they had no cargo carrying capacity once you loaded it up with a couple of adults - you had maybe 150 lbs of axle weight left.

It's also why SUVs are insanely popular, and not cheap small SUVs like the foreign makes, but the big ones.

It's why the Big 3 have been getting rid of less profitable sedans - they're marketing people to buy big cars. And the cars they do make in the lower end of the spectrum just can't compete - with major recalls going on.

The only reason America still makes cars are EVs like Tesla. The ICE cars are almost all foreign makes.

The Big 3 aren't worried about Toyota Camrys or Corollas because Americans are loyal to the Ford, GM and Chrysler marks. It would take a seismic shift to get them to consider a Honda or Toyota. And even more to go with a Hyundai or Kia. All of whom make low end vehicles that are cheap but relatively full featured.

Ford isn't going to sell F-150s to Japan - too big, too expensive, not very useful. But Ford doesn't care about the Japanese market. Toyota and Honda, meanwhile, sell very nice efficient cars to Americans to fill the lower end gap. Of course, Trump also goes around and does tariffs, but a lot of those are made in the US to be sold in the US.

But brand loyalty is a fierce thing, especially in red country.

That's only very partially true. The uptick in unpaid mortgages gave the house of cards a little tap; but it was the giant pile of increasingly exotic leverage constructed on top of the relatively boring retail debt that actually gave the situation enough punch to be systemically dangerous; along with the elaborate securitizing, slicing, and trading making it comparatively cumbersome for people to just renegotiate a mortgage headed toward delinquency and take a relatively controlled writedown; rather than just triggering a repossession that left them with a bunch of real estate they weren't well equipped to sell.

That made sense if you saw the Apple product line which had dozens of computers at many different price points all with subtle variations all meant to satisfy some niche.

Jobs knew Apple could not sustain such a product line. Restaurants in trouble often have sprawling menus for the same reason - some small percentage of the customer base likes one menu item, and now the menu bloats to dozen pages with dozens of dishes on each.

The call to simplify was required because Apple had no business with dozens of variants of a computer to the point a customer didn't know what they want. Many were also superfluous - you had a model with X and Y, and one with Y and Z, and a customer didn't know which to choose. (In reality, a model with X, Y and Z might be easier, and cheaper).

Jobs understood the illusion of choice - having dozens of choices is often worse than having a very limited set of choices.

By cutting choice down, it meant Apple had a simpler product matrix they could handle with dwindling resources, and customers no longer had to go to a department store to look at one line of computers, a computer store for another line, and an electronics store for a third line, all of which are subtly different and with confusing price points. Jobs simplified the menu at a time so Apple could concentrate on making a small range of products that fills the widest possible market - even if it meant the one configuration perfect could not be fulfilled. This simplified menu turned away customers, but it meant scarce resources could be used to maximum returns. Once Apple was on more solid footing, they then expanded their catalog of products, but also observing to avoid needless overlap which only adds confusion.

When struggling restaurants get overhauled, their menu is often simplified from the huge book to a single page listing at most a half dozen dishes they can concentrate on doing really really well that causes customers to come back for more. Once the restaurant is back on solid footing, they can start to expand the menu - by adding a dish, and being ruthless about cutting out underperformers.

There are two ways to do this. First is to feed AI slop into AI - this ruins the training models and is actually one of the biggest problems in AI right now - everyone is using it and posting slop all over the internet. But it also means when you crawl for data, you're ingesting that slop as well and it's corrupting your models

The other thing to do is to poison the well by posting non-slop that's deliberately wrong. If you give a command or code example, hide in ways that are destructive or don't get the job done. Things like today's equivalent of "rm -rf /" (which doesn't work since "rm" actually requires a couple more parameters to do it - but make it appear it's a normal argument to rm). Non-slop that's wrong is just as harmful - people are using it without thinking so if they're blindly following AI commands to do a task and it wipes their machine, well, that's a goal as well.

If you run a mailing list, have a hidden archive of AI slop generated archives that look a lot like the real thing and make it harder to sort the real from the fake

Your post is about encountering municipal bureaucracy when you had it in mind to do it yourself in the first place.

I'm no fan of bureaucracy for its own sake. But there's a reason you need to jump through some hoops when you want to change something on your property. Those trees you want to cut down might be crucial for flood mitigation. That room you want to turn into a spare bedroom might be a fire-trap if it lacks a window or quick access to an exit route. Digging on your property might disrupt buried pipes or cables.

Like it or not, we do need rules, even though sometimes they may seem silly to you.

Oddly, I don't think that's ever been an issue because DIY is happening all the time, and that's why those regulations are there because someone dies and people find out it's because an unauthorized renovation happened that created a firetrap.

So no, it's not a deterrent because it's happening all the time. It's made worse by house flippers because those people are cutting corners to save money (i.e., make more profit), who you know aren't taking time to get permits, do inspections, or even bring things to code. By the time the flawed renovations are discovered, it's too late and the buyer is basically left with their house falling to pieces.

So I don't get get the claptrap that DIY is illegal - because if it was illegal, substandard construction and renovation work wouldn't be happening. There's probably a small fraction of the unpermitted work done properly to code (or better - remember code is just a minimum) and you'll never know until decades down the line when someone tries to renovate and discovers no permit was ever taken out. It's just it was well constructed, well built that no one needed to do anything. But that is far from the norm, and DIYers are basically the reason for the regulatory hell.

Also why "house flipping" should be an immediate rejection of a house - it looks pretty but the pain is likely concealing a load of issues you won't find out until later.

For Africa, the situation is different. The government led projects aren't happening not because of regulations, but because corruption and other things are basically draining the resources. Building an electric grid even without regulations we have (basically it's the wild west outside of Western nations) still costs money and effort, and enough palms get greased that no money makes it down to do the work. That's why it's not happening. And having electricity is better than not, so even the shadiest and lousiest of DIY gear you can get off Temu makes your life way better than trying to get it done the right way. Electrification rates in Africa are disputed because if you have a house with a single LED light that provides light for a few hours after dark, you're considered to have electricity.

Even the most basic DIY solar projects in Africa provide that, but also power to charge cellphones and provide Internet connectivity (during the day - there are batteries but they provide the lighting) - when the sun is out the battery charges and runs an inverter so you can run a computer to get Internet (usually via cellular network). This is often enough for farmers to access trading networks and get weather forecasts which is why it exists and is considered an important resource. And while the sun is out, cellphone charging is done.

It's certainly possible that some people do, sincerely, 'fear' that the onrushing machine god will speak chinese and that it would be just the worst if all humans were rendered obsolete by the wrong side's robot when that's supposed to be our job; but, especially with how tepid the results are for the money poured in, it seems much more the case that we are seeing a lot of nakedly cynical playing of the 'give us what we want, lest the chinese win' by people who are otherwise on deeply shaky ground in terms of things like massive copyright infringement, voracious data mining, and an endless hunger for capital without any signs of returns.

It's like a vastly hypertrophied case of the 'race to 5G' stuff; where, if we didn't give Verizon whatever they asked for, China would have a faster rollout of 5G and we would lose the 4th industrial revolution or something? It was never entirely clearly what losing the race was going to involve.

The existential tone of the claims seem especially curious given how meagre the leads people are pouring billions into seem to be; and how readily 'AI' models can be poked at via distillation attacks or good, old-fashioned, electronic intrusion. If The Singularity kicks off that presumably changes everything beyond the powers of meaningful prediction(though that holds for whoever develops it as well as everyone else; given the odds that it will slip the leash); but as long as you are in the realm of incrementally more or less flakey chatbots it seems a bit weird to even talk like there is some sort of victory condition that will trigger and cause one side to lose.

She won $150K and donated it all.

She still has to pay income tax on $150K, given that the tax deduction on donations isn't 100%.

I'm guessing she does not have the free cash available to pay those taxes either.

She could've "donated it all" which also means "minus taxes". So she donated all her winnings net taxes owed. I think most of these lotteries already withhold 40% of the money and remit as taxes anyways so she probably just gave to charity what she got left.

The IRS takes their cut immediately, even if you're a foreigner. You then have to submit tons of paperwork showing whether or not your country has a tax treaty with the US, at which point they just withhold 25% for taxes. Then you have to submit even more paperwork if you want the last bit (because lottery winnings may be tax free in some countries, like Canada).

I would also guess that perhaps the lottery has the ability to donate a portion of your winnings to a charity of your choice to help bypass some of the paperwork regarding taxes, because it's not unusual for winners to donate a portion of their winnings.

This just seemed like an obvious swing-and-miss on the part of the manufacturers. TVs are passive consumption devices, and that's exactly what people want them to be.

Yeah, but the heart was in the right place - because videoconferencing is a thing after all (and was a thing pre-pandemic). So instead of everyone in a family gathering around a phone to say hi to grandma, they could do it from the living room sofa.

Conference bars are expensive - even if you go for the non-smart ones they're still pretty pricey, add on a Barco or other unit to do your conferencing stuff, and it's fairly expensive and you still have to supply the TV. Meanwhile, you can get a camera for the LG for $100 and it does Teams and Zoom and everything else.

So the idea was sound, you can still buy conference bars today or even smart conference bars even.

It was an idea, with bad to worse execution (the horrendous privacy policies notwithstanding). If they planned it out better with a real privacy focus, they might have done a lot better than simply being a way to monetize their customers in the end.

It's likely one where had they tried not to be greedy in the beginning it might have had some modicum of success. Instead they decided to be full on greed and untrustworthy from the get go.

It's actually a terrible idea.

As someone with an SCCA license used to driving racing cars that have much higher performance than nearly everything on the road (including your Tesla), I can tell you that no mass-market road car is hard to drive. The problem is never the car, it's the driver, or more accurately their lack of ability.

To properly solve a problem you need to attack the root cause, not one of it's symptoms.
If there are people out there that can't truly can't handle jthe acceleration of a car or type of car then they shouldn't have been legally allowed to drive it in the first place.

Except for the first time in basically automobile history, cars have broken acceleration records to the point it's physics limiting acceleration and not the vehicle.

ICE are slow and laggy - they take a while to get up to speed, which generally has limited acceleration for normal vehicles.

These days production EVs are easily able to get beyond those limits way too easily, and getting 0-60 times in 3 seconds isn't unusual. (a 0-60 in 3 seconds used to be the holy grail, and now production EVs are beating it on a regular basis).

I'm guessing China probably saw a bunch of rear-enders where some EV driver ran into the rear of the car ahead of them because the EV out-accelerated the car in front. And chances are everyone is close to everyone else so if you're a bit too enthusiastic with the pedal you might not be able to hit the brakes in time.

So now China is making too many electric cars and solar panels, compared to domestic demand. Their solution was to export that stuff. Now we want to impose tariffs on those things, so that global demand for Chinese stuff is artificially depressed. But when China loses markets for their stuff, what will they make with their comically overbuilt production capacity? Not solar panels or clean cars, but weapons. It turns out tariffs don't stop the "export" of bombs and missiles and attack drones to Taiwan.

Really good comment. I think I basicallly already thought this, but the way you put it is clearer than how I was thinking about it, so thanks!