They could say no. No-one is stopping them.

You're right. Also a professional baseball player *could* put their bats down and just stand at the plate, but pointing out that it's physically possible is stupid, especially if your argument supporting that "They Can Just Do That" is that baseball players *should put their bats down*.

This is why such people shouldn't be in positions of power.

Again with the should. It's dumb saying "they can do something, but they won't, but they should" because it's a moot point. Yes, they could also write a press release that is an 80 page Star Trek fanfic set in the narrative universe of Mr Rogers. Nothing is stopping them. But what is the value of pointing out something they are physically capable of when even you seem to understand why they won't? It's just a completely meaningless observation, particularly since you couch it in phrasing that suggests it's just a simple easy thing to do? You're trying to have your argument both ways - it makes you sound simple.

I am truly dismayed at how long I had to scroll through this thread till I saw a comment that asked this

Seriously we live in The stupidest possible timeline

I honestly don't know what's worse:

The privacy implications / issue reported
or the fact that this even exists..

how is this a thing?

This is why such people should never be in positions of power.

What you're trying to do here is deal with the world the way you think it should be, not the way it actually is. So saying, "You can just do this" if the world was the way you think is should isn't a particularly well supported assertion.

"The whole point of this is because Waymo isn't supposed to make those mistakes,"

There is no whole point in such a complex issue, but I would like to tell this person that the idea is part of the argument for automated vehicles is they may make less mistakes. Perfection shouldn't be a condition for improvement.

That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

That's what I just said.

Here's where the summary goes wrong:

Artificial Intelligence is in fact many kinds of technologies. People conflate LLMs with the whole thing because its the first kind of AI that an average person with no technical knowledge could use after a fashion.

But nobody is going to design a new rocket engine in ChatGPT. They're going to use some other kind of AI that work on problems on processes that the average person can't even conceive of -- like design optimization where there are potentially hundreds of parameters to tweak. Some of the underlying technology may have similarities -- like "neural nets" , which are just collections of mathematical matrices that encoded likelihoods underneath, not realistic models of biological neural systems. It shouldn't be surprising that a collection of matrices containing parameters describing weighted relations between features should have a wide variety of applications. That's just math; it's just sexier to call it "AI".

But that would have ended with Russia not being owned by Russians.

The only thing "Russian" about the people that own Russia now is the country on their passports, which they probably don't use anyway because of the sanctions etc. from Ukraine and that many have citizenship in whichever country they have moved to. They sure as hell don't give a damn about the country, it's people, or anything else "Russia", besides their ability to keep extracting money and influence from it.

Of course, you could say that about a lot of the people that essentially own the rest of the world too.

Doubly so in this case, albeit of a slightly different nature. I keep coming across IP addresses that are managed by Cloud Innovations all the time, and almost always leased out to some sketchy ISP that is either heavily compromised by botnets, or an out and out "bullet proof" hosting provider. The latter are particularly interesting as they are presumably raking in the cash because they both covering Lu's rental fees and maintaining a business relationship because they keep cycling to new subnets as the previous ones get blocked. That implies they are not defaulting on the rental fees, and Lu is either oblivious to what that continual changing of ranges for the same customer implies or is fully aware of, and therefore supporting, this kind of activity.

10m IPs, huh. /checks blocklist. Yeah, I've got just over a third of that blocked & flagged as "Cloud Innovations" at the moment, most of which are in /16 and larger IPv4 allocations. About 7m to go, I guess... Thank $deity for IPSets...

National budgets simply do not, and cannot, work that way. Taxes go into a central pot, and then get assigned out according to the priorities of the state as interpreted by the government that currently controls the national purse strings, ideally without having to borrow any additional money although that seldom happens and is deeply unpopular when it does (see "Austerity" - governments typicallydo not live within their means, yet usually expect their publics to do just that). For the whole system to work, they have to both tax things that are easy to collect the tax on, and over tax those things to make up for the costs of things where it is not easy to tax. If you want any taxes spent to be proportionate to what they are raised from, then the outcome will be a LOT of essential services that are currently supported by the public purse seeing drastic cuts, forcing more people to go private or join a *long* waiting list, and requiring suplemental per-use fees.

For most people, sure the odometer will be fine, but some of us live in rural communities and have vehicles that are used a significant amount of time off public roads, but still need to be taxed for their on-road usage - think tractors or road-legal quad bikes, for a couple of very obvious examples. A simple "per mile driven" based on the odometer is not the perfectly fair "one size fits all" solution that it might at first seem to be if those kinds of vehicles go electric at some point, so I think a little more nuance may be required before this scheme sees the light of day. Privacy concerns aside, many of those issues could easily be addressed via GPS-based tracking of just public road usage, and could also enable more nuanced billing to try deter drivers from using busy roads at peak times, effectively turning any road that is applied to into a toll road.

It should also be noted that this is on top of existing vehicle tax, which is paid as an annual fee in the UK. People with large SUVs and commercial vehicles will still be paying more to drive those vehicles per year, but whether the plan is to shift more of that tax to the per-mile rax rates based on criteria such as the likely amount of road surface wear they will create, e.g. different per mile rates for larger vehicles, isn't yet clear, either. Overall, it's probably the fairest system for users of different types of vehicle classes and power trains to pay their share of the public highway costs, but the devil is always in the details and at this point there are scant few of those available to see where the issues people ought to be concerned about might lie.

It's mostly a contracting issue. Sometimes, if a customer wants full rights to all documentation and design details (or source code or whatever), they have to pay more. If they want exclusive full rights, they have to pay even more. This can be beneficial for some things, not so good for others. If you want to customize your ERP system (SAP or something like that), you'll generally bring in an outside company to do it. You could demand all the source code for everything they did and pay more for it, but if you don't have the necessary expertise on tap to make use of it, it's just throwing money out the window.

The taxpayers paid for the goods along with their research and development.

Not always. Companies do undertake their own research on their own dime, hoping to later sell it to government or other contractors. To take a simple example, a government that purchases a Cessna Citation jet for travel purposes is mostly buying off the shelf. They may customize it with their own communications gear, but they didn't pay for the R&D that went into it. Textron (owner of Cessna and part of RTX) paid for that and is making it up over time with sales of the jet.

A more complicated example is Anduril, which started developing families of weapons on its own and then started getting contracts to further the development process. How much of that should the government own, or at least get access to, if they didn't pay for it?

I agree that the government should be able to fix its own things through contractors of its choosing, and it should get access to all necessary design data. But it's still a contracting issue.

If people trust Google to keep them anonymous (which I wouldn't), apartment complex reviews are gonna get a lot more spicy. As it is, you only get reviews from ex-residents and morons.

The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.

Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.

They clearly do NOT think it is safe. From TFS, emphasis mine:

"It is important to differentiate between the highly toxic PFAS such as PFOA and PFOS for which the EPA has set drinking water standards, versus less toxic PFAS in pesticides that help maintain food security," notes Doug Van Hoewyk, a toxicologist at Maine's Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.

Less toxic is still toxic. So, they *know* it's bad for you (and probably the environment/local ecology too), just not as bad, and yet they still expect you to be grateful for their efforts and quite literally lap it up. Good luck getting that shit on the shelves of places like the EU that have reasonable food standards, regardless of any tariffs or TACOs.