Whatâ(TM)s interesting here is that as a professional musician, this guy is a public figure and the âoeactual maliceâ standard for defamation applies â" a standard that was designed when defamation could only be done by a human being.

This requires the defendant to make a defamatory statement either (1) knowing it is untrue or (2) with reckless disregard for the truth.

Neither condition applies to the LLM itself; it has no conception of truth, only linguistic probability. But the LLM isnâ(TM)t the defendant here. Itâ(TM)s the company offering it as a service. Here the company is not even aware of the defamatory statement being made. But it is fully aware of their modelâ(TM)s capacity to hallucinate defamatory âoefactsâ.

I think that because the tort is based in the common law concept of a duty of care, we may well see the company held liable in some way for this kind of thing. But itâ(TM)s new law; it could go the other way.

This is it, precisely. If I could buy a new EV for $12K I would absolutely do that. If buying a new EV means that I have to spend $60K then I am not remotely interested. EV vehicles have some problems that make them impractical as the only vehicle for most families. Those problems disappear completely if the vehicle is inexpensive enough so that it doesn't have to be your only vehicle.

China is currently giving EVs away, we are stupid for not taking them up on the offer. Eventually the U.S. auto market would adapt. I am quite sure that they could also make low margin EVs if they had the right incentive. Let's be honest, the American public would probably be willing to subsidize them as they made the change. However, instead we have rigged the entire system so that U.S. manufacturers are incentivized to only compete in the largest, most expensive, and least environmentally friendly auto markets available. It's no wonder that the rest of the world isn't interested in our cars.

The laborious, linear interface is of course another limitation of all kinds of tapes -- digital or analog. But getting rid of this also changes human behavior. People don't listen as much to long form collections; they don't even necesssarily listen to entire songs.

A mix tape is essentially a long format program manually and personally curated for you by another human being, unmediated and indeed untracked by any third corporate party. Losing the mix tape was a real cultural loss. Sure they didn't sound great, but they didn't have to.

I suppose every technological advance is potentially double edged. When people get books and literacy, verbal storytelling declines. That doesn't make books bad. the technical limitations of verbal stories -- say limited repeatbility -- are real limitations, but that doesn't mean something wasn't lost.

Well surely the people impacted won't figure out who has a raging hate-on for wind power because it's classified. Right?

You dont make multiplayer games for a living. Please stop talking, it's embarassing ... for you.

I'm pretty sure someone was expecting that we were addicted to that $100B trade, and by throwing a 15-999% tariff on it, 15B-1.5T of fresh taxes were going to be generated. With a 40% drop in purchasing, that's going to translate to a lot lower tax intake than expected. The price for that will probably be more inflation, but the powers that be have shown very little concern over using other, more nuclear options (possibly even literal nuclear options), for handling budget shortfalls.

Exciting times!

The Turing test (which involves having a 1 to 1 conversation with an AI agent) has fuck all to do with astroturf posts, dummy.

Not by a long shot. Unsafe is scoped. 20% of Rust packages may use unsafe, but the amount of code in unsafe sections is far far far lower. Unsafe means "I accept the risk of doing unsafe things" but because it's scoped, just because a package uses Unsafe, it's still benefiting from the memory safety of bounds checking and borrow checking 99% of the time.

That's a far far cry from "it's just the same thing as doing it in C"

Usually with our money... Right and Left = Divide and conquer. No option options. I stopped trusting any of them decades ago. ;-)

That's the entire goal of flooding the zone with shit. Trusting nobody is not the smart position I suspect you consider it to be.

PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

I remember arguing with someone that the "States Rights" mantra was just a mask for racism and the ability to shit on minorities by southern states. He made vast arguments about the power of a federation and states abilities to try different things and learn from each other. Statements that even at the time were bullshit and we both knew it (sitting in Austin, working for tech companies that were only there to escape taxes).

Well, now that racism is federally mandated, they're still doing away with states rights. So I guess I win that 25 year old argument. I don't particularly disagree with the stated purpose of this law, but the irony of it being delivered by a racist at the expense of state's rights is hilarious.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

ya basic, son