Ukraine (and Europe and many others) would disagree on your assessment of Patriot interceptors. A drone won't intercept missiles. Patriot does. Including Russia's ill-conceived "impossible to intercept" Oreo Shnick. Different tools for different work. That's what combined arms is. Russia is losing principally because they're using the same kind of thinking you're using.

Secondary to that, they think bombing civilians instead of bombing strategic military targets wins wars. Spoiler: It doesn't. Nobody ever capitulated because of bombing raids, they capitulate only after they've lost the means to continue fighting. This is why Ukraine's attacks on Russia's oil refineries is a good idea. Russians. Putler's wermacht runs on oil, not palaces or bath houses. So putting missile defenses around those is rather pointless. Ukraine has no reason to go after those, so why waste effort on it?

I'm glad to see that we have moved past the era of 'bugs' or 'defects' and are now anthropomorphizing undesired behavior as 'honest mistakes'. Truly progress is glorious.

This isnâ(TM)t about saving money or helping educators. This is the same thing as removing trollies so that people buy cars. Itâ(TM)s about control.

We think this is the economy. But we wouldnâ(TM)t need prison if we spent that same money helping people instead of incarceration. It costs more than housing and college.

There is more money spent spying on each American than helping them. What if we find that âoelow costâ AI actually costs much more than we are told. Why are we using it?

Take away the air and sell it to us.

Obviously billing errors are bad; but it seems like ones that off by an egregious number of powers of ten should concern us much less than ones that are small enough to be within the realm of plausible; those are the ones that you'll need to fight over and quite possibly not even win if you are an edge case or dealing with one of the services/configurations where you don't necessarily have any independent measure of usage. You can probably tell that you didn't use a VM more than 720 hours in the last 30 days; but are you actually counting GET requests in some way that is both authoritative and cheaper than just paying the $0.0004/thousand rather than hoping that Amazon will charge you correctly? For some very buttoned up buckets that only your other stuff accesses, quite possibly you can infer from those systems; but if it's something public facing and it might be a billing error or maybe you just got crawled hard last month?

Realbotix's classroom robot has drawn scrutiny because the company is connected to RealDoll, the longtime maker of hyperrealistic sex dolls and sex robots. Realbotix acquired RealDoll's parent company in 2024 but says the education-focused operation has separate employees, payroll, facilities, and technology, with plans to formally separate the businesses at the ownership level.

The "companion robots" are different from sex robots and intended to address what it's described as a "loneliness epidemic." Kiguel has previously said the company's goal is to produce robots and AI that are "indistinguishable from humans."

I'm not surprised surprised or anything; but it seems like a serious problem that it's the 'maker of high-end sex toys' part; rather than the 'attempting to replace education and human interaction with chatbots' part that has the company embroiled in controversy. Real Dolls are certainly pretty niche; a lot of additional inconvenience and cost for modest gains vs. vastly cheaper and more accessible local stimulation tools; but using tools as stimulation tools seems considerably less weird than using them as friends or fobbing children off on them.

I'd honestly be a little surprised if there's much protective effect.

It's possible that having to go through the setup process yourself is a little too much seeing how the sausage is made vs. interacting with a pleasant frontend cynically put together by someone who knows how 'engagement' works; but it's not like the nerd reputation for skewing socially awkward or the AI bro reputation for reaching a bit too quickly for slightly mystical anthropomorphisms are entirely unearned(the 'soul.md' is a frankly somewhat depressing genre).

At least for now; there might be some confounding demographic effects if you are talking one of the chunkier local models; in a country with a per-capita GDP of ~$14k being able to comfortably afford, or willing to uncomfortably afford, the necessary hardware would make you either at least modestly wealthier than average or significantly more interested than average; but as you slouch toward stuff that runs on more typical hardware the demographic differences presumably decrease.

If you didn't try to steal copper, your brain wouldn't be fried and there'd have been one less power outage.

...You're sitting here comparing an Iroquois village with a larger landmass and a tenth of the population to a country, and then being aghast at the difference in scale. Besides, since when does your igloo need electricity?

But the US and Israel already have nukes.

âoeDeterrenceâ is the extra terrorism you keep in reserve.

It requires at least ten years of education from a reputable source to be offended by the prior comment.

They program an AI to abuse people and then blame the AI for the abuse.

This is why Iâ(TM)m putting original sin on the creator. You made the kids that way dad. Itâ(TM)s on you.

âoeA burden for generations.â

Only if we allow it. Go socialist and change the rules or continue the same path and end up in a forced labor camp. I donâ(TM)t see any middle ground here.

Itâ(TM)s not my debt any more than itâ(TM)s my yacht parked off Epstein island. Until we get class consciousness we are going to be forever in debt to someone elseâ(TM)s excess.

Is this a real human being saying not having a monopoly is censorship?

The FCC works for the bad guys. Larry Ellison will soon have half the media. News Corp and Doctor Evil control the rest.

These discussions are so weird. Itâ(TM)s like being in the Mad Max world where warlords fight over water and oil and someone is talking about tax incentives. Do we even live on the same planet? The country is nearly a fascist dictatorship and we have masked ICE Agents kidnapping people for camps. Why are we still arguing about anything? All conservative and neoliberal policies have done their work ruining the country. Thereâ(TM)s no trickle in the trickle down â" thereâ(TM)s just humidity.

Listening to these quaint conversations about the business is news is so 30 years ago. We should have a public funded source. We should have public finance of elections.

Itâ(TM)s too late. Thereâ(TM)s more being spent on bunkers than water infrastructure right now.

This is ignoring the corporate interests and rampant propaganda. We can pontificate about the feedback loop of confirmation bias, but thereâ(TM)s not a news outlet that isnâ(TM)t giving tips to North Korea right now.

To have a democracy you need valid information. What we have is totally manipulated pretense of a meritocracy and PR for war crimes.

At this point itâ(TM)s just grifters and suckers and a few people opting out or depressed. Itâ(TM)s too late to repair the corruption. The best we can have is a reset with none is the rich people involved in the solution. The status quo is the problem and nobody in the media could see it to report a solution.