From the transcript about 43 minutes in of a public conversion with Eric Schmidt from Apr 10, 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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          "Question: Thanks for the great conversation so far. Leonard Justin. I'm a PhD student at MIT. Um, I was wondering if you could just discuss a bit more some of the risks you see coming specifically with respect to biology and how we should go about mitigating those. What's the role of the AI developers? What's the role of government? Um, yeah, how can we move forward on that?
        ----
        Schmidt: So, so you're going to know a lot more about this area than I, but speaking as an amateur in your field, the two current risks from these models are cyber and biorisks.
        The cyber ones are easy to understand. The system can generate cyber attacks and in theory can generate zero-day cyber attacks that we can't see and it can unleash them and furthermore it can do it at scale.
        In biology, you get some evil, you know, the equivalent of Osama bin Laden. They would start with an open-source model. Now these open source models have been restricted using a testing process. Uh they're called cards and they test it out and they delete that information from the model.
        It turns out it's relatively easy to un to reverse essentially those security modes around the model and that's a danger. So now you've got a model that can generate bad pathogens.
        Then the second thing you have to do is you have to find things to build them. Our collective assessment at the moment is that that's a nation state risk, not an individual terrorist risk. Although we could be wrong, but there's plenty of examples uh and this the the report talks about some of the Chinese examples where in theory if they wanted to they could not only manufacture bad things but sorry design them but also manufacture them.
        The good news and the reason we're all alive today is that the bio stuff is hard to manufacture and distribute and to make deadly and and spread and so forth and so on. Um there's lots of evidence for example that you can take a bad bio right now and modify it just enough that the testing regimes and the sort of surveillance regimes it bypasses and that's another threat.
        So that's what I worry about.
        But I think at the moment u our consensus is we're right below the threshold where this is an issue and the consensus in in my side of the industry is that one more or two more turns of the crank these issues will be -- and you know by then you'll be graduated and you can sort of help solve these problems.
        Um the a crank is turned every 18 months or so. This is about three years.
        ----
        Moderator: But theoretically, couldn't AI and biotechnology help you come up with a counter measure?
        ----
        Schmidt: Um, I had thought so, and that was the argument I made until I I do a lot of national security work. And there's a term called offense dominant. And an offense dominant is a is a situation in a military context where the attack cannot be countered at the same level as the attack. In other words, the damage is done.
        And most people, most biologists who've worked in this believe that while the model can be trained to counter this, the damage from the offense part is far greater than the ability to defend it, which is why we're so worried about it."
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Ultimately, I feel a big part of the response to that threat needs to be a shift in perspective like through people laughing at my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." :-)

Explored in more detail here:
"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism"
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
        "... Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
        These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ...
        There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."

On the very good side, this will lower the cost and lead times for new drugs.

On the bad side, nation-states, terrorists, and even just Evil Agents Of Chaos[TM] who have access to tools like this and the knowledge to (ab)use them will be able to unleash biological chaos on the world.

Imagine if someone created a virus that infected everyone, spread rapidly, but was asymptomatic or had only common-cold-like-symptoms on everyone but their intended target, but it killed their target. The target could be an individual, a family that uniquely shared a mutation, or an entire ethnic group where the mutation was common in that ethnic group but rare outside of it.

Even worse, once unleashed, the virus will likely mutate and people or groups that are not the intended target may die, including the people who unleashed it.

I fear this is what is in our future.

culturally, they are incredibly laid back and think hard work is a waste of time.

Nice. Speaking as a New Mexican, these sound like my kind of people.

I hereby challenge any Filipino to a laziness contest, where loser buys us both margaritas. You have no chance. When I get around to it, I will eventually crush you with my inactivity.

The underlying filesystem has supported larger partitions all along. It's just the Windows UI tools didn't expose this.

Sounds like this will reduce the diversity of package management - which will help enormously with the problem of multiple Linuxes (Linuxen?) because users won't keep being told that moving between Linuxes is as complex as moving from Amiga to Mac or DEC VAX.

As for running Windows code without you having to give permission on each an every occasion in triplicate, signed in blood - this sounds like a totally unacceptable security risk to me!

I've been looking since March 2024. Having no reasonable options in sight, have reopened https://informationr.us/

... instead of doing 300 unrelated experiments, do 30 experiments and independently replicate each one 10 times.

At least then you'll know if you've got 30 repeatable experiments, 0 repeatable experiments, or something in the middle.

I sure don't believe the "completely anonymous" part.

I wonder if humans are less sensitive to lung cancer than other animals: we've been sitting around campfires or in smokey huts for hundred of thousands of years, long before we started smoking tobacco/cannabis. There must have been selective pressure to survive it better, no ?

The thing is, I like slave labor, when the slaves are machines. I want to work Bender 24 hours a day, and if he complains about it, I'll deny him his alcohol ration! Fuckin' clankers and skinjobs don't have any rights to infringe.

The catch to that, is that over here on my side of the ocean, I don't see and can't inspect Bender working way over in China, so I can't be sure the drudgery is experienced by the 6502 in Bender's head. How do I know he isn't just relaying commands to his servos and motors, which were sent by the teleworking Apu in India, doing the Waymo thing?

Well, what are you waiting for? Step on it!

(The idiots may also have been algorithms.)

In this job search, Linked In and Dice- but MOST of my LinkedIn devolves down into one of the above quickly. The number of scammers on Linked In is truly awesome.

Nah, that's paranoia. These days, the FCC just requires a FSB backdoor.

Maybe not ...

But you can sure as hell die trying!

Requiring cars to not allow themselves to be used as getaway cars in armed robberies, whether autonomous or not.

Any politician who votes for this has proven themselves unfit for the purpose for which they were elected, and should be declared to be inadequate for any office, let alone a "high office".

In my view, they should be required to get a medical certification that they are sane before they are allowed out of the house.

Disclaimer: I do not reside in the USA.