It would be amusing if it weren't so annoying; but you often see people who embrace both positions without a hint of awareness of the contradiction: when condemning the non-breeders they are 'selfish' and 'hedonistic' and so on; but, in the same breath, children are their greatest pleasure and most fulfilling experience and so on and so forth. What's it going to be? Are children the cutting edge of indulgence and everyone who is missing out will die bitter and miserable; or are the people failing to pay the flesh tithe to our civilization repulsively self-centered for avoiding a massive hassle that one undertakes only as a grim duty?

I'd be curious what, if any, role the increasingly obviously hollow promise of progress may have.

In absolute terms residents of low-income countries are usually more fucked than those of high income ones; but in terms of trajectory they often have a somewhat rosier picture: if GDP per capita is really low you don't really have an option but to be really poor, there's just not enough productivity to support being otherwise; but there's a fairly straightforward alignment of incentives: unless there's a local supply of mineral wealth to skim, even the local elites generally want everyone to be more prosperous because there's just not that much money to be gouged out of subsistence mud farmers; and there are a variety of plausible avenues toward greater productivity in the form of people looking for new manufacturing areas and the like.

Similar things hold for various quality-of-life stuff. Low income countries tend to see a lot of morbidity and mortality from lack of relatively cheap and simple medical interventions; but have a corresponding selection of relatively cheap and simple improvements that will improve population welfare if realized.

Wealthy countries are, obviously, absolutely wealthier; but are often harder to write an optimistic trajectory for: if most of the obvious productivity improvements have already been made and you still feel squeezed it's a lot less plausible to believe that you will grow out of that problem(both because there are fewer evident paths to notable growth; and because feeling poor in a wealthy society is often a good sign that someone who isn't you is good at capturing value; and will probably remain good at that even if more value is unlocked); and if most of the relatively simple, relatively cheap, improvements in things like medical interventions and occupational health and safety standards have already been made it becomes much less evident how your children will do better than you did.

My impression is that, among people who actually reason their way toward parenthood, there's a general desire to see good outcomes for their children. This often involves heavy doses of irrational optimism regardless of location; but there are definitely some contexts where at least expecting your children to have it better than you is within the realm of the plausible; and others where you need to be hitting the copium pretty hard to imagine that they'll beat the odds dramatically enough to do so.

I assume I'm not supposed to ask what 'our own civilization' has done to deserve our care; and just swallow the implication that suffering as an end in itself is totally sensible?

If you think that AI is good enough to replace education; do I want to know what jobs that pay for family-size houses you expect people to be working?

Most of the time economists respond to data about individual choice with a "meh, revealed preference, obviously"; then "It becomes possible to do sex without 9 months of creepy endoparasitism and a couple of decades of very high cost parenting; turns out people are up for that" hits and suddenly it's a crazy mystery what is driving such a change...

There's one confounding factor with a lot of enterprise tech announcements: the people who make the purchasing decisions or act as executive sponsors for splashy projects don't actually have to use whatever they are purchasing, and are often at fairly modest risk of real consequences(especially if the failure is readily contained: if the COO announces a bold plan that ends up destroying the ERP system he's probably going to use that golden parachute whether he wants to or not; but if a little NFT faff can be described as an experiment in unconventional marketing and then quietly dropped in 6 months when it's time to announce a 'digital twin' AI-centric approach to airframe maintenance, that's entirely survivable); but the those people are the ones looking to build 'personal brands' get treated like 'thought leaders' and industry conferences, and so on. So there's a temptation to do trendy nonsense with only the slimmest business case because it effectively means that you can spend the company's money on burnishing your own resume. The most overt cases are where the speaking gig is directly related to the thing you are buying: get real hyped about Salesforce Agents, sign the contract, get your own little keynote at Dreamforce for being such an innovator.

That's what is a trifle puzzling here: 'crypto' is basically a generation old as a "things the degenerates of linkedin think will make them thought leaders" item. Even the guys who are still just talking 'generative' rather than 'agentic and context aware' are starting to look out of touch and behind the curve; so it's a weird time to see an announcement.

When you can use other people's money as the stupid money there are sometimes reasons to remain in the market longer than if you are working entirely on your own account; but the most obvious of those reasons requires that the stupid money still be pouring in because it's trendy; which NFTs definitely no longer are. 'Crypto' has settled into a fairly lucrative but somewhat less glamorous role as the deeply, deeply, shady side of 'fintech'; but nobody cares about NFTs and 'web3'.

Fat bodyguards are less likely to leak your location and better at soaking up dangerous fragments. Prime minster obviously doesn't know what he's doing with the protective detail.

The situation varies by region in the US. In some places there is just 'a' power supplier and that's the deal; in others there are several options(sometimes including choices between slightly higher fixed rates and ones that pass spot prices directly through, sometimes by generation type).

In all cases though, EU and US, the energy supplier 'market' is a bit of an oddball because it's substantially synthetic.

Unless you are such a big account that you literally get a direct line from the generator to your site it's not like anyone is slapping labels on electrons to make sure that Electrodyne LLC. electrons are being properly routed to Electrodyne customers: it's all a construct on top of the same basic arrangement as described above of the grid operator working with suppliers in order to have power available to service load; and metering customers on the other end.

Synthetic doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't work; assuming it is designed properly it certainly can; but it does tend to mean that the apparent vibrancy of the competitive scene can bear a somewhat unpredictable relationship with the state of supply. If you actually operate generating assets and want to sell the result you can do that. If you want to buy supply futures and bundle the resulting 'capacity' into something you can hopefully resell to end users at a profit you can do that as well. You can do a bit of both if you run generating assets that are heavy on a specific flavor, cheap base load or highly responsive peaking units or whatnot; and buy cheap base load from someone else if your peaking units are relatively expensive; or run base load and make up any shortfalls between what you provide and what your customers want at worst-case times by buying capacity from someone with peaking units; or 'virtual' capacity from someone with load shedding options, or some combination.

The system has its virtues(and is, to some degree, mandatory unless you want point-to-point wiring everywhere); but does have the habit of making it look like there are a lot more suppliers with uncorrelated prices than there in fact are. In a pinch you see a lot of...optimistic...assumptions about the cost and availability of spot contracts to cover unexpected load.

I initially shared your assumption; especially since 'cute/expressive avatar' is the aspect of 'robot' where a suitably rigged 3d model in the engine of your choice can get most of the effect(and a great deal more versatility) for essentially nothing; while environmental traversal or manipulation and sensing are where 'actual physical robot' start to get much more interesting; but unless they are very carefully hiding that desirable feature it seems like a no.

It seems especially tepid if you compare it to something like the "Loona V28 Robot Pet Dog ChatGPT-4o Smart AI-Powered Companion" that costs $50 less than the freestanding variant of the 'Reachy Mini'; but is dragged down by being a proprietary blackbox hobbled by no doubt dodgy firmware on a mystery SoC and a near-certainly alarming (lack of) privacy policy in terms of whatever hastily implemented chatGPT integration is powering it.

There's a thing that also isn't exactly going to terrify Boston Dynamics or change the face of the 5th industrial revolution; but it's both enough 'robot' to justify not just being a 3d character onscreen using your webcam; and something where an explicitly tinkerer-friendly version would likely be a lot more engaging. I'd be surprised if the designer of that one did much overt hardening; a proper job of that is expensive; but unless the user is in it for the reverse engineering just using some mystery ICs or glob-tops, an LCD that speaks somewhat oddball SPI; and generally not labelling headers or leaving debug consoles open can making modifications a real hassle without explicit anti-tamper efforts.

It would sound like an Alexa on wheels; but it doesn't actually have any wheels. It's basically a webcam with mic, speaker, and the ability to wiggle its 'head' for effect.

This is the 'disruption' that is supposed to be shaking a billion-dollar industry? 'taking on Tesla and Boston Dynamics with radical transparency(except on the order page, because why would you want to know about the camera resolution or battery capacity?)'; and apparently not much else; but hey, only $300 for the hardwired version.

Truly, actually being able to traverse or manipulate your environment is for legacy losers. Wiggling your head is the transcendent future of robotics!

Luckily the new standard's fretting about "authenticating agents" and "ensuring that only authorized agents can participate in workflows" should allow doing cryptographically what historically was handled by mere obfuscation; so that you can call it a security feature rather than having it recognized as hostile UI design.

I assume that, sooner or later, someone will propose 'agent attestation', if only as an excuse to stop working on the "our agent is dangerously unreliable" problem because that's hard, potentially intractable; while "it's dangerously unreliable; but we can cryptographically demonstrate that it's running on our hardware root of trust" is fairly pedestrian 'trusted computing' stuff at this point.

Then we can talk up 'interoperable', 'standardized', 'glorious collaboration across disparate platforms!' without the risk that our bot infrastructure might enable downright vulgar use cases like scrapers obtaining transparent price signals.

"Once they gather more insight into what factors make games and decision-making scenarios more challenging for people, Zhu and his colleagues hope to start devising new behavioral science interventions aimed at prompting people to make more rational decisions."

The guys who do mobile game monetization are laughing into ~$125 billion/year at the idea of someone attempting to study how games make people act irrationally in order to do something other than encourage them. And that's not counting the overt gambling and day trader facilitating operations.

I'm glad to hear that one of AI's "most pressing challenges" is concluding that you should use TLS on the wire and having a standardized JSON object in which to declare your proprietary extensions; rather than the ongoing inability to make LLMs distinguish between commands and data even vaguely reliably; or the persistent weakness to adversarial inputs.

It's not wrong that you'd want to use the sensible obvious choices and avoid pointless vendor quirks; but talking about 'A2A' as a contribution to solving agentic AI's most pressing challenges seems about as hyperbolic as describing ELF or PE32+ as being notable contributions to software security and quality. Yeah, it would be worse if we were also squabbling over how to format our executables; but oh boy is that the unbelievably trivial bit by comparison.

I'd be curious how often a support session would be sensitive enough to make having it move a problem.

It's easy to see how(especially if people are willing to pay for onshore or onshore-adjacent support anyway) it would be vastly easier to just have the data stay there rather than try to red team every random log upload to see if there's a snippet of GDPR or somethin in it; but my impression was that people already shied away from doing things like uploading live auth tokens when they could avoid it; so I'd be curious how often the support session is truly of urgent interest. Doesn't necessarily need to be; if somebody wants to be sure and the additional cost is marginal; but I envy the security problems of someone locked down tight enough that compromising their vendor and scraping their support logs is the way in.

LLMs seem like a fairly appropriate pick if hallucinations are the point of the exercise.