While not a Christian, I can see there is an appropriate non-nefarious appeal. LLM’s are (Bender's) Stochastic parrots, not reasoning “entities”, so if you want results conformant with your ethics and beliefs, you should train the LLM on material that aligns with the results you want. Between the training sets, the guardrails and any other infrastructure, there is a lot non-trivial work, and thus there is a potentially valuable business in crafting products for such an audience.

It would not be unreasonable to replicate such things with a focus on, say, Buddhist or Jewish source texts.

That is assuming that one believes that LLMs are an appropriate path forward to building AI assistants. That certainly seems to be a path that has attracted enormous amounts of capital in recent times.

If you want to craft a medical assistant, I’d expect you’d want it to be focused on medical literature and/or medical images. AGI would be another kettle of fish entirely, where you might well want a more well rounded eclectically educated “entity”; perhaps LLMs do provide a path to AGI (not clear to me how, seems like a dead end to me).

Alternatively, have the required beacons be mounted on little robots (ala Roomba’s) which the truck would dispatch and would place themselves appropriately. In inclement weather I’d expect this to potentially work better than a flying drone (no, it would NOT actually be a Roomba; bigger treads for snow and such).

These would be useful for human piloted rigs as well. Walking around in traffic is hazardous. The larger volume would help drive prices down, whether or not Aurora ended up winning the automous driving race, they could have a product more generally salable. ;>

Perhaps it is more complex.

Many years ago, while visiting Tokyo on business, I recall my Japanese colleagues explaining to me why so many preferred small purchases at vending machines vs. humans it boiled down to the avoidance of all the complex social nicieties of Japanese politeness. Importing workers involves not only training them in Japanese, but in the complex corner cases of manners and ultimately failing vs. dealing with a “robot” which evades all of that. And, I think the hope is that the robots will become increasingly autonomous and until they achieve some AGI level, there still won’t be a need for the tiresome (their description, not mine) of all the layers of manners.

Consider the latest anti-Russia action, the 25% additional tariff on Indian goods (https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/08/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-addresses-threats-to-the-united-states-by-the-government-of-the-russian-federation/). Of course, what gets slapped on quickly could come off quickly IF India weans itself from cheap Russian Oil. But that’s a pretty big IF.

There have been several such cases in the news over the last two years. I guess the penalties haven’t been painful enough to get their attention. Higher $$$ and perhaps professional sanctions.

The obvious counter is to set up a huge network of autonomous sentry drones, if the cable is cut, sink the ship towing the cutter.

I share the confusion. No matter how good the plane's clock, the satellite signals need to reach the plane and not be spoofed. Hostile actors can jam the signals or potentially broadcast fakes. better clocks don't help these issues. I'd have thought they'd be working on lower cost better "laser gyros" and such, so that the planes could reliably use internal navigation when the GPS is iffy. But Time Lords wouldn't be the right title for folks working on better / cheaper internal guidance.

Back in ancient times, like the 1970's, there were companies specializing in "import/export", mostly the import for China->US trade in trinkets, and low end electronics. These companies were put out of business by direct ship to consumer. Their value add was paperwork, warehousing and for the better shops ... some quality control (they actually vetted the supplier, rather than playing Russian roulette with some mostly anonymous figures on the China side.

Going from direct back to intermediaries is going to be disruptive and will cost more. But it wouldn't be the end of the world, and we might have a lot less waste, and perhaps energy savings (surely shipping by the pallet by boat is more efficient than packaging each item in plastic and sending by air mail.

AND POWER. Trying to charge a 85w device with a cable only capable of 5w is a bad joke in poor taste. Sometimes engineers need a little help from Human Factor engineers or Marketing people. None of the various flavors of USB have had consumer-usable naming, and this continues to be a problem and makes a mockery of the EU mandate.

Dick Picks âoeRealityâ OS and ENGLISH programming language. Surely some slashdot readers know a bit about computer historyâ¦

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Is this a microkernel? Yet another Linux fork?? Perhaps a BSD derivative??? or a derivative of WindRiver???? A real from the ground up brand new OS might be technically interesting, but would seem a bit risky. I appreciate that they and their intended customers really don't give a fig about the technical underpinnings, or (probably) security and lots of other things that users might focus on ... but surely someone, somewhere is pitching a more complete story to folks closer to the hardware than the CEO and advertising and marketing VPs ....

What about LISP and Prolog? No doubt Logan might have developed along appropriate lines.

A former employer of mine used to send tranches of these out regularly. Being slightly paranoid, I kept a VM snapshot available, would instantiate it, check all the links, terminate the VM, and file a security notification form (it was good enough to not be super obviously our internal phish, and I thought it would be helpful to identify the miscreants and notify security about what might well have been an actual phishing attack).

Instead of “thanks, well spotted” that resulted in mandatory “retraining” which was pretty pointless. I had spotted the risk, I had mitigated the risk, and informed the authorities. Sadly, the Powers that Be had a process, and the process had to be followed irrespective of the facts on the ground. Obviously, a next safer step would have been to blocked the external trackers and such, but since the result of such things appeared to be HR demerits, why bother?

It’s not why they are an ex-employer, but it was typical of much of Management’s dysfunctional behavior. Indeed, the training lacked any good ideas about how to actually check the message (e.g. use a safe ephemeral VM, and dispose of it properly ;>).

Unless the facts turn out to be that they leveraged actual recordings of her voice from her films. I have no inside information, do you? What basis do you have for asserting that they hired a sound-alike?

Even if it is the latter, I don’t know that there isn’t existing case-law (IANAL). I do recall HarleyDavidson defended their trademark sound against Japanese clones (and succeeded). It may well be the case that actors likenesses and sound are inherently protected (or at least protectable, perhaps if they have filed appropriately).

Wolfram Alpha https://www.wolframalpha.com/ has specialized math reasoning (descended from Mathematica) for decades. A mashup is exactly what Stephan Wolfram wrote about some time back and is the obvious “next step” up from “simple” language models. If this is a mashup, it represents good progress but seems like it should be made explicit even in a high level article such as this one.

If it isn’t, why is “alpha” in the name?