I agree with this post. A $200 million failure clearly refutes the first portion of the sentence: "Concord wasn't a bad game, but it just didn't generate enough interest with enough players". Heck, where I work, a $200 million failure would have someone sent to jail.

Modern models will take into account statistical biases in lotteries. For example, here's ChatGPT:

Pick good lottery numbers for the Virginia powerball lottery

Good question. First, a reality check: Powerball is pure chance — there’s no “good” numbers that are more likely to win. Every set of 5 white balls (1–69) + 1 Powerball (1–26) has exactly the same probability.
wwwuat.valottery.com
+1

That said, I can give you a few tips + a sample “random but balanced” pick, if you’d like to pick your own numbers rather than use Quick Pick.

Some tips when choosing your Powerball numbers

Spread your numbers
Try to pick a mix across the range (low, mid, high). According to lottery-strategy advice, not clustering all your numbers in one group is better.
samlotto.com

Avoid patterns
Many people pick birthdays, anniversaries, or sequential numbers. That’s fine—but if you win, you might have to share with more people because these are popular picks.
lotteryvalley.com

Use “due” or “hot” numbers carefully
Some sites (like lottery-analysis tools) track which numbers are “hot” (drawn recently) or “overdue” (haven’t appeared in a while). But remember: past draws don’t change future odds.
m.lottostrategies.com

Mix even and odd
According to some statistical analyses, it’s less likely to draw all odd or all even numbers.
samlotto.com

Play responsibly
Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are extremely long: 1 in ~292 million.
lotterycritic.com

Sample “balanced” Powerball pick

Here’s a random-but-balanced combination you could use just for fun (or as a basis to tweak):

White balls: 8, 23, 41, 57, 65

Powerball: 12

If you like, I can generate 5 different “smart random” picks for the next Virginia Powerball draw (balanced by probability and number distribution). Do you want me to do that?

It's a damned shame '99942 Apothis' will miss us in a few years

It's not too late to fix that.

The thing is, it very much *won't* be random numbers. It's about as far from a random number generator as you can get.

In a really bad model, one would expect it to likely be "numbers it's seen the most in the context of a lottery". But in a good model, esp. a thinking model, one would expect it to think over which sorts of numbers are statistically over-chosen (birthdates, etc) and avoid them in giving its answers.

The funny thing is, think of how this woman will interact with ChatGPT from now on. ChatGPT could say "Abraham Lincoln was married to John Wilkes Booth", and she'd be thinking, "Okay, that sounds really, really wrong, but on the other hand, it picked the right lottery numbers, so..."

That's a trick question.

Answer: None. In 2025, Everything's Computer.

Apparently I'm not human? I like hyphens, en dashes and em dashes. I understand what all of them mean and how to use them correctly, and I find it helpful when text that I'm reading uses the right one.

From the summary:

If the world's most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.

That's not the right conclusion. It doesn't say much one way or the other about AGI. Plausibly, ChatGPT just likes correctly using em dashes — I certainly do — and chose to ignore the instruction. What this does demonstrate is what the X user wrote (also from the summary):

[this] says a lot about how little control you have over it, and your understanding of its inner workings

Many people are blithely confident that if we manage to create superintelligent AGI it'll be easy to make sure that it will do our bidding. Not true, not the way we're building it now anyway. Of course many other people blithely assume that we will never be able to create superintelligent AGI, or at least that we won't be able to do it in their lifetime. Those people are engaging in equally-foolish wishful thinking, just in a different direction.

The fact is that we have no idea how far we are from creating AGI, and won't until we either do it or construct a fully-developed theory of what exactly intelligence is and how it works. And the same lack of knowledge means that we will have no idea how to control AGI if we manage to create it. And if anyone feels like arguing that we'll never succeed at building AGI until we have the aforementioned fully-developed theory, please consider that random variation and selection managed to produce intelligence in nature, without any explanatory theory.

I'll go with NHTSA and NASA over the "Barr Group" ambulance chasers, thank you. Barr found that it's possible if you get like a cosmic ray to flip just the right bit you could stick the throttle on (but still not make it overpower the brakes). NHTSA and NASA investigated not just the software but the actual cases. In not a single actual case that they investigated did they find that it wasn't well explained by either stuck pedals or pedal misapplication (mainly the latter).

Oh hi, I remember chatting with you earlier :) Sorry to hear about your back. If you're ever planning on visiting Iceland, drop me a line, I can make recommendations. :)

There's some fascinating new work on "inverse-vaccines". In the same way that antigens can be flagged as "foreign", they can also be flagged as "non-foreign" by attaching N-acetylgalactosamine (pGal) to them. The liver recognizes that tag and uses it to suppress immune activation against that antigen.

That's not the goal of a vaccine against a dormant virus (destroying B-cells), it's about developing a more capable immune reaction against the virus itself. See for example the shingles vaccine (targets dormant VZV, aka shingles / chickenpox). With a strong immune recognition of the virus, as soon as it tries to reactivate, it's immediately targeted, preventing it from becoming problematic.

Dormant viruses use a combination of (A) techniques to suppress immune recognition of them, and (B) low / no reproduction until your body's immune recognition of them has weakened. Vaccines help deal with both issues.

(BTW, if you're getting up there in age and haven't gotten your shingles vaccine, do so. It's one of the "rougher" vaccines, IMHO (both on my initial and followup doses I had "flu symptoms" for a day, when I normally have no reaction at all to vaccines), but that's *way* better than getting shingles)

The funny thing is that as soon as I saw "[condition] may be linked to a common virus" I thought, "It's Epstein-Barr, isn't it?"

Seems it causes bloody everything under the sun :P

As soon as there's even a clinical trial I can sign up for to get vaccinated against it, I'm getting it. I had mono in my late teens, so I can be expected to have dormant Epstein-Barr in me. A horrible autoimmune condition that my mother has (which leads to among other things her skin regularly feeling like it's on fire) seems to be linked to Epstein-Barr reactivation.

All very true, except you imply that this is a new situation in US politics. It's not. Until the 1883 Pendleton Act, political appointments were always brazenly partisan and there was no non-partisan civil service (except, maybe, the military). Firing appointees for petty vindictiveness was less common, but also happened. Trump isn't so much creating a new situation in American government as he is rolling the clock back 150 years, to a time when US politics was a lot meaner and more corrupt than what we've been accustomed to for most of the last 100 or so years.

Of course, the time when our Republic has had an apolitical civil service, strong norms around executive constraint and relatively low tolerance for corruption corresponds with the time when our nation has been vastly more successful, on every possible metric. That's not a coincidence.

Omitting the camera saves the consumer the minor cost of having to use up a square inch of electrical tape.

Oh, I forgot to add: Stage 6 is the dumbest and most short-sighted one yet. It only works by ignoring the large regions of the world which will become unlivable, or nearly so, and the fact that those regions are home to billions of people. Those people won't just lay down and die, so the areas that are still livable -- and maybe even more comfortable! -- with warmer temperatures are going to have to deal with the resulting refugee flood, and the wars caused by this vast population upheaval and relocation.

But, yeah, if you ignore all the negative effects and focus only on the potentially good ones, you can convince yourself it'll be a good thing. SMDH.