If San Francisco is operating under laws similar to other states, they already have the power to tax snacks. It is typically not very popular and causes enough backlash that a city trying it often gives up or scales back their snack tax plans. Suing these companies puts the industry on notice that they should improve their practices, even if the city is unlikely to succeed. I'm not a lawyer but I don't think their odds are good, interstate commerce doctrine probably applies.

Owner's fault. I won't wreck my car to save a dog either.

I've run over a couple that I likely saved by straddling them. One clearly lived as it was running for home after the tumbling trip under the truck. I hope it learned a valuable lesson.

The last fatality left me with the following choices. Hit the dog, Slam on the brakes and get rear-ended, drive into the ditch which made up the median, or swerve into the right lane and hope the car in that lane just behind me could manage to miss me. The dog took the hit.

The ability to delegate tasks to an AI and relax as it reliably achieves them (or comes back to you for help if it cannot) is something that everyone wants from AI, and that marketing hype keeps suggesting that we have from AI, but that AI is nowhere near capable of. Not even close.

A significant part of the current AI bubble is driven by this extremely optimistic and outright false belief. People get really impressed by what AI can do, and it seems to them that it is equivalent or even harder than what they want it to do, so they convince themselves that it can.

But it can't. AI hallucination completely ruins this. You give it very clear instructions, and it will get 2/3 of it right, and also do something the exact way you told it not to. This gets even worse with implied behaviors like "and don't delete my entire hard drive while doing this."

AI can be helpful, but not in this way. Proper utilization of AI requires that you understand its limits and operate within them. It is outright reckless to give AI the authority to take action on your behalf (at all), and stupidly reckless to skip confirmations. Without you examining each command it generates, there is no force ensuring that it did it right, and it absolutely will do wrong things that should be simple for it to do right.

What seems most depressing about this isn't the fact that the bot is stupid; but that something about 'AI' seems to have caused people who should have known better to just ignore precautions that are old, simple, and relatively obvious.

It remains unclear whether you can solve the bots being stupid problem even in principle; but it's not like computing has never dealt with actors that either need to be saved from themselves or are likely malicious before; and between running more than a few web servers, building a browser, and slapping together an OS it's not like Google doesn't have people who know that stuff on payroll who know about that sort of thing.

In this case, the bot being a moron would have been a non-issue if it had simply been confined to running shell commands inside the project directory(which is presumably under version control, so worst case you just roll back); not above it where it can hose the entire drive.

There just seems to be something cursed about 'AI' products, not sure if it's the rush to market or if mediocre people are most fascinated with the tool, that invites really sloppy, heedless, lazy, failure to care about useful, mature, relatively simple mitigations for the well known(if not particularly well understood) faults of the 'AI' behavior itself.

There is zero value in some big scary climate risk number also being disclosed, because A that risk accounted for if you are studying the details anyway and does not help you make a rational decision, because it literally does not affect you beyond the places where it is already baked into the numbers.

If you don't care why the insurance is so expensive or unavailable (e.g. high risk of flooding) then maybe you also don't care about why the house's price is so high (e.g. nice location, good construction, etc). No need to even look at the house. Just treat the whole damn thing as an abstract exercise in numbers.

OTOH, some people might actually care about details. Maybe because they're considering living there?

There's nothing that screams 'trying to con you' quite as hard as a participant in a nominal free-market scenario trying to preserve ignorance and information asymmetry.

So... what is the purpose of the beeping alerts, then, if there is no danger to which you need to alert humans?

Just remove the beepers entirely.

It's a catch-22, and always has been.

Dictatorships are tyrannical no matter how intelligent the leaders are. And given the power structure they have, there is absolutely no way to ensure that the dictator even cares about the people at all.

On the other hand, most people are idiots. They are extremely vulnerable to fake facts and other forms of manipulation, so their voting power isn't actually a form of political power held by the people so much as held by the people who manipulate the people.

What we actually have in America is an oligarchy that pretends to be a constitutional republic. Yes, we vote, but regardless of how many people participate the small group of rich people get everything they want. This is the inescapable result of the general stupidity of the majority of people (not to mention general laziness, apathy, and the very real and pressing need to spend their time earning a living instead of studying up and staying on top of politics).

So we get ruled by elites no matter what we do. The blow is softened a bit in a democracy due to regular rotation of the publicly-visible power-holders, but even then, most of the power is held by un-elected, un-appointed, rich people who only care about the country inasmuch as they have to in order to protect their own wealth.

It does not need to be intelligent in order to qualify as "artificial intelligence." In this context, the word "artificial" means "fake." Like "artificial leather" which is not actually leather, or "artificial crab meat" which is not actually crab meat.

The phrase has been around a long time in the domain of computer science and has always been used to mean "that which imitates intelligence (without actually being intelligent)."

You are not alone in your distaste for the word use here. But you are also greatly outnumbered. The English language doesn't have a final authority on what words mean beyond popular use. And in popular use, the phrase "artificial intelligence" is a very broad term that refers to a wide variety of ways that computers do things that seem intelligent (even though they actually aren't).

So, your pleas for people to stop using the phrase this way fall on deaf ears. That ship sailed long ago. This is what the phrase means, and will continue to mean, no matter how much you disapprove.

What always puzzled me about Intel's...more peripheral...activities is that they seemed to fall into a weird, unhelpful, gap between 'doing some VC with the Xeon money; rather than just parking it in investments one notch riskier than savings accounts' and 'strategic additions to the core product'; which normally meant that the non-core stuff had limited synergies with intel systems; and had the risks associated with being a relatively minor program at a big company with a more profitable division; and thus subject to being coopted or killed at any time.

Seemed to happen both with internal projects and with acquisitions. Intel buys Altera because, um, FPGAs are cool and useful and it will 'accelerate innovation' if Intel is putting the PCIe-connected FPGA on the CPU's PCIe root complex rather than a 3rd party vendor doing it? Or something? Even at the tech demo level I'm not sure we even saw a single instance of an FPGA being put on the same package as a CPU(despite 'foveros' also being the advanced-packaging hotness that Intel assured us would make gluing IP blocks together easy and awesome). They just sort of bought them and churned them without any apparent integration. No 'FPGA with big fuck-off memory controller or PCIe root we borrowed from a xeon' type part. No 'Intel QuickAssist Technology now includes programmable FPGA blocks on select parts' CPUs or NICs. Just sort of Intel sells Altera stuff now.

On the network side, Intel just kind of did nothing with and then killed off both the internal Omni-path(good thing it didn't turn out that having an HPC focused interconnect you could run straight from your compute die would have been handy in the future...luckily NVlink never amounted to much...) and the stuff they bought from Barefoot; and at this point barely seems to ship NICs without fairly serious issues. I'm not even counting Lantiq; which they seem to have basically just spent 5 years passing on to Maxlinear with minimal effect; unless that one was somehow related to that period where they sold cable modem chipsets that really sucked. It's honestly downright weird how bad the news seems to be for anything that intel dabbles in that isn't the core business.

This is the beta build. So it IS the QA/QC testing. A total nothingburger story.

Not delivering on schedule is absolutely a symptom; it's just a somewhat diagnostically tricky one since the failure can come from several directions; and 'success' can be generated by gaming the system in several places, as well as by successful execution.

In the 'ideal' case things mostly happening on schedule is a good sign because it means both that the people doing the doing are productive and reliable and the people trying to plan have a decent sense(whether personally, or by knowing what they don't know and where they can get an honest assessment and doing so) of how long things are going to take; whether there's something useful that can be added or whether forcing some mythical man-month on the people already working on it would just be a burden; keeping an eye on whether there's anything in the critical path that is going to disrupt a bunch of other projects, and so on.

If you start losing your grip on the schedule, that fact alone doesn't tell you whether your execution is dysfunctional or your planners are delusional, or some combination of the two; but it's not a good sign. Unhelpfully, the relationship between how visibly the gantt charts are perturbed and how big a problem there is is non-obvious(a company whose execution is robust but whose planners live in a world of vibes-based theatre and one whose execution is dysfunctional and crumbling and whose planners are reusing estimates from the time before the rot set in might blow a roughly equal number of deadlines; despite one having mostly a fluff problem and one probably being in terminal decline); but it's never a good sign.

Proprietary service drops support for proprietary protocol..

Good idea, but you'd also need a pretty robust safety verification mechanism, showing that the vehicles are indeed in an area where they can turn safety features off, with no humans accidentally in the area.

They're also cracking down on HDCP compatibility. My video glasses now also don't work with downloaded Netflix shows which is obnoxious. So of course I'm just going to go find an ISO and the more ISOs I download the less incentive I have to actually pay Netflix for something that doesn't work.

It's not like these anti-piracy efforts are doing anything to stop a perfect stream from being available 1 hour after airing.