It's pretty easy to tell a human from a dog by a karyotype. It's actually quite a bit more difficult by DNA sequencing, especially the kind of rapid sequencing that is used for this kind of work.

A good analogy are the old statements that "humans are 99% chimp", and similarly "humans are 90% banana". The genetic similarities between very different species are profound. To tell one breed of dog from another - where of course the chromosomes are the same - you need to look at certain highly variable regions of the genome. The problem though is that those same highly variable regions exist in our genome.

So what could they do differently? Well they could add a few more control reactions to their sequencing to try to rule out errant DNA. They were operating under the assumption that people were sending in only dog DNA, and now we see what happens when something else goes in. The real challenge though is what to do if you get a sample that has some of each - which could easily happen if a dog owner with a dirty house collects a dog sample in a cavalier manner and ends up sending in some of their DNA along with the DNA of their dog. It appears the company built their method without a terrible amount of concern for that either.

What recourse would you have?

None. I'd just have to whip out my key, exchange a bunch of BTC for ten million hundred dollar bills, and retire into obscurity. I'd shrug and say "Oh well, I guess I'm not legally myself," as I wait for my harem to replace the hundred-dollar-bills-bedding that we're all going to fuck on.

That's probably what Craig Wright is doing right now. Why wouldn't he? If he's not doing this tonight, then he's probably not for real.

If there is evidence, I don't know about it. I merely infer its existence because the incentives are such that they benefit from attempting to be as accurate as they can. Undercharge and a claim can make them lose money. Overcharge and competitors take their customers.

But I don't think anyone really knew all the factors the insurance industry was using, and how they weighed them before this, either. Their algorithms have always been proprietary, haven't they?

Someone has to play Devil's Advocate, and I'm feeling like it today.

Insurance is about spreading risk, and different groups have different risks. Do you object to insurance costing more for a 16-year-old driver than it does for a 36-year-old driver? Do you object to insurance costing more for someone who has been in 3 collisions than 0 collisions, or for someone with 3 speeding or careless driving tickets, than someone with 0 tickets? Men vs women? This ZIP code vs that ZIP code?

This is just more of that.

If it costs you more, you're a victim of accuracy, but if it costs you less, then you're a beneficiary of accuracy. Boo hoo or yay, depending on how well you drive.

And this merely involves information that the buyer had already decided doesn't need to be kept private. Before they spent their money, they knew the vehicle spies on them; they just (maybe) forgot the consequences of that spying. If you cared enough to make sure your vehicle (and phone, watch, etc) doesn't spy on you, then you don't have the "problem" of your insurance premiums accurately reflecting your actual risk.

And so, I think that deep down, this is basically fair. Though I think that if it ever became maximally (magically!) accurate, then there would no longer be need for insurance at all, since we'd all know the future and then be able to plan for our liabilities (or lack thereof) directly, without amortizing it across the larger population. And that would be even more fair, though it's impossible to achieve.

Congrats to you as well! :) Baby is only slightly premature, being induced at 2.5-3 weeks early due to size.

Yes, I agree, I think it is making society worse. It's the classic sci-fi story where a technology is invented that's so powerful we actually end up destroying ourselves because it amplifies our worst natures, i.e. forbidden planet. Human nature hasn't changed that much in thousands of years. However, at the same time, the technology does seem to work in positive ways that are unexpected. Kind of like how the internet is increasing transparency and starting to deconstruct all the propaganda that we've been living under for hundreds of years. There are these weird, subtle beneficial effects which seem to happen despite us, and perhaps that's one saving grace.

I agree. I think each form factor exists because of how it fits with the environment and the person and what the person is doing. There are many times when having a huge monitor just gets in the way. There are times when having a keyboard gets in the way. There are times when not having a keyboard is a huge ache. People mention CAD files. Even there, sometimes you're much better off being able to tap in coordinates quickly on a keyboard than trying to drag and drop with a mouse. Sometimes the mouse is better. Sometimes you want the environment to be distraction-free, and a kind of single app device with just a screen works fine. There are many contexts, and I think the form factors exist because they suit these different contexts. The form factors which don't want to exist, I think the market will find it votes them out because they're just as useful as a pair of jam trousers.

The Prius has had a couple decades of design history behind it now. It would be a bigger surprise if it lost this contest.

I'm not a fan of the Prius myself, but it has its place and its base. We could of course criticize what it actually takes to build it, or the cost of disposing it when the time comes, but it should have little trouble winning this award.

My closest big city is not San Francisco (though I visited San Francisco not long ago while traveling for work). I strongly suspect that downtown San Francisco is seeing similar issues to my own local large city downtown area.

Namely, my city is seeing a chicken-and-egg problem getting retail going. The Macy's in that city left several years ago. More recently Barnes & Noble left as well. They still have Target and Walgreens, but not a whole lot else in terms of retail. Most of their high end jewelers, haberdasheries, suit stores, and the like have left as well.

Before a lot of the retailers left though they cut back their hours as they saw that downtown workers weren't sticking around very late into the night to shop (bar patrons didn't tend to shop much either). This created an unfortunate cycle; workers were leaving right at the end of their working hours because there wasn't much shopping to do while shops were closing because people weren't shopping.

Which leads to a chicken and egg problem of sorts. If retailers stay open later again will people start to shop? Or do the shoppers need to do something drastic to indicate to the retailers that they are looking to shop later? If the latter, what should that be?

My main airport has tried a similar idea in the parking ramps. It sounds great in theory, you can turn down an aisle in the parking ramp and see if there are any green lights in the ceiling that indicate an open spot. It also is supposed to all report back to the boards at the ramp entrance to tell you which levels of the ramp have open spaces.

It all sounds great, except it rarely works. Sometimes the tally is close to accurate on a per-floor level. The markers in the aisle rarely get it right though, and you end up driving hopefully up to several green lights before you eventually find an open spot. There is no rhyme or reason to it, either; it's not like the occupied green light spots are occupied entirely by Fiat 500s or other small cars, they could be filled by any vehicle you can imagine fitting into a standard American parking space.

That anyone gives a flying fuck about the exchange rate of Bitcoin is sad, and kind of shows that Bitcoin has failed at its purpose.

If Bitcoin had been successful, then instead of people talking about exchange rates, they'd be talking about the speed and/or the competitive pricing of transaction processing. That stuff is what matters, and stressing those values is how Bitcoin would have become good and generally usable.

If anything, the volatility of Bitcoin, and yes that even includes it going up in price (with the side-effect of making holders rich), is a weakness and just another thing to its discredit.

I wanted to like Bitcoin. I really did. I still think that deep down, there's a really great idea behind it. But that it's become an "investment" means that it's not worthy. Bitcoin has failed to live up to its hype, and the existence of this poll's question is an example of that failure.

I have no idea about Musk's legal claims and what he is owed. Maybe he's full of shit as usual, and maybe he has a great case.

But about having "open" in your name while your main product is proprietary: if I were on a jury, that combination of facts would give me the default assumption that the company intended willful fraud.

"Open"AI has the burden of proof that they're not crooks.

They can meet that burden by showing that we're all misspelling their name (it's really "O Peen AI"). Or they could meet that burden by providing a link to the full source and data, along with a statement that it's all been given to Public Domain.

Barring that, they very much look like intentional crooks who are deliberately ripping off all contributors and investors.

I think they call it "hallucinate" to give the impression it's intelligent.

And if they simply let the tool be what it is, then people could understand the nature of the tool and use it in ways that made sense. A reader's digest of the Internet. It's this pretense that it's thinking or that it can give you answers, as it were, that seems to be its undoing.