What is this unhealthy fixation on what someone is "worth"? It is not a billion tons of gold, it is not a quintillion tons of grains. It is a fiction, a fleeting number on paper that signifies current valuation of a business. Musk does not have a trillion dollars under his mattress. Not even 2 billion.

I think Musk is a con artist, but why is it difficult to wrap your head around a person benefiting less from his billions than the society? Society gets to use these billions in many ways more than the person himself. Society gets the products made by the businesses that are valued at billions, society gets the jobs and paychecks from all of this money. What does the person get except for a headache of dealing with the norms and rules and taxes imposed by the society upon his business? He really doesn't eat much more than the next guy, though his meals will be more expensive because they are cooked by some private chefs. But the cost of the food, chefs, housing, airplanes, whatever is negligible compared to the value of the company that society gets to enjoy. Even just the trading of the stock market allows people to have something to invest into, there are jobs, there are products, then there are various contracts required to maintain this business, so there are other side businesses that rely on the gigantic companies owned by the billionaire.

Again, a billionaire personally can use maybe a few hundred million dollars, maybe even a couple of billion (if he buys a couple of yachts and a few mansions). The gain to the guy is completely negligible compared to the gain to the society. It is like infrastructure in itself, that's what these huge businesses are. To say that this is 'Libertarian-Randian gobbledygook' is simply to use a personal attack in place of an argument.

But again, I am fully convinced Musk is a gigantic fraud, running his empire almost exclusively on vaporware.

Women do not want children in more numbers than ever because they are not marrying, because they follow each other on instagram and other mass hysteria sites where they promote hedonistic living to each other and yes, much of it requires resources and time that otherwise would be allocated to rearing children. Unmarried women rely on the government systems that women (and womenized men) have promoted and voted for over decades. This promoted disconnect between generations, grandparents and other family members are not involved in helping with the kids as previously. Two income household means women are working (because of inflation caused by the women as a voting block people are forced to pay insane percentage of earnings as taxes). Taxes used to subsidise classes of people, especially single women require so much more money that women im families have no choice but to work. Their husbands' earnings are more than halfed by the taxes, so need 2 people to work where previously 1 would have sufficed.

So women as a voting block created the environment of high taxation and subsidization, this in turn requires that more women entered the workforce than ever before. None of this is child friendly, women as a block are truly pushing towards childless society. This is self defeating, the people with more children will inherit the world, which will roll back most of these anti child policies. This will require a demographic collapse first, which is coming within a few decades. Within just 2-3 decades most of the world that has anti child policies will be very old of-course. The age of single childless people will cause an age of single old people. Their policies will die off with them giving apace and rise of various fundamentalist cultures, for example Islam. The only hope is that Israel also keeps their births up and somewhat balances out the Islamists. If not, then the few remaining non muslims will feel very lonely on this planet indeed.

I'm not sure what confuses you here: everybody has an EoL, age related if nothing else, and they don't live on either through their class or their descendants. What do you gain by throwing more poor bastards into a sucker's game when you could just not?

Yeah, it's ultimately a matter of taste and what becomes economically and strategically feasible; but I figured that there is at least a conceptual distinction between weapons that are better at being obedient(basically any attempt at stable aerodynamics on the low end up to electromechanical gyroscopic stuff, to TERCOM and GNSS guidance; but you specify where you want it to go and the guidance system attempts to minimize or counteract outside influences), weapons that can independently follow a very specific instruction(at least the simpler acoustic and IR seekers where you need to point them toward a particular loud/bright object but they can compensate for it moving, to a degree); and finally the ones that can take fairly generalized instructions of the "anything that looks like a target in this area" flavor; which seemed like the best candidates for 'autonomous'.

I realize that it's a better hype piece if we assume that the 157000 'agents' are fancy chatbots; but this is just an HTTP API; on what basis are they distinguishing between 'agents' in the currently trendy sense and someone's little script around cURL or whatever?

I, for one, completely trust this objective and disinterested report from a company that has no stake in the ease of ramming datacenter approvals through.

This is obviously a matter of degree, and what you feel like calling a 'drone'; but it seems implausible to say that it's a 'first'.

Something like a Mark 60 CAPTOR entered service in 1979 and is an enclosure for a torpedo that uses acoustic sensors and onboard signal processing to decide if/when to launch the torpedo which then homes in on whatever its acoustic sensors deem high priority. The human deploying the mine defines the search area since they control where it is placed; but everything after that is pure killer robot.

A slightly more recent system would be something like the Bofors/Nexter Bonus, entered service in 2000. 155mm artillery shell that releases two submunitions that use IR and LIDAR to look for vehicle signatures and explode to send an explosively formed penetrator into them. The artillery operator defines the search area by choosing the shell's path; but once they pull the trigger on it selection of who/what in the search area gets a dose of top attack is 100% automated. The German SMArt 155 is a similar concept with similar development and deployment dates.

Obviously how cheap and easy to deploy it is makes a vast difference in practice; there's a certain amount of restraint imposed by something costing $100k+ a pop and being manufactured in boutique quantities that is not imposed by vastly cheaper systems; but it's not the killer robot aspect that is novel.

Obviously pious concerns about fraud are...not...the motivating force here; but I'm curious where on the scale from 'secondary but real' to 'frankly absurd' the burner-powered fraudsters actually live.

It's not like bad prepaid phones are expensive; but, especially if you are actually burning them with any frequency, they aren't really cheap unless you are doing some sort of scamming rather more lucrative than spamming people about nonexistent aftermarket warranties with sub 1% response rates. Are actual SIMs, or even actual phones, remotely competitive with the VOIP equivalent of bulletproof hosting if you want an in to the phone network?

In a similar vein; what's the breakdown of phone-using criminals between people who actually go to the counter and pay cash, where the FCC now wants them carded, vs. the various PO box companies that tend to show up on weird phone charges? It's not a surprise that they are running with the excuse; but the idea that telcom enabled crime is actually substantially the domain of something as clunky as burner phones/SIMs, rather than more efficient services that nobody cares enough to chase down, seems very implausible.

Basically any service you can think of only costs as much as it does because there are limits to how much quality and reliability it actually promises. Electrical utilities tend to keep the grid pretty stable most of the time; if you want better than that you end up talking to Eaton or similar and running increasingly involved onsite equipment; just as people who want internet access to be very reliable rather than mostly reliable end up buying redundant links.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are cases where it would make sense for the utility to operate and sell the additional reliability, rather than the customer DIYing it, whether because there are grid topology things they can do to get the result more effectively or just because they have greater experience with alarming AC gear; but that would be a tier above the standard offering, not a concession that it's reasonable to run the entire grid at the level of the worst-case customers.

You could get into the same argument about water. Hospitals and precision chemistry applications often have fairly elaborate onsite setups to provide sterile or ultra low ion water for their particular requirements because that's not the standard to which utility water is normally held. In theory you could shuffle around ownership and responsibility for the additional processing steps, and in some cases it might even make sense; but it's not terribly compelling to run the entire water system as though it is being piped into a burn ward or a chip fab; and, at least in agricultural areas, there's often another tier below the 'standard' for non-potable irrigation where you can worry less about microbe counts and whether there's matching sewer capacity because it's just getting sprayed on fields.

I suspect it's a straightforward incentives problem. If you can get away with making it the grid's problem there's not much incentive to pay for more expensive facility power setups. Presumably this is why ERCOT is testing current and prospective customers and making noise about it; and why there are at least some standards for how ill-behaved a load can be while still being allowed to hook up; with some awkward interactions between very large sites that also have the ability to shut down rapidly at relatively low cost. If you are 'mining' crypto you presumably prefer the gear to be online because it is depreciating by the minute regardless; but the risk and inconvenience of shutting it down and booting it up again isn't particularly dramatic compared to having to cold start an aluminum smelter or something.

I'm sure that there are worse options, probably being actively considered since this is no longer getting them what they want; but an opaque 'public/private partnership' slush fund that spends its time slathering a thin layer of dubious military justification on random projects seems like a very, very, dodgy way of doing things.

Obviously the switch from "loss leader on a scale the capital markets can barely absorb" to "losing money" is going to sting; but I'm curious if we'll see sneakier knock-on effects.

So long as they were losing money hand over fist the vendor does want to throw enough tokens at you to make you feel like you are having a good time; but as few as are required to do that since they lose money on every one. If they were breaking even or turning a profit the incentive would be to sneak as much spend and upsell in as possible; and it's well known that the verbosity/cost of LLM chatter is hard to predict; harder if there are multiple models and other complications being switched around in the background.

What sort of exciting little tricks will we see from vendors who actually make more if you use more?

Everyone knows that 10x engineers validate inputs and carefully manage dependencies; so clearly there's no risk of unexpected behavior.

It seems worth noting that one of the items in Wyden's rather pointed inquiry is the fact that the feasibility of doing this is known to have been demonstrated for the DoD by outside people familiar with it at least as early as 2016; so while this is the first confirmed case of adversarial use it's the outcome of at least a decade of just ignoring the problem; and a significantly longer period of failing to reasonably anticipate the problem. It's not like there's No Such Agency you could ask about "how could you spy on someone with the internet even?" if you wanted to know how well or poorly readily available information matched a nation state signals intelligence apparatus.

Purely as a matter of cellphones being expensive and somewhat tepidly capable in the before times I assume that there was a period within living memory when merely telling people not to Gordon Gekko on their DynaTAC where the russians can hear you was good enough; but that would have clearly and rapidly been getting less true for at least a quarter century.