Hmm, let's check:
Big Sur
Monterey
Ventura
Sonoma
Sequoia
Tahoe
No, no, you're totally right, this has everything to do with McDonalds as some kind of appeasement to Darth Cheeto rather than referencing some location in California. Well spotted!
Producing a lot of power for a few seconds is one thing, maintaining it for any significant length of time is quite another when you only have sunlight to rely on.
Do you actually need to do it for extended periods, though? All you have to do it make it intermittently unreliable for a few minutes at a time in order to potentially make it unusable in a war zone (if your GPS guided bombs/cruise missiles have a high probability of going off target, you're not going to use them and fall back on laser guided bombs / inertially guided cruise missiles, for example).
It sounds like at least at some point, Donut Labs genuinely believed that CT Coatings actually had a revolutionary battery tech, and would eventually be able to supply it to them, per leaked emails between the companies, and maybe the initial fakery by Donut was just trying to bridge the gap until CT Coatings delivered what they promised.
Err... "we were only defrauding people until we could figure out how to make the snake oil actually work" is still fraud. No amount of handwaving gets you passed that.
According to a talk I attended by one of the GPS system designers you can jam GPS with a 9v battery.
I guarantee the US can also so big whoop.
...a lot of people online were saying there was an upcoming event called The Halvening that would change everything.
I guess this is it?
No one is using well-known ports for anything legitimate that isn't the associated service. Anything spun up on e.g. 110 that isn't a POP server is going to inherently be questionable.
Seems to me 'dead' for a taxi isn't 'dead' for a static power bank. If I'm running a taxi I've got hard limits on how large my battery can be and how heavy, and I want to maximise the mileage I get between charges, because while my taxi is charging it's not out on the road earning money. When that battery is keeping only maybe 80% of its original design charge, and now I have to schedule one recharge too many per working day? Bang goes my business plan, so I'm replacing it.
If I'm storing energy for the grid I'm a lot less worried about that. It only stores 80% of what it did when new? Better than nothing, and the taxi firm is selling them off cheap. I'll stack them up!
Perhaps not, but if you pick your moment right then permanently stopping the work of some of the most talented researchers there could very well make a difference. A spectacular incident that makes the headlines might also deter others - bright graduates might decide it's far safer to take up a different line of work, subcontractors and suppliers might decide doing business with AI firms isn't worth the danger, investors might figure the increased risk of loss of premises and equipment into their projections, that kind of thing.
If people genuinely believed AI takeover was a real, present and imminent threat, then they wouldn't just be publishing essays online, they'd be forming direct action groups, along the full spectrum of campaigning: all the way from awareness raising publicity campaigns, through picketing, blockades and sit-ins, up through Black Bloc type actions, right up to menacing intimidation campaigns and terrifying physical force operations. But I don't see any Butlerian Jihad getting started. Which tells me they don't actually believe this at all; they're just bigging up their own importance. 'Oh yes, our technology is so incredibly powerful, if it were done wrong then imagine what could happen! Keep the money coming to make sure it's done right instead! Then all that power can be ours instead!... I mean, uh, yours, Mr Investor sir.'
AI stock valuations don't make a bit of sense unless the technology turns out to be every bit as powerful as that. If they don't keep that thought alive, then the bubble bursts right now. That's what all this hot air is about, and that's why nobody really pulls a Miles Dyson at the AI research lab.
The interesting thing about the Terminator movies is that when AI researcher Miles Dyson became convinced that his work had a high probability of resulting in an artificial general intelligence attempting to replace humanity, he did not go and post a ten thousand word essay on LessWrong about how he had updated his timeline and p(doom) estimates and discussing the full Bayesian analysis of the situation. He went to the lab that very night with some heavily armed companions and he blew the place up.
I keep hearing that one AI researcher or another claims that they believe as Dyson came to believe. Until one of them takes similar action, I simply do not believe that they actually think their research carries such a risk.
You have access to the lab where the work is being done? You regularly meet in person with leading researchers and talents driving the project forward? You are an American and you have the Second Amendment? And the entire future light cone is at stake? Quintillions of hypothetical future lives riding on the outcome of this project here and now?
What's the most effective, altruistic thing you could do for them?
Yeah, exactly. I've never heard of anyone shooting up their AI lab. Which tells me they don't believe their AI is at all likely to wipe us all out.
The people who block ports pointlessly just because they've been abused in the ancient past are idiots too.
You'll want to amplify on this, because blocking a well-known port for an insecure protocol has no downsides. Nothing legitimate is going to be spun up on e.g. 110, why would you leave it open vs blocking it?
As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.
'You can turn it off!' he said.
'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that privilege.'
... and then to secure Ukraine into the European economic and defence structure as firmly as possible. At this point they're far ahead of NATO on how to use drones and robots in war, and they're clearly getting very, very good at building them too. European military and aerospace people both will have a lot to gain from cooperation with Ukraine after the war is over.
As cadets were so memorably told a generation ago: remember always, your duty is clear - to build and maintain those robots!
Sounds good - DDG is pretty bad lately, it typically just returns a list of AI generated SEO slop pages, so I've been switching back to Google in a private tab for a lot of things. Might be worth trying this one now!
If they leave them there, the next administration might be able to switch them back on and start gathering woke climate science data again.
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless. -- Sinclair Lewis
