First, because it's an extraordinary book: well-researched, beautifully written, cohesive, and enlightening.

Second, because it's applicable here. Briefly: neuroplasticity is a thing: our brains can and do actively change themselves in order to handle the cognitive tasks we ask them to perform. They do this surprising rapidly, and they do so in adults, not just children. So -- for example -- while we no longer ask students to memorize very long poems, that doesn't mean they don't have the capacity to do so. (After all, our brains evolved over a very long time. They're not going to un-evolve in just a few hundred years.) The same is true of mathematical reasoning, rhetorical analysis, spatial reasoning, and everything else. Children today are just as capable of doing these things as children 20 or 50 or 200 years ago.

However, the learning, social, cultural, and economic environment around those children has changed. The lives of many of them are incredibly stressful, and it's not reasonable to ask anyone, let alone a child, to be good at learning under such adverse conditions. To put it another way: if you want better educational outcomes, then ensure that every kid has a stable home, medical care, good food, all the essentials required to provide the environment in which it's possible for them to learn. If you do that, then their brains will adapt to the tasks in front of them. But of course in many countries, including the US, national policy is do the exact opposite of this -- the product of decades of Republican work to undercut education at all levels, because literate, educated people are their enemies.

It's happening right now, as you're reading this: kids need clean air, so EPA regulations have been gutted. Kids need vaccinations, to anti-vax lunatics are being pushed. Kids need libraries, so their funding is being cut. Kids need hope for the future, so the economy's being wrecked. Kids need a safe environment, so global warming is being accelerated at every opportunity. Kids need safety, so pro-gun advocates want mass shootings every day, preferably in schools. Kids need available parents, so they're being forced to work two or three jobs. Kids need stability, so national leaders are whipsawing policy around on almost an hourly basis. Kids need peace, so pointless wars are being started. Kids need hope, and it's being systematically taken away from them.

Instead they're being offered lives of misery, working forever as the vassals of the feudal lords of tech. So of course they're not learning: how could they? Why should they? And it's not their fault: it's ours.

Good analysis. I'll add the price of crude continues to increase because the cost of shipping continues to rise quite rapidly. Insurance fees have gone through the roof, fuel costs are up, some ships are being rerouted all the around Africa with commensurate costs. The Saudis' east-west pipeline is out of commission for an indeterminate period. And now that the Houthi control the southern entrance to the Red Sea, all it will take is a couple of potshots at passing ships to exacerbate all of this further. All because Trump couldn't stand the idea that a black President had negotiated a working (imperfectly, but working) deal with Iran that kept everything manageable and because he's surrounded himself with sycophants who are just as ignorant of asymmetric warfare as he is.

1. It's not ethical anywhere that two-party consent is required, because Meta will make a recording of it and retain it.

2. Deaf people have gotten along and will get along just fine without Zuck's pervert glasses. Lip-reading and sign language almost always suffice, and on the few occasions where they don't, a scribbled note works.

3. If there was the slightest intention of creating these in order to help out the Deaf community, then (a) the Deaf community would have been consulted up-front (b) and asked "do you actually want/need something like this?" (c) the design and implementation would be very different (d) a consent mechanism would have been built-in and mandatory (e) there would be no recordings. This is an after-the-fact attempt to justify a device that was conceived by a misogynist who absolutely hates women with every fiber of his being -- something we've known since he was in college -- so that he can abuse and victimize them vicariously, and then blame the users of these devices, the very people he purposefully enabled.

We need to find out the names, addresses, vehicles, etc. of every Flock employee and set up 24x7 surveillance not only of them, but of their entire family. The resulting videos/photos should be posted online along with corresponding metadata including geolocation. This data/metadata should be heavily replicated so that it can't be taken down and it should be correlated against whatever databases are available in order to build dossiers that are complete as possible.

This is what Flock's doing to us; we should do it back to them. And we should show the same responsibility and restraint that they've shown: NONE WHATSOEVER.

It's the only way. Regulation and legislation won't help us here, they're much too little, much too late, and Flock will simply ignore them anyway. We need to put them in same panopticon that they've put us in and keep them there until they yield.

"Emergency responders can break a car side window much faster than it can be wound down."

(Former FR, current FR trainer here.) We can, and we will. We're not about to pull out the smartphone we're not carrying (I have a $60 stupid phone because I tend to lose and/or destroy them), figure out what model vehicle this is, navigate to the vendor's web site, find their 27-page manual, read it, study it, absorb it, and then use it....while something or someone is on fire, or drowning, or bleeding, or whatever.

Nor are we going to waste time trying to chat up Tesla personnel to tell them to move the vehicle: we're going to get a fire engine to shove it or drag it.

Understand that from our point of view, vehicles are expendable: we're not there to save property, we're there to save lives. If any property survives, well, that's a happy side effect. But we're not going to waste a moment worrying about it if it's between us and what we need to do.

Kalshi: builds a platform specifically designed to encourage and profit from insider trading
Santos: engages in insider tradiing
Kalshi: no, not like that

No, but a lot of people simply don't know what else to do. Plus: in many cases, there isn't anything else to do because chronically underfunded and understaffed city and state agencies just can't keep up.

So 911 operators wind up spending a substantial amount of their time redirecting people, e.g., "wait until business hours and then call XYZ". Or they forward calls. Or they do the best they can to help out (sometimes very upset) people who've called 911 because they're desperate.

In a better world, we'd tax the hell out of billionaires -- sufficiently that there would be no billionaires, because no society or country needs them -- and we'd use that money to provide federal, state, county, and city services in sufficient quantity and quality to (mostly) make these kinds of problems go away. We'd hire enough people, train enough people, and pay enough people to respond to problem reports and fix them, whether they're heart attacks or potholes or anything else. None of this constitutes an arcane/insoluble problem: almost all of it is straightforward given enough money.

This has ripple effects, because some of their students will go with them -- and when they do, that means some of the next generation -- the people will reach mid-career between 2050 and 2060 -- will be gone. Canada is of course not the only country doing this; the entire EU, the UK, Australia, NZ, Japan, and others are doing the same thing because they see a golden opportunity right in front of them.

The consequences go far beyond academia: basic scientific research is THE engine behind engineering, medicine, and industry. The US has enjoyed amazing economic success since WW II because it recognized that there's no better investment not just in terms of monetary ROI, but societal ROI. And now it's being systematically destroyed by one psychotic senile moron who couldn't even name the planets or tell you the difference between a bacteria and a virus.

This is both maddening and depressing. The US spent 75 years becoming one of the best, if not the best, scientific countries in the world and now, in just a few short years, it's rapidly undoing much of that.

Amodei, and Musk, and Altman, and Zuckerberg, and all of the rest are vicious, dangerous thugs who don't care who they hurt or kill, or what they damage or destroy, as long as they can satiate their egos and their greed. They're utterly devoid of conscience, of compassion, of ethics, of responsibility, of everything that it means to be a functioning human being in a society. They are raw, pure evil -- and they keep proving it to us every time they speak or write.

Only a moron would trust people like this, and I use the term people loosely here.

We didn't make them this way: they chose to become this way. And now they're whining about the consequences of their decisions. Well, guess what: every time throughout history that sociopaths have done this, have put their gratification and enrichment ahead of the people, the people eventually decided en masse that they'd had enough and that it was time to put a stop to this nonsense. I see no reason why this time will be different -- or should be different.

"AI" could mean "statistical pattern recognition" or "image processing and object classification" or "flight control" or "target prioritization" or any number of other things that aren't quite what we usually mean in 2026 when we toss around the term "AI" in 2026. (Certainly there's no need for a missile to have anything resembling a LLM.)

For example, given Ukraine's steadily-improving defenses, it might make sense to equip a missile with enough data acquisition and processing capacity to select targets based on real-time conditions while en route -- e.g., to shift from a primary target to a secondary one if the defenses around the primary seem to be working too well. Given all the RF jamming in play, that'd have to be done by onboard processing with no reliance on external communications.

But this is all speculation. Until they get their hands on one that's intact enough to recover the code running it, we won't really know. But one thing that's clear is that the Russians didn't install it in a munition arbitrarily: they had a reason. (Insert quote from "The Hunt for Red October" about Russians and plans.)

I've done a lot of incident response, and was a certified trainer for over a decade. One of the things I've observed is that the higher the reliance on technology among the party, the higher the probability that they'll require rescue. People who can read a topo map, can use a compass, who understand the importance of carrying more water than they think they'll ever need, and who have a (tested, working) flashlight rarely get into trouble. People who rely on Google/Apple/whatever maps, who are glued to their cell phones, who can't read a map or use a compass, set themselves up for issues. Of course, thankfully, most of the time those issues don't arise or are minor. But when they're not...

In this particular instance: 6000 feet of elevation gain is rather a lot. I've done 5000 up/down in a single day, but that's a LONG day even for someone who's fairly fit and accustomed to the exertion. Anyone who's not in shape is going to really struggle not just with the exertion but with the altitude, and we see in this instance, as they fatigue they may stumble and/or fall. It's just not a good idea, even for (let's say) young people who are physically active, go to the gym, play a sport or two -- because it's a very different kind of physical activity and because you can't just stop when you've had enough.

Aside: experienced trail runners make all of us look silly. I remember slogging my way up a trail at 11,000 feet when I heard the quick tap-tap-tap of one behind me. He went by with a quick "Morning!" and just kept going. I was still slogging my way up at about 12,000 feet when I saw him coming toward me, on his way back down -- same tap-tap-tap at the same pace, just out for a casual morning trot while we ordinary mortals were trudging along. I'm willing to bet that he did that trail often enough to know every rock, to have every step mapped out in his brain, to just dance his way up and down.

This particular one was exquisitely susceptible because it was managed by a stupid, corrupt crypto bro (yes, that's redundant; all crypto bros are stupid and corrupt) but there are similar ones managed by allegedly sober people with decades of investment experience...and they're not immune to the same market forces. The hype/mania around AI valuations will eventually collide with reality -- and perhaps "eventually" is "soon". A few people will make a fortune (and already have, on paper at least) and a lot of other people will be screwed.

I say that because it was triggered by a single change that should have been easily discovered during basic testing, or if not then, during any audit conducted during the last 5+ years since that change was made. Sure, it's possible that this was typical crypto bro sloppiness and stupidity, but that seems like a reach given all the opportunities for it to be detected before it was exploited. Add to that the pervasive corruption that is an intrinsic part of all crypto operation and it seems to me that the most likely explanation is that someone involved making that change has been playing the long game. It would be very interesting to find out who was involved in that change and where they are now: if they're still in the same position that would argue against this hypothesis, if they're not then perhaps they're elsewhere -- and cashing in.

The attackers are assessing defenses: what are they, what are their response times, what do the responses look like, etc. The real attack(s) will come somewhere else and will be much more thorough, because they'll be informed by the intelligence gathered from these probes. Given the state of US infrastructure security ("miserable") any competent attacker should be able to do a great deal of physical, economic, and societal damage rather quickly...

...which is one of many, many reasons why starting a war with a capable adversary without any kind of plan was a profoundly stupid and reckless idea.

I suppose that's cheaper and easier than using their own AI slop detectors -- doubly so because that would require hiring actual real live people and paying them suitably.

But I think that's not the real goal here. I think the real goal is to find out which AI slop escapes detection and use that information to fine-tune their models to crank out even more AI slop, so that -- eventually -- LinkedIn has almost no human-generated content. A lot of people will leave, of course, but those who remain will be the ones most open to exploitation, and that is where the real money can be made.