My employer announced that AI costs will be billed back to departments. Token use (almost entirely among developers) was cut in half without affecting productivity, and perhaps even enhancing productivity because they had to think a bit about the best use of what they had instead of trying random things.

well, their chips are coming out of a foundry after all...

Not sure about the assembly of small electronics. It looks like that's still a fairly hands-on, manual process.

One of the barriers to automating the assembly of commodity microelectronics is that the revisions iterate fairly quickly. It's difficult to build an automated assembly line that can handle those changes. It usually just ends up being easier to have a person do that assembly work if the product is going to change in a few months and it would take a couple of months to retool for the change.

A broken clock might be right a couple of times a day.

Unless of course someone rips the hands off. Or if it's a digital clock that simply doesn't display anything. Or probably for a bunch of other possible reasons.

MTBF calculations are a bit of a scam in of themselves.

...is normally preferred with a good, crisp apple.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

And dont pay anywhere close to what they were making.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

It is true that US Border Customs / Homeland Security can search you and your devices when re-entering the country. Also, within 100 miles of the border checkpoints vehicles can be stopped and searched without a warrant nor even probable cause. This is all under national security and not your citizenship rights.

Wiping your phone prior to entering the country could raise suspicions and is the equivalent to document / evidence destruction.

The only reason I even tried out the Arc browser was due to the lack of UX chrome and tiling window working scenarios. The insane thing? The Browser Company never ported it to Linux. Just macOS initially then Windows. Something about a 3rd party proprietary bit of code preventing it or The Browser Company trying to protect some internal code they wrote. Either way, no port to Linux. Then they abandoned Arc in favor of Dia an A.I. first browser. I don't care about A.I. I care about using a browser that lacks any sort of UX chrome interface. No menu, no toolbars, etc. Just a hiding sidebar of vertical tabs. Lots of key bindings as well.

If I want A.I. I am just going to run an agent harness...

To believe that humanity is even capable of altering the planetary climate is quite kooky to begin. All the numbers are based on guesses in a computer model. Classic computing problem of garbage in and garbage out. Half the freaking global sensors are placed right next to heat sources from the sun beating down on pavement to an air conditioner exhaust being pointed directly at one of these sensors. There were multiple ice ages and humanity survived. Technically, we are still exiting the last ice age and yes, the ice is retreating. But it doesn't mean we are doomed. Not by a long shot. The Earth has been far hotter in its long history, and it will be cooler at times as well.

Imagine replacing the firmware in an LG spyware TV? Turn off all the tracking and surveillance features.

Any subs that follow the TrueWhatever invariably turn into shit.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.