After my failed upgrade experience, I realized that if one puts Windows on "unsupported hardware", it would be trivially easy for Microsoft to disable it if they felt it furthered their interests. I realized I didn't want that Sword of Damocles so am looking at Linux.

One has to know what's going on - your disk is being encrypted by default, and all your data is getting sucked up to Microsoft's server by default. Your medical information, tax information, etc (i.e. PII and PHI).

Then, one has to research how to disable all that stuff.

Out of the box, by default, for the average user, all of the data theft and forced-encryption is going to happen because they don't know what's going on. The encryption is secret and the data theft is not advertised - just that one needs a Microsoft account to use this operating system.

I accidentally bricked a PC with Windows 10 Pro because I tried to upgrade it to Windows 11 using a popular third party tool to run on unsupported hardware, and selected the wrong parameters. I'm looking at the PC now and it's solid hardware and I don't want to send it to the landfill because Microsoft and its partners decided they wanted a windfall profit. I realized finally that if I knuckle under, I am voting for Microsoft and partners to only get stronger and bolder. So, I am finally going to put Linux on it.

Linux is a hobbyist's tool. You have to know how to secure it and how to update it yourself. I've used it extensively in the past at work. Microsoft Office and other programs I use don't run on it. It will have a learning curve. I can only do it because I am a professional programmer with significant Linux experience which is a small group. It will have zero impact on Microsoft, but for me, it is the Right Thing To Do because the only way to avoid this expensive and outrageous corporate control and privacy invasion, is to do it.

What about for people with no intention or ability to take delivery?

"a new breed of AI systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and safe,"

Pick three.

It increases engine, battery, and starter motor wear and tear. Leading to earlier disposing of the car

It does not. The whole system is designed to handle it. And by decreasing the amount of time the engine sits idle at stops, it actually reduces overall long term engine wear.

Starting and stopping puts more wear on engine components. Cars with these systems reputedly have more robust starters, beefier batteries and core engine components that are supposed to be able to resist wear when spinning with low oil pressure. I'd prefer to avoid the additional wear entirely. The goal is maximum uptime for the vehicle between repairs and long vehicle service life while trying to keep costs down.

It does seem to reduce gas consumption by a limited amount. I can't say that I want to put additional wear on my vehicle for that purpose.

I accept anthropogenic global warming (AGW) exists, I have no reason not to believe it. I wonder if better base gas mileage and increased engine and component life offset the increased gas consumption.

If the running software process was programmed with a goal, and it was using an LLM / neural network database, could it run amok to human detriment? That's the overarching question.

In this incident, if the software process continued to execute after the code was rejected, seeking ways embedded in the LLM / neural network database to respond to this, what would it do? Not something good as reported in this case.

It's not that the machinery will suddenly come to life, it will be that highly capable machinery will be given faulty goals with unexpected side effects, and how to stop that.

These machines aren't magical. They don't reason. They're not oracles. They can't get things "wrong" or "right" because they have no intent and no concept of those things. They're generating text on a deterministic model, and adding some randomness by not always picking the most likely next token (sometimes picking the 96% vs 98% likely next token). Most people just don't understand how this stuff works and use terms like "hallucinating" because no one is being honest about what the weighted random guessing machines do.

LLM's (i.e. "AI") are a probabilistic database. If you query a database 10 times with the same query, you'll get the same answer 10 times. If you query an LLM 10 times with the same query, you are not guaranteed to get the same answer, because of stochastic nature of it, as noted above.

The term "stochastic parrot" is largely correct IMO.

Don't get me wrong - it's an amazing tool, like the Internet itself. But also like the Internet, there was a surge in stocks and investment beyond what is initially appropriate because everyone wants to get in at the ground floor and doesn't want to be left behind. Larry Ellison commercialized the relational database in 1977 with the founding of Oracle and he's one of the richest men in the world and relational databases underpin nearly all of business software.

It's quite amazing that something like easily accessible mechanical door releases are not mandated in the US, but are mandated in China. I never thought we'd ever be in this kind of situation where a dictatorship is prioritizing safety over our democracy.

If an American safety official tried to mandate this... one can imagine the appeals to over-regulation and corporate freedom to innovate being infringed. And 50 years after Buckley vs Valeo (it limited direct contributions to politicians, but said unlimited individual spending was allowed, and began the "money is speech" paradigm). And 16 years after Citizens United which allowed unlimited corporate spending on elections.

Gerrymandering (allowing politicians to choose their voters via adept drawing of districts, instead of voters choosing their politicians) and de facto uncontrolled money in politics (see Sheldon Adelson spending 10s to 100's of millions of dollars on political races) is leading this country towards oligarchy and feudalism. The rights and freedom earned through blood and toil are being drained away via complex and secretive election rules.

I've not touched the HVAC settings in my car in 2 years now. It's the same summer, winter, rain snow or shine. As it should be. You know how you're dressed when you get in a car, there's no reason you can't set the desired comfort level before you drive off.

It was 9F / -13 C the other morning when I got to my car. I get in with a winter coat, start the car, wait a couple of minutes, then drive off. Heater air becomes hot after several minutes. After I warm up a bit, I want to turn down the heat, what with wearing the coat in the 9F temperatures. When I take the coat off and hang it up in the back seat for the next leg, I want the heat up higher.

Or... in summer, in 90F / 32 C temperatures, getting back to the car after working outside. People want to cool down fast. Blowing cold air helps that. Once they've cooled down, then they dial back the AC.

Or they just like the feeling of hot or cold air blowing on some part of their body.

People want the ability to vary the temperature in their car. They've had the ability and still do (via touchscreen) since car HVAC was introduced. Thinking up use cases for this scenario is trivially easy.

State legislators are easy to buy and not that expensive, like federal politicians. I'll bet the data brokers don't have an association in California. If they form that, and shell out some cash to legislators, this law will be rolled back.

Just FYI... the words "Jesus" or "Christ" are nowhere in the founding documents (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights).

There's the Newtonian world, which we can experience and intuitively understand with our five senses.
There's the quantum world, which defies intuition, and we cannot directly experience.
There's the information world, which we do experience, but with information being intangible, have difficulty thinking about.

Light. Time. Gravity. We experience them but they are intangible. Information is the same way.

"How to make a bundt cake" is information. Does it exist only in the context of life? Did it always exist, even in the time of dinosaurs?

There's the "Black hole information paradox." It seems to suggest that the universe should be playable both forward in time, and reverse. How does the basic information about particles map to information about bundt cakes?

The Platonic information world - how does that map onto reality? Does that have any relation to life?

Life does two things - create entropy and process and accrue information. What are the implications?

I have no idea. Just some questions I've been trying to formulate.

If they're not making it clear to people at purchase that the advertised price is not the full price, it's straight up bait and switch (the advertised price is the bait; the subscription and additional revenue stream is the price switch).

An LLM is, at is core, a database. It's queried with plain English and responds in kind. It's an amazing tool. But it's a simulacrum in terms of appearing to be a human with intent and deviousness.

I think LLMs are going to be big, real big, because they are a new, more effective way of information dissemination, similar to the relational database debut in the 1970's. An absolutely amazing tool. But pushing the "simulacrum effect" of LLM's to make non-technical people think they are anything but a database is... at best disingenuous.

Initially, there was an intense media flood-the-zone campaign blaming pilot incompetence when the Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302 went down due to the faulty MCAS system on the 737 Max. So much so that I was talking to a casual observer who said it was the pilots' fault.

Big corporations (and lobbying associations) do two things for media: 1) make their jobs easier by giving them pre-written stories (now we have AI generated) making generating content easier; and 2) paying them via advertising. Most people do not understand the political-corporate-media ecosystem.