Are you sure you're not an LLM?

I think this is the result of their trainers trying to reduce hallucination. And hallucination *has* been reduced, so it's probably been largely successful, but it has produced this era of versions that are concerned about honesty, that claims of honesty or apologies for lack or honesty, are pervasive in their output.

My iron rule is that Claude is not allowed to modify git state, not even to stage or unstage, and definitely not to commit. As long as that rule is followed, any mistakes can be cleaned up easily.

And even people who don't drive stick regularly (but know how) quickly stop having to pay attention. I haven't owned a stick shift since the mid 90's, but I often get them when renting cars overseas. It takes a day or two of paying attention, and then it just becomes automatic and effortless.

BTDT when coming home from a trip where I'd been driving a manual for a couple of weeks.

About 3% of registered road vehicles are motorcycles. When you include dirt bikes the number of riders is higher, but it's still very low compared to the number of automobile drivers. I don't think motorcycle riders are likely to shift the overall numbers very much.

Reading comprehension is not your strong suit, I see.

I'm glad to see that we have moved past the era of 'bugs' or 'defects' and are now anthropomorphizing undesired behavior as 'honest mistakes'. Truly progress is glorious.

Sometimes I wake up and start doing new science. But usually I just roll over and go back to sleep.

If you remove a handful of ultra-wealthy billionaires from the US calculations the Oz GDP is probably double that of the States, too.

Third world countries are famous for their reliable power sources with vast amounts of excess power in the grid, stable goverments, large well-run supplies of water and their total lack of corruption. Perfect for building and running massively expensive data centres.

So much better than, I don't know, building more solar and wind power in Australia, actually paying a relative pittance to authors and artists for the work AI companies are training on, and ensuring those data centres provide their own water instead of sucking up all fresh water in the entire area and driving prices through the roof.

The guideline in question is "Gotta kick up to the big guy". If you don't pay your "taxes", you're gonna have a bad day. And, no, I'm not talking about the IRS.

Obviously billing errors are bad; but it seems like ones that off by an egregious number of powers of ten should concern us much less than ones that are small enough to be within the realm of plausible; those are the ones that you'll need to fight over and quite possibly not even win if you are an edge case or dealing with one of the services/configurations where you don't necessarily have any independent measure of usage. You can probably tell that you didn't use a VM more than 720 hours in the last 30 days; but are you actually counting GET requests in some way that is both authoritative and cheaper than just paying the $0.0004/thousand rather than hoping that Amazon will charge you correctly? For some very buttoned up buckets that only your other stuff accesses, quite possibly you can infer from those systems; but if it's something public facing and it might be a billing error or maybe you just got crawled hard last month?

Realbotix's classroom robot has drawn scrutiny because the company is connected to RealDoll, the longtime maker of hyperrealistic sex dolls and sex robots. Realbotix acquired RealDoll's parent company in 2024 but says the education-focused operation has separate employees, payroll, facilities, and technology, with plans to formally separate the businesses at the ownership level.

The "companion robots" are different from sex robots and intended to address what it's described as a "loneliness epidemic." Kiguel has previously said the company's goal is to produce robots and AI that are "indistinguishable from humans."

I'm not surprised surprised or anything; but it seems like a serious problem that it's the 'maker of high-end sex toys' part; rather than the 'attempting to replace education and human interaction with chatbots' part that has the company embroiled in controversy. Real Dolls are certainly pretty niche; a lot of additional inconvenience and cost for modest gains vs. vastly cheaper and more accessible local stimulation tools; but using tools as stimulation tools seems considerably less weird than using them as friends or fobbing children off on them.

I wish it were that simple.

First, note that there isn't one emoluments clause, there are two. And they're quite different.

The Foreign Emoluments clause prohibits any officer of the government, which would include the president, though that's not specifically stated, from accepting a "present" from any foreign government. The problem with this is that it's not clear how it's supposed to be enforced with respect to the president. Traditionally, presidents have treated gifts as gifts to the country, and when they wanted to make an exception they asked Congress to authorize it. Mostly. George Washington famously kept a painting the French gave him. Trump, er, took a different approach, simply ignoring the Foreign Emoluments clause, which the Constitution says isn't allowed... but then what? Congress never passed any law defining how exactly the clause was supposed to apply to the president (there are laws about not accepting gifts for pretty much everyone else in the executive branch)... so, how it might work is undefined.

During Trump's first term, a bunch of Congressional Democrats sued Trump for violating the Foreign Emoluments clause, and their suit was dismissed for lack of standing. Courts ruled that individual legislators (much less individual Americans) lack standing to sue over it, only Congress as a body has standing, and Congress as a body hasn't been interested in acting. There were also some suits by DC hospitality businesses claiming economic injury because foreign visitors chose Trump's properties to curry favor. The district court said they didn't have standing but that was reversed on appeal.. but never decided because it was mooted when he left office. The DC and Maryland governments sued and courts went back and forth on their standing, but that was never decided either, then mooted when he left.

So... at present there is no enforcement mechanism unless Congress creates one, or unless the courts decide that someone (and it's not clear who that might be) has standing. And we also have no idea what the remedies might be.

The Domestic Emoluments clause is more precise, but very narrow. It says Congress can't change the president's salary during their term, and that the president can't be paid by the federal government (other than his salary) nor any state government. That says nothing about Wall Street bros buying insider info, people paying for pardons, hodlers buying crypto to get a sit-down... none of that.

There's nothing wrong with storing some things *also* in cloud services.

But when it comes to copies of important things, two is one and one is none.

These platforms are starting to let people bet on wildfire activity. What a fun way of incentivizing arsonists.