"Lots" and "one that is widely accepted" are not the same thing at all, which is my point. There's no point in discussing intelligence without first nailing down which definition the interlocutors are using.

Also, nearly all of the definitions are extremely fuzzy.

Indeed.

The claim you made was not about whether machines can currently perform like a brain, nor about complexity. The claim you made is that the human brain cannot be simulated by a Turing machine, which is a much, much stronger claim.

So I repeat, why do you think that?

38 of the 50 US states are "one-party consent" states, which means that as long as one person present (e.g. the person wearing the glasses) is aware of the recording, it's legal. Roughly half of countries around the world either allow any party to a conversation to record it without telling the rest, or don't have any restrictions at all.

Since there's no clear definition of what "intelligent" means, much less one that is widely accepted, that's a pointless argument.

You clearly have not used them much. Try using an LLM (one of the top commercial models, e.g. Claude Opus 4.7) to debug code that has never been on the Internet. I don't think anyone knows what "intelligent" means, so arguing that point is a waste of time, but LLMs clearly can observe results, reason about them, form hypotheses, devise ways to test those hypotheses, perform the tests, evaluate and reason about the results, etc.

My guess is that the face blurring happens on the car, before the data is even uploaded to Waymo, as a way to protect the privacy of random passersby from Waymo and Waymo employees. They likely never had possession of imagery with unblurred exterior faces, so there was no way they could provide it.

There's no way that Waymo is just defying a court order.

Why do you think that?

SMRs that utilize 1950's designs and require intense operational oversight and maintenance could never be economical. SMRs that use better, safer designs that can safely operate with no active operational oversight and little or no maintenance, which can function without intervention and without refueling for 20-30 years, then be inexpensively disposed-of and replaced, and which can be manufactured in large quantities to bring the unit cost down, promise to be very economical.

Will the new designs actually achieve all of those goals? On paper it looks good. Whether that theory will translate into practice is something that can only be discovered by trying.

The risks are a lot smaller than you think they are, because of new reactor design. Nearly all of the nuclear reactors in the world are still using a design that's 70 years old, that requires active cooling and doesn't fail safely. We have much better designs now, at least on paper, designs that simply can't melt down, whose failure mode is to simply stop. But no one builds these new designs on industrial scale because they're unproven, and there hasn't been much funding for doing all of the engineering and research needed to develop them into fully-functioning designs that can be.

I'm skeptical that small reactors are really the best way to actually deploy nuclear power on a large scale, because of security concerns, but starting small is the best way to validate and refine new designs. And modularity is clearly a good strategy for making deployments of varying sizes cost-effective. If you can develop a cost-effective module that can be manufactured in large numbers, you can build large plants by clustering them.

The new designs shouldn't actually need much operational oversight -- if something goes operationally wrong, they just stop functioning -- but they'll still have highly radioactive cores which, if extracted, could be pretty terrible weapons. Not to make nuclear bombs, but to greatly enhance the damage done by conventional explosives, by adding radiation hazards that linger for years. So, security will remain an important consideration, and the SMRs should only be deployed where security can be assured, which will in practice mean that most are deployed in large clusters.

This all assumes that the safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the new designs proves out, of course. The only way to find out whether that will be the case is to try.

One common way is treating municipal wastewater. This doesn't "create" water, but it does make available a water supply that wasn't previously.

I think such systems are generally dual-loop. There's the loop that directly cools all of the equipment, which is full of pure (might even be distilled) water that circulates but is not consumed, then that water goes through a heat exchanger in a much larger supply of treated wastewater. So the wastewater doesn't get close to sensitive equipment and doesn't run through tiny pipes.

I don't think I ever suggested that this was a Trump-only problem... indeed I specifically highlighted at the end that conservatives should worry greatly about what an unlimited liberal president will do, and I pointed out at the beginning that presidents have been pushing the boundaries since Nixon, at least.

Regarding your claims about Biden... bringing him up is kind of a non-sequiteur. As the other commenter pointed out, Biden very much followed the traditional path with respect to treating the independent federal agencies as independent. Do you have any counterexamples? As for #3, Biden did abuse the pardon power and I wish he hadn't done it, but as far as I know there is zero evidence that he did it to protect people from prosecution for illegal acts that he ordered.

Finally, on #1: Yes, the ruling happened during the Biden administration, but the ruling was entirely about Trump. I'd go so far as to say that if Biden had been the subject of the case, the conservative justices would have ruled the other way.

While Trump didn't initiate the move towards a more powerful executive, if he achieves status as king-in-all-but-name, he'll be the one that did 90% of it.

I agree that Trump has not yet achieved full control over the executive branch. The uncertainty over whether Slaughter will go his way is a remaining obstacle. We'll know soon.

From outside, an IR imager should be able to see the heat from a leak. But who knows; one would imagine if it were that easy they'd have done it 7 years ago, when this crap Russian module's chronic leak issues began. My inner cynic thinks this is probably political; competent people aren't being permitted to deal with it.

They'll deal with it when some hatch or docking port blows out and sucks a couple people into space wearing NASA tee shirts. I'm rather certain about that much.

Not at all.

Car batteries have to have high storage to weight ratios. A reduced-capacity battery holds less power but still weighs just as much.

But weight doesn't matter for grid storage. If the batteries only have half as much capacity, just stack up twice as many of them. And in fact it's not a case of "half capacity". I'd bet Waymo retires them when they get to 80-90% of capacity, because reduced capacity means more time spent charging and less time spent working. If the grid storage system gets a battery with 80% of its original capacity, it can likely use that battery for decades before it has to be retired and recycled.

And, of course, lithium ion batteries are highly recyclable, so there's no reason not to expect them to be recycled when they're finally taken out of service in 2060 or so.