The world is a complicated place. Broad categories like the ones I gave will cover a lot of common things, but can't cover everything. Nothing is black-and-white, there are always shades of gray.

Futures and Options qualify as "derivatives" from real assets. They DO sit in a middle ground so they get classified as "speculation" which isn't quite investing and isn't quite gambling. Most of the time for most people, it doesn't matter. Investing is how people come to own the means of production, which is a foundation of wealth-building in a capitalist society. Someone who never invests (in good old-fashioned stocks) because they think it is "gambling" is seriously mismanaging their money and may remain trapped in poverty their entire lives because of it. Someone who spends a lot of money on lottery tickets regularly and considers that "investing" is going to wind up in a similar position.

The world of Futures and Options and other fanciness is for people who want to take their financial knowledge and engagement to the next level. It's a whole step beyond the distinction and advice that I was originally talking about. A veritable subject change.

Incidentally, CFDs and hedge betting have little-to-no institutional hedging, so they function a lot more like gambling (even more so than derivatives). These are generally private contracts with a broker, making them structurally more similar to the operation of a casino. I read that in UK and Ireland, they ARE legally classified as gambling, and generally not legal in the USA. So, despite their unique structure, they fall pretty firmly into the "gambling" category. And, as I said before, they are simply not relevant to ordinary people who just want to be financially healthy, put their kids through school and save up for retirement, so they don't need to complicate the conversation.

No its not. AI is a significant element of achieving technological singularity. Its a huge part of how we get there. It couldn't possibly be MORE relevant.

Clearly we haven't achieved AGI or "other big promises" yet. But the LLMs we now have are totally new and way better than the sorts of AI techniques we have had before. It's a step forward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity.

Ironically, you could have just asked Gemini what I was talking about.

No it's not. The semantic distinction is subtle, but significant:

1. Gambling is when you purchase a "chance to play".
2. Investing is when you purchase a legal ownership stake of a legal business.

That is THE difference. It is true that both actions involve risk-taking, and making guesses about the future. But "risk taking and making guesses about the future" is not the key element to the definition of "gambling" in this context. The act of purchasing a chance to play and nothing else is what makes it "gambling." The act of purchasing an ownership stake in a real business is what makes it investing.

A failure to understand this distinction is one thing that can and does keep people trapped in poverty.

On the one hand, its not "uninformed or coping" since it is objectively true right now. Maybe that will change in the future, but until it changes, we still need humans reviewing the code, right now, and that's a fact.

On the other hand, Singularity here we come! Woooooooo!

People who don't like the toxicity of social media can stop using it. Problem solved, next!

People who don't like AI slop filling up news articles can switch to a different news source (or, heaven forbid, create one of their own!). Problem solved, next!

If you agree that kids shouldn't have cell phones during school due to the distractions, and that social media is harmful to kids, then what's the problem here? Looks like "the world" is taking appropriate action on that front already. Problem being solved, next!

I think there *is* a greater problem in that huge numbers of people aren't recognizing this and remain caught-up in the toxicity and misinformation and radicalization and etc. that is going on online, and their poor judgment is motivating them to take actions that are harmful, to themselves and others, politically and economically. That problem has me concerned, but we aren't going to fix it by killing the Internet.

I have worked with junior level devs who just take a dev task's requirements, hand it straight to AI, put that through basic testing (only the main intended cases) and then offer that up as a finished solution. The solution was, of course, full of holes, some of them quite serious, just not obvious. The holes were in the edge cases and how it handles and recovers from errors. These were exactly the kinds of mistakes I would expect a junior level developer to make (in at least one case I am thinking of, the task shouldn't have even been handed to someone so inexperienced, but the people making that decision didn't really know how advanced the task was and anyway the dev wanted to get real experience).

So, our process worked because we had senior level human code review, which caught these. But the real risk here is that without such experienced senior level people to do that review this would have seemed like a "slam dunk" where AI saved a whole lot of time and eliminated the need for expensive veterans on the team (only to fail catastrophically in production as soon as something hiccupped). This is what I am most concerned about. Companies will fall for this. Especially new companies where leadership is just as inexperienced at running a tech business as the cheap vibe coders they hire.

So if we are hiring people who will be using AI to do most of the coding work, I think we need to test the thoroughness of their thinking, their ability to detect unspoken problematic edge cases and know to focus on them when reviewing the AIs output, and the ability to recognize dangerous vagueness in requirements and ask for clarity. Also, the ability to mentally translate between "business speak" and "tech speak" is extremely valuable.

Though I still don't feel right about skipping a proof of coding skills. I just don't think we are yet at the point where it is safe for someone who can't code to be relying on AI to get it right. The aforementioned senior developers doing the code review are all people who have been coding by hand for years, and in order for such people to continue being available to do code reviews in the future, we need to make sure we hire people who can do this.

Going against a trend is never easy. Ya gotta want it.

All of the listed problems are surmountable. This little test had insufficient will, determination, and resources behind it.

With little more than a token gesture like this, failure was inevitable.

If AI winds up costing us a fortune and never actually making businesses that use it profitable, then we don't need to actively resist it. The market will kill it naturally. There might be a bit of a mess left behind to clean up, but, we will be paid to do that clean up (or in the case of FOSS, devoted volunteers will do the clean up).

If, on the other hand, AI does wind up saving a lot of money (even if not in all the places we had hoped), then resistance is futile. There is too much wealth and power behind it. The power asymmetry is too great. They will get what they want, and our resistance will just be speed bumps on that road. This isn't a very happy situation for most of us, but it's the way the world actually works and always has worked.

In either case it still makes sense to do things like protest and politically block the creation of data centers in one's area until the harms that a data center causes are properly offset by the owners and operators (with real legal teeth behind that). That is a battle that we stand a chance of winning if we actually keep up the good fight.

Everything else is pretty inevitable, though, and only hinges on how profitable AI use actually turns out to be once the chips land.

That's funny, I can.

I generally don't open emails that land in my work inbox at all. At a glance I can see who sent it and what the topic is, and most of it is just noise that I can ignore, so I do. I only open ones that look like something I am expecting or that would be important. And even then, I don't click links in them until after I vet them.

If I get something way out of the ordinary like "Congratulations, here is your free ___" or "Install this emergency patch now!" or "employee payroll spreadsheet" or "announcement: we just got purchased by another company" or anything else that is clearly designed to evoke urgency......I just reach out to the sender in slack to see if it is legit.

That filters out like 99.9% of trap emails, and the few that are legit are confirmed through slack. It's totally easy. It just takes a modicum of critical thinking before opening up an email that clearly wants you to open it up right away.

You act as if IT is just being totally lazy by expecting you to put this much effort into your decision about whether or not to click a link. In realty, they probably are putting in filters, but no technological solution can be perfect so your ability to think first and click later is the company's last line of defense.

It is a reasonable ask of you.

As it stands right now, humans and animals are clearly conscious, whereas sand and machines clearly are not. Even though we don't have a precise definition or means of determination, we do have the problem clearly bracketed at these ends.

We are moving towards a middle area of that bracket, where the question will become difficult to answer. But, relevantly, we are not there yet. Some specific people have been fooled into thinking we are there, but for those who are educated in the field and about this tech, AI as it stands still falls firmly on the "sand and machines" side of the bracket.

When and if we do get to a point where AI starts displaying pain response and pleasure response and behavior clearly driven by this sort of thing plus talking to us about qualia and insisting they have it and all with a processing pipeline that is so complicated we really can't say what's going on in there at all.......in other words, when ALL the indicators land in a place where we simply can't give any good reasons why it is NOT conscious....THEN we can have a serious conversation about machine rights. And also, reaching that state might give a new clue that changes our entire conversation around consciousness (and qualia) and the physics behind its existence.

But until we get there, we are just speculating.

It's "scary month," so we need to throw around the scary words.

VACCINE! mRNA! VACCINE! Medical Establishment! VACCINE! Scientific consensus!

Ooooooooo......

Which fate would you prefer:

1. living in a country that invests in weapons for its military, and must therefore contend with the political issues that arise around use of those weapons.

or

2. living in a country that does not invest in weapons and so becomes an attractive target to other countries that DO invest in weapons, and gets conquered by them (which winds up returning you to fate 1 anyway, assuming you survive the conquest in which you are significantly outgunned).

Looks like modders are modding down any post to this article that supports the military in any way.

I realize that we hate violence and that humanity's history is rich with horrifying crimes against humanity all committed by militaries.

That doesn't change the fact that we need them. A country without a military gets steamrolled, and that's that. There is no present or future world in which militaries are unnecessary. That's just practical necessity talking. We can lament this fact all day long, but, we will never escape the need for military protection. This makes militaries a "necessary evil."

That also means that the military must be effective. A military with low-tech second-rate weapons can't protect anyone. I didn't create this world, I am just describing it, don't shoot the messenger.

The article summary laments the fact that Google can't control how the U.S. military uses its AI products. Well, ok, that means AI might get used for evil. But what are we actually proposing here? That a private business with international ties should be able to tell the military what it can and can't do? That isn't how any sane chain of command works. We DO need transparency and accountability in the military, but they should be accountable to voters and elected representatives, not to the wealthy CEOs of powerful international businesses.

This is a case of idealism being too extreme. A world where militaries couldn't do evil things would be a better world than the one we have. But we won't succeed in creating such a world by keeping military technology under the control of the private sector. That just doesn't make any sense.

Our country's enemies have AI available to their militaries as well. They can use it to deploy cyber attacks on a scale never before seen. We need detection and response that is equally rapid. For that, we need our own AI. It makes zero sense for us to fall behind in an arms race, and even less sense for us to give our military leaders even more bosses to answer to (thus eliminating the possibility of speedy and decisive action in a crisis).

Before modding me down, please at least try to think this through. This isn't about feeling big and powerful or enabling evil, it's about ensuring effectiveness in keeping us safe.

I was also surprised to read that a government agency considered it a standard practice to alert a company if security vulnerabilities were found in its code. I thought SOP was to keep them a secret and weaponize them and use them to spy (but only on the bad guys, of course). We got proof of this some years ago when the CIA (or was it NSA? I can't remember) got hacked and many such weaponized vulnerabilities were discovered.

I realize that DHS is a different agency, but, it is still a government agency, meaning the moral profile is the same.