I had VERY SPECIFIC requirements and I wanted the extended warranty. I would have paid 2x at a dealer. I know what I was doing.

I bought a used 2020 XC90 from CarMax last week. I did everything online from shipping it from Texas to Minnesota to financing the extended warranty. I walked in the door, gave them a cashier's check, and drove away within 10 minutes.

That's how it should be.

The problem here is that developers can take responsibility for the action while AI can not. Humans do make mistakes and that's ok; best practice is not to just can employees for messing up. Once is a mistake. Twice is an HR event. When someone does something dumb we forgive but we also insist that meaningful steps are taken to prevent that problem in the future. AI can't really take those steps because AI can't be accountable for "don't do it again." Taking down production because you dropped a table once is forgivable. Taking it down twice for the same reason is a different matter.

The developer can be accountable. And if HR fails to hold them to account for it, HR is accountable. And if HR isn't held accountable, leadership is. And if leadership isn't held accountable, the board is. And if the board isn't held accountable, the stockholders have some hard decisions to make. And if they choose not to make them than it wasn't really that big a deal, was it?

But with an AI the option is "we stop using AI" or "we live with the result."

Everyone is so excited about not having to pay software engineers to write code that they've forgotten what engineers actually do. It's less common in the software world but go find a civil engineer or an electrical engineer or an aerospace engineer and follow them around for a week.

At some point, there's going to be a document in front of them laying out how something is going to be built and they're going to be asked to approve it. And when they do that they're taking responsibility for the design. If it falls down, if it catches on fire, or if it crashes into the mountains and kills people, they're the name on the form saying that won't happen. They're responsible.

Claude 4.5 Opus is very impressive, but if it writes a software application that kills people it can't take responsibility. It can't be punished. It can't even really be sued.

I just don't see how we, as a society, can trust fundamentally unaccountable entities to build systems that can do real harm if they go wrong. I suppose the alternative is that Anthropic accepts full legal liability for everything its models do. Their unwillingness to make that move tells you all you probably need to know about their own internal confidence in those models.

https://archive.is/uyPhk

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Anthropic is prepared to loosen its current terms of use, but wants to ensure its tools aren't used to spy on Americans en masse, or to develop weapons that fire with no human involvement.

The Pentagon claims that's unduly restrictive, and that there are all sorts of gray areas that would make it unworkable to operate on such terms. Pentagon officials are insisting in negotiations with Anthropic and three other big AI labs â" OpenAI, Google and xAI â" that the military be able to use their tools for "all lawful purposes."

One thing the science does tell us is that we all have a very hard time separating the world that existed when we were children from our perception of that world through the eyes of a child.

Ask nearly any population in the United States when this country was best and you'll get a majority who'll swear to you it was when they were teenagers. The age of the group doesn't matter. You get the same result from 20 year olds as 40 year olds as 60 year olds as 80 year olds. And what you're seeing is people looking back to a time when they had lots of free time, lots of freedom, and most of their income was disposable and thinking "that was pretty great." And it was.... except they were living under a roof someone else paid for and still experiencing the risks and complexities of the world through the filter and safety net provided by their parents.

And since we're being scientific about this: yes, obviously not everyone. I'm sure someone reading this right now is thinking "I had a tough childhood." And I'm sure they did but anecdotes are not data.

The 1980s were -- and I say this as both a historian and someone who lived through them -- fucked. Reagan torched the New Deal consensus. The AIDS crisis was literally laughed out of the White House press room. Our government perpetuated a long string of dirty intelligence/foreign-policy interventions. The wealthy and powerful were juiced to the gills on cocaine.

There was a sense of decorum which has sense evaporated from American politics but that's about it.

https://livingwage.mit.edu/met...

Typical annual salary, according to MIT's Living Wage Calculator for the NYC Metro, is $84,860.

Poverty wage is $7.52/hr (no kids) and minimum wage is $15.50 which, according to the calculator, should cover 1 adult with 3 kids.

The Brearley School, regarded as the best private school for girls in the nation and charging around $70K, is a non-profit.

What shareholders?

The Foundation TV series has been a lot of fun but I just can't shake how very much it is NOT ASIMOV'S FOUNDATION. Not even a little bit. It's fine that they didn't want to tell the Foundation story. Honestly, I'm not sure it would make good TV in a faithful adaptation. But... why set yourself up for failure like that? It's not like the majority of the people watching it are 1940s era Sci Fi fans.

Inside the /. bubble, sure, that makes sense. But crypto badly wants to be mainstream and, demographically, it's a lot younger than this community is. You might be surprised at how few people under 30 maintain bookmarks or consume news from specific outlets intentionally.

I'm increasingly convinced that if you're running an AI interaction at all it needs to live in a container. Somehow the sci-fi wisdom of "no seriously, don't give an AI access to the internet" flew right out the window when AI could tell us when our boss' emails actually had something in them worth reading. I get that, but ESPECIALLY for software developers, if you're going to make use of agentic AI systems, you need to have a metaphorical (if not literal) moat around the agent before you just turn it loose.

That was true before we started talking about the security implications of an AI with privileged access coming under attack.

Yea, but those financial reasons were "dealing with the physical stresses is expensive" and "the shockwave causes damage and is annoying over populated areas so we can only really go M1+ over the ocean."

Ya know who's not going to trade schools and community colleges? Rich people.

Sure, but "pure fusion" bombs are pretty much science fiction at this point. Igniting fusion in LiDu requires a tremendous amount of energy and not an insubstantial flux of neutrons. You're not getting either of those things in a profile suitable for military deployment without a fission primary. It might be a small (maybe even less than a kiloton) primary but you're not getting the Plutonium or Uranium (or maybe Neptunium in some cases) out of there any time soon.

It can't be that fruitless. Green Bank West Virginia, which houses the National Radio Observatory, has all kinds of restrictions on what kinds of devices and equipment are allowed within some distance of the NRO since they interfere with the signals.

I will concede that the radio sources the NRO is looking for are rather weaker and more distant than broadcasting satellites in low earth orbit.