The data centers people hate are the ones powering the AI slop engines, not the Internet. There's a reason traditional data centers never bothered anyone.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

Tragedy of the commons isn't a problem with human nature, it's a problem with the incentives in a capitalist economic system. Look at what happened with the real commons - individuals who were using it decided to organize and regulate sustainable use of the commons. Only corporations are selfish and short-sighted enough to fulfill the theory's prediction.

It may not be intentional anti-environmental shilling (in general, with sinij in particular it's quite clear that it is), but it is practically indistinguishable from it. The best time to build nuclear was 50-60 years ago, but the second best time, at this point, is probably never. Renewables with storage are vastly cheaper and vastly faster to build. Building nuclear today means locking up resources for decades that could've been used to rapidly deploy far greater amounts of cheap clean power instead. There are only a few niche uses where nuclear could still make sense and they are steadily being eaten away by renewables with storage.

I think who you and GP are looking for are the Black Panthers. They're still around and didn't take kindly to the ICE goon squad.

That sounds socialist.

AI is a metric fuckton of cons and a tiny pinch of pros. Typically we allow bad things to happen if they come with a greater amount of good, not the other way around.

Some scientific studies have found that permanent DST is about 2/3rds as good as permanent standard time:

https://med.stanford.edu/news/...

And others have found that permanent DST is the worst option:

https://www.berkshireeagle.com...

Considering Trump is pushing this it's probably lucky that he's not manually adjusting the time zone to suit how he feels with no warning.

Because unlike software-based solutions, it can successfully hide the information from the user (barring any hardware vulnerabilities). The problem isn't just that hidden information can exist on the system, the problem is that the root user can't access the information. Being able to access the information is what made DRM crackable. Without that, it could be possible to make a DRM system that actually works, which would be the worst invention in the history of computing. If the user can clear it but not see it, that does nothing to make that less viable.

No strawman, it happens almost every time I express concern at the possibility of TPM enabling a working DRM system.

Anyone care to once again reassure me how TPM, a system for hiding information from a computer's user regardless of privilege level, can't be used for DRM again?

Hint: Find out what kind of government Henry Kissinger considered to be a greater threat than communism.

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.