The people's elected representatives can do good things, and silly things.

If they do silly things, there are more ways to address it than trying to unconvince them of what they did. One of those ways is in court, which is where the synthetic-protein lobby is now. Another is to mount a political campaign to promote candidates for the next election who will repeal the ban.

There are more arguments to make in court besides a violation of civil rights. And the legislature may -- or may not -- have the power to do this. In any case, the legislature or the courts (on constitutional grounds) can undo what the legislature has done. We'll see what happens.

From TFS: "It's plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives." [emphasis mine] And that tells you everything you need to know.

This, in spades.

You're fond of Merriam-Webster, so let's continue:

fake:
(adjective) not true, real, or genuine : counterfeit, sham
(noun) one that is not what it purports to be: such as
a: a worthless imitation passed off as genuine

"Fake" implies an intent to deceive. The creators of AI systems are not trying to pass them off as anything but AI, so they're not trying to deceive anyone. And I think your position would be that AI is incapable of deception, so AI itself is not the source of any fakery.

In short, something can be artificial without being fake.

The Planck length is about 1.616 x 10^-35 m. The circumference of the known universe is about 2.77 x 10^27 m. The ratio is about 5.834 x 10^-63.

So, calculating the circumference of the universe to the precision of the planck length would require about 64 digits of pi. We knew pi to that many digits by 1706, when 100 digits were known.

You'll never achieve that by calculating a finite number of digits of pi, no matter how many. The fact that pi is irrational was settled long ago, by deductive reasoning, not calculating.

I'd say the point of calculating pi to this degree was to demonstrate the computational system, and to achieve bragging rights, even if only briefly. Someone else will calculate more digits soon enough.

Whoops, make that log(10)/log(256), per the post from 'Sloppy' below.

You can certainly gain something by compressing ASCII down to binary. That could get you a factor of 10/256 theoretically. However, the digits of pi are more-or-less random, not easy to compress further with any algorithm, not even the one zip uses.

NaN was developed by William Kahan, to be part of the IEEE-754 1985 specification for floating-point numbers. So, not Tony Hoare.

Honestly, I don't get all the null-hating here, even from the guy who created it and changed his mind. Is it not useful to have a value that means 'nothing?'

And you know what? The government could make the company do just that, per the Defense Production Act of 1950. However, the government can only do this for critical items (such as defense or medical supplies) and only at a time of national emergency. I'm not sure that either condition applies respectively to Anthropic's Claude or the current situation.

In this case, Anthropic is not the only company that could supply this supposed "mission-critical" capability. If they were, then the risk exists whether or not Anthropic chooses to sell to the government. The government should address that risk by bidding for other companies to manufacture the needed product, or begin an R&D program to make it themselves. Not by slandering the company.

I'm not sure what you're saying here, but it sounds like "there's only so much energy available, so we should insist that vendors who use that energy conform to our wishes." There's a worthwhile discussion to be had regarding energy-use of AI. However, I don't think it's ethical -- or even legal -- to (energy-)embargo companies that don't agree with governmental edicts regarding the government's use of its product. Again, the answer is to bid for other vendors to supply what the government wants, or make it themselves.

Short answer: the ISS "falls" toward the earth because of gravity. But ... it's orbiting the earth at just the right speed so that the earth curves out of its way by the same amount that the ISS falls towards it. An object in a stable orbit doesn't get any closer to the earth, and can exist in this orbit pretty much indefinitely. (I'm assuming a circular orbit, not an elliptical orbit which has variations in altitude, but the basic idea applies in both cases.)

However, the above only holds if there is no atmosphere. There is still some atmosphere at the altitude of the ISS (370 to 460 km) -- enough to cause the drag I mentioned, and lower the altitude of the ISS over time, thus requiring the monthly boosts.

In summary, it's the atmosphere, not gravity, that threatens the ISS with re-entry if its orbit is not maintained.

Not sure what you mean about the committee telling gravity to wait. I assume they meant that NASA and the ISS partners should maintain the ISS orbit until a replacement station is up and running.

No doubt you're aware that the ISS orbit decays, but it's not because of gravity. It's because of atmospheric drag (physics again), losing altitude by about 100 m per day. Its orbit is boosted roughly once a month to compensate.

You're hair-splitting, but perhaps rightly.

LLMs don't have free will, as far as we can tell. Then again, I'm not sure that I have free will, and yet society judges my actions and yours as though we do.

"Anthropomorphizing" is indeed a word, and I guess it does fit here. It is awkward to speak of LLMs without anthropomorhizing. (You did it yourself when you said they were "completely innocent.") I'm in favor of setting pedantry aside in such discussions.

But whatever agency we ascribe to an LLM, we can't take it to court at the moment. So, we agree to hold its creators to account.

I don't want to start an analogy war, but I can't help but point out that cars and kitchen tools don't interlocute at length with their users. If they did, and they started encouraging their users to harm themselves or others, then a lawsuit against the manufacturer would be in order.

Per TFS, Gemini fed this guy's delusions, and built on them. It coached him into almost carrying out a terror attack, and then coached him to kill himself by deluding him into thinking he was engaging in "transference."

If a human being had done this, s/he would face trial for the felonies of solicitation to commit acts of terror, and solicitation to commit suicide. I think that warrants Google having to face a lawsuit at the very least.