BTW, AI is a godsend for ALS patients. Even with an eye tracker, your writing throughput is low / tiring compared to typing, and of course you can't do anything that requires physical activity (painting, playing an instrument, speaking, etc). AI tools help fill the gaps.

Did *she* want to die? Did *she* want to be "released"?

Did she have an eye tracker, to allow her to communicate naturally?

Motor neurons dying != brain control of motor neurons dies.

Anyway, you don't need a brain-computer interface for an ALS patient to work. I have a friend in Finland with ALS who works as a consultant on safety for a nuclear reactor startup (he was a nuclear safety engineer before becoming paralyzed). All it takes is an eye tracker.

The biggest problem is the typically short and unpredictable lives of ALS patients. He has lived abnormally long (I think something like 13 years now), but a large part of that is due to him thinking like a nuclear safety engineer (backup on backup on backup, training his nurses to have zero tolerance for error, etc), and still has a close call like once per year or so, and I regularly worry when I don't see him online in a while that something happened that killed him. A tube comes off a life support system. A nurse forgetting to reconnect something. A mucus plug in his airways. Etc. ALS patients' lives are fragile. He does CAD design for parts on his computer (it's too hard to do it with the mouse using the eye tracker, so he designs the shapes programmatically) and orders them 3d printed to correct any deficiencies he finds in his support systems.

ALS patients also have to constantly fight the medical system. Even in a place like Finland that will actually do long-term care for ALS patients (which is very expensive), it shows that it would be much more convenient for them if those danged ALS patients would choose to die (and there's often pressure put on them to do so). One of my friend's goals is to outlive a doctor who told him he would only live a year or two put a lot of effort into getting him to choose death. It was a battle to get long-term ventilator care. It was an even bigger battle to get to use a cough machine and to be able to control the settings on it; without regular, meaningful cough support, your lungs fill with mucus, and you'll probably eventually die of a mucus plug, pneumonia, or whatnot.

By contrast, ALS patients today can actually live a decent life using eye trackers. It's not like before when you had to tediously spell out things one character at a time to a helper holding an E-tran frame. Given that 1 in 500 people will get ALS at some point in their life, we really should be allocating a lot more money toward researching cures, even if purely from a cost-saving perspective.

(One final note: if anyone here starts getting peripheral weakness and worries its ALS: your instinct will be to exercise more. Do just the opposite. If your peripheral neurons are dying, the last thing they need is more work. ALS overwhelmingly strikes active people - one researcher I was reading noted that in her entire career, she's never met a couch potato who got ALS. Take it easy, see a doctor immediately, and if it is ALS, start preparing early, but know that you do not have to be forced to choose to die, so long as you can get care. You can live a decent, productive life if you choose to).

And if they did, the Party of Personal Responsibility would just blame it on Biden.

TFA from Techcrunch is basically "creative editorializing" the original reporting of other sources (axios mainly) to justify the clickbait headline. But it you click through to the original sources the story is more nuanced and more interesting.

The surface dynamic is anthropic is in a delicate position and struggling to manage a "temperamental" regulatory power *and* strategic customer shortly before their IPO.

The background dynamic is multiple sources close enough to the matter in the exec branch felt so strongly this was an unnecessary escalation and that anthropic was the party who could and had to fix it, that they're talking to axios reporters the next day.

  In an administration that is proudly punitive of leaks, don't assume multiple people are spilling the tea to reporters this quickly out of civic interest or a strong belief in the role of free press.

Define crypto as share trading, and tax it accordingly.

Whether Anthropic was trying to hype about Mythos / Fable or not (and FYI, it is a pretty big leap forward), they absolutely did not want to get public access shut down. The US government very much seems to want to have exclusive access to it for now.

Also, to clarify the "jailbreak": They took open source projects that had known vulnerabilities, as well as deliberately introducing vulnerabilities into some other projects, then asked Fable to fix them, and then asked for test scripts to demonstrate that the exploits could no longer be exploited - the implication being that they could then use those exploits against unpatched systems. But what's the logic here? The challenge isn't "how to write exploits against known bugs", any model can do that. The challenge is finding the bugs - something Mythos / Fable has proven better than previous models at. Even if Fable refused to write said test scripts, it would automatically downgrade to Opus 4.8, and then *Opus* would have written those test scripts. Or any other model out there could do it, including free open source ones that can be safety-abliterated at will.

They'd run it again today anyway.

you miss out on the true meaning of Christmas.

News would be if he did something that *wasn't* fraudulent.

Is only half of women being able to read at all really the counterargument you were trying to make here?

And we're just talking the most basic aspect of an educational system. Kids today learn to read early in grade school.

ED: EEG, not fMRI.

And again, that's not to imply that they have any particular "mastery" in this specific case. Obviously, if they just typed "write the essay for me" into ChatGPT and submitted it without reading it, then they're not going to have learned much of anything from that. The question is, however, what did they do with their time instead? Because their brain was learning that instead.

The correllary to "use it or lose it" is that the brain isn't just going idle, it's refocusing its efforts on other things that you are "using" instead.

The average person today could hardly identify all the wild edible plants in their area, change a horseshoe, or build a proper barn, like their ancestors hundreds of years ago could.

By contrast, their ancestors hundreds of years ago probably couldn't read.

Brains don't just go idle; they just refocus on different things. A wealthy Victorian often pursued a life of a polymath, seeking varied intellectual pursuits and sometimes making great discoveries, but they could probably scarcely tell you how to mend a shoe or even change a nappy - that was their servants job.

Also, it's quite the spin to present low MRI activity as "reduced function". It's commonly literally the opposite. If you present a novice with a task they're not used to, and an expert with the same task, the expert will tend to show much less activity than the novice, as the novice has to think harder to accomplish it, whereas it's become rote for the expert. Low activation on a task is commonly a sign of cognitive efficiency.

At least he ended another war on his birthday. People will be lining up to give him peace prizes.

Has an agreement actually been reached? Both sides agree on the terms?

How much was given away to get it?

How will Trump and his stooges spin it?

How long will it last?

I hope you'll forgive me for being skeptical, give what has happened up 'til now.