So much this..

Yes except, we are not talking about keeping ourselves warm in the winter, cool in the summer, the lights on in the ER etc... We are talking about power for AI data centers; not even data centers for "traditional" computer applications and software.

I'd be the last person here to argue we don't to develop energy infrastructure. I would agree that could maybe even should include nuclear fission at least in the form of modern much safer designs with real consideration for who bears the cost for the 'common defense' when a commercial entity is permitted to paint a giant target on a community.

Never the less this is a societal cross roads, where it comes to AI. The choice isn't massive unrestricted AI build out or mud hutts. We options spanning a range of carrying on like it 2016...damn the torpedoes restart EOL reactors and generating plants to feed the things.

Nuclear power plants (particularly 3rd gen and older) represent an enormous socialization of risk. Their really isn't any getting around that. Historically a rising tide has also lifted *most* ships. Even if it is not immediately clear and their are short term employment impacts etc, AI driven productivity probably will make most American's better off and a small subset with a lot if direct financial interested in things like restarting aging nuclear reactors more fabulously wealthy than they already are. So the question is does this "Promote the General Welfare" in net or not in terms of should regulators really go along with it.

The problem with Nuclear power is that it looks really good in the abstract sense but where it encounters reality it does not suit society so well.

Someone on here a few days ago pointed out that with something like 400 power stations and large industrial reactors there have only been three serious containment incidents.

I would say that isnt actually that good a track record given the cost of such calamity. Which really is unbound as far we know because it remains unclear what dealing with Chernobyl may still require as there is still fissile activity producing enough heat it could destabilze the surroundings, and all kinds of weird fungus that might be attacking the structure of the buildings, and Fukushima while it looks like we have handle on the ongoing clean up requirements, there can still be surprises. If scale the numbers of 2017-19 Chevbolt fires to 30 years you still have a rate of about 2 tenths of percent where spontaneous ignition would occur. GM still did a a recall and that only burns down your garage...

The other problem is the size and acute nature of catastrophe when it does happen. Yes you can prove with statistics coal plants release more radiation and kill more people one way or another. That's fine but they tend do it over decades at a rate society can absorb those costs. Even when a tail pond lets go or something we are usually looking at the loss of one town not a 1000+ sq miles. That is difference between one these 100 year floods and 500 year floods right there, in terms of social cost.

The picture for modern reactors does not change as much as Bill gates wants us to think because humans. Sure maybe it can't meltdown, maybe it can't produce hydrogen and create explosive conditions that will scatter materials on their own. But that does not mean some nut job shouting "Death to America" won't crash a jetliner into it, or execute some other kind of attack potentially spreading contaminates over 100s of miles. Remember you don't need a blast its the fire and the smoke that pump stuff high into the atmosphere where it can rain down later.

I don't disagree with any of that. I see a lot of LLM and agents being thrown at problems we used to have much more tailored tools for that did at least as good a job, while consuming a tiny and by some comparisons almost immeasurably small amount of compute resources.

You're not wrong, Word 6 on a 486 with less than handful of megabytes of memory was able to perform grammar checking on word doc. Now you need 10s of gigs of primary storage, perhaps as much as 50 gigs of secondary storage between the model and the office suite. How much better a job it actually does is disputable. The experience is different, and a no-knowledge user can get started immediately. There is value there in both aspects. I don't see people who get paid access thru and employer etc to claude, gpt, etc stop using it or ignore it.

You're asking a deeper question though, how does that no-knowledge user become someone who understands the system when the system is getting bigger all the time and the short term incentives to learn anything about it get smaller smaller. I don't know. There is a lot of scifi on the subject, dated from before 2020, so thinking without being colored by recent economic interests, probably worth reading.

I love when the jackals start fighting each other..

Exactly, my top use of AI is probably, this prompt:

Please review the document below for typographical and grammatical errors and make the required edits. Do not suggest edits that simply alter style or tone. You may make clarity changes, such as splitting a compound sentence into two separate thoughts or exchanging a pronoun for the proper noun it references. Replacing a less specific nouns such as 'thing' and 'it', with a more concrete noun being referenced; as long as it will not read as overly verbose is appropriate. Finally suggest verb replacements where there is a more appropriate term of art, as and example it would be reasonable to rewrite "Next run the code." with "Next execute the code." Make all your changes with tracking enabled so I can review and accept any proposed edits.

I don't think that makes the document any less your own than having a human copy editor conduct a similar review which has been done since forever.

Which is nonsense. There is nothing new under the sun. People have been kicking off interactions to complex to fully imagine all possible outcomes for as long as we have had laws, and the law has had approaches to assigning responsibility anyway.

Say you are back country camping in a national park. You absolutely can be held responsible if your campfire gets out of control and you start a forest fire, and you are found to have acted 'carelessly'. Even if you had a back country permit, and even if the park rules allow campfires.

We are not in uncharted territory here as how to apply standards like negligence. We may very well have gaps in our current law where various hacking and electronic abuse laws don't cover a negligent mens rea, but that could be easily fixed. It just takes little amendment to change a 'knowingly' to 'negligently' and its fixed. What we lack is a public will to hold these people accountable for anything. This is I think why they are so desperate to go public even while their actual financials SUCK...They want to cerement themselves as TBTF entities.

Sometimes the worst port of incident response is the responders not knowing when to just STFU.

Honestly what a statement to make. Nobody breaks into a system exfils and bunch of records without authorization without some intention to miss use the information. I guess there is a edge case where it is 'just a stunt' or part of some pentest/proof of concept exercise, in the latter case though it isn't an incident and is authorized just not thru ordinary procedure.

All saying you have no indication the information has been miss used is really saying is - it is absolutely being used against us (collectively) or our personnel individually AND we don't have the intelligence capability to identify how or whom specifically..

This is worth a mod up ^

5k is a heck of a lot of headcount for what Mongo seems to have in terms of scope of product offerings and support services.

At minimum people have a duty of self care. Why are they expecting others to do that job for them!

I am not even arguing we should not help in hard cases, from both a policy and an ethical standpoint. However suggesting the in-action someone makes us responsible for those outcomes is insane.

Every type of law enforcement ever, has killed an innocent or two; especially in situations where people are protesting the law and large numbers of people are propagandized into obstructing law enforcement. ICE has a pretty damn good record here actually all things considered.

If you want to assign responsibility for these deaths, maybe take a hard look at the policy, organizations, media, legal system, prior executives who created a situation where we had massive numbers of people in unresolved extra legal status and allowed that problem to continue compounding for three decades. That is not party thing, either plenty of inaction under Bush etc to point at. Here is the dirty little secret about the who immigration conversation. Self interested liars who have a lot of media influence keep claiming Trump is the on violating the law here, when in fact he is the first person in the last 30 years to actually try to do what the IIRIRA actually requires the federal government to do. The Constitution requires the president to " âoetake care that the laws be faithfully executed", literally Clinton, Bush, and Obama, should constitutionally speaking have faced impeachment and conviction over IIRIRA!

No it hasn't killed a single person, not one. The conditions the locals have allowed to persist in places where USAID formerly was providing whatever...it was providing is what killed those people. Inaction in the form of lack of prevention where it requires concentrated effort and importantly you are not the proximate cause whatever the calamity might be in the first place is not equivalent to acting (killing).

Where was the EU? Where was the CCP? Where was the ANC? Where was OPEC or for that matter Walmart Corporation :-P How come none of them stepped in to fill the gap. What absolves them of culpability?

Personal shoppers etc are a thing; but what is different here is the scale.

If Amazon's experience is so bad, that is what that is maybe the market will move to walmart.com; not really the point.

The point is that letting the AI Boys become an intermediary between every enterprise and most people will NOT be a good thing. I am not saying Amazon isnt a bad actor or isnt hypocritical here on a broader context. I am saying that shop keeps of all stripes should be at least free to post a "No Robots Allowed Sign" and have it respected.

Because I don't think we will much care for the outcomes when we have a world where Coca Cola and slip Meta half a a couple hundred million to make sure the next model generally chooses their products when someone asks the AI to ensure the fridge has colas in it. The consequences for the market where there are six or so middle men everywhere won't remain 'free' long.

At least the retail arm of Amazon is um a wait for it a retailing operation. The individual candy bars, and $2 for 20z chilled sodas are up by the checkout line where you are standing around waiting at the grocery for a reason.

At any large retailer (an some small ones) quite a lot of thought goes into what is on the end caps and what gets less prime real-estate. I actually don't think it is unreasonable Amazon should seek to control the shopping experience to a degree even if to the point of using so called 'dark patterns' to drive some impulse purchases or steer customers toward higher margin items in the category.

That is consumer selling and has been since probably some ancient farmer bartering with his neighbor suggested he'd take fewer animal skins if the other guy agreed to accept some of the squash that had already gone a bit soft over the fresher merchandise.

Does big tech, take that probably way to far - I think the answer is likely yes, but how far that is and how they should be restrained is really a different conversation.

The separate question is should Amazon have to let Meta (or anyone else) step in and completely separate Amazon's own customers from interacting with the store front Amazon wants to present to them? I think the answer to that really should be no.

The reason it should be no is not to protect Amazon but because as much influence as they have in the retail space (maybe to much) think how much influence a handful of frontier model AI providers might get in terms of determining product selection etc if shopping via AI bot becomes the nominal consumer expectation.

One man's "gate-keeping" was everyone else's curating. The old model printing and distribution was a very real cost, usually two large to be borne by an author and certainly by a new author. The primary sales channels also had a premium on space, you can only put some many books on shelves low enough for customers to browse, their are only so many end aisles privilege products with placement showing more than their spine, and the story with magazine racks wasn't much different.

So the publishes provided enormous value to retail by both ensuring quality control, and filtering for what the public wanted to buy or was worth convicing the public they wanted to by thru various literary reviews, direct advertising, etc.

Digital has removed the *need* (and many of the retailers with that).

The question is was and remains how much value was the curating, QA to the consumer. We were reading/listening to better content because of the filter and not wasting on time on drek, alternatively what price were we paying for the gate-keeping aspect in terms of not hearing voices and ideas that might have proven interesting. What is the cost of the fan out. When everyone was pulling from the selection on the shelf at the local Books-A-Million, Dalton, or library shelf, there was good chance of running into someone who'd read the same thing you did. Now - FAT chance if someone actually read something it was probably a substack, or some Kindle E-book by someone you never heard of.. As with water-cooler television even if what we are consuming is very good the opportunity to have any local discourse about or discourse within your own social circles whatever form they take is nil because you must first convince someone else to make the investment in it.

It certainly is having an effect on social discourse and how ideas advance and change in our society and I think very likely calcify because their is no collective train of thought. As to the topic at and AI is just going to pour gasoline on all of this, it will absolutely eat the proofing, editing, polishing value the traditional publisher can still add in the ebook era. The incentive for various retail channels to 'stock' the stuff of least providence will be huge, if an algorithm can see sell Christine Middle Schooler another book about sparkling vampires and her Dad another story about manning a first generation aircraft carrier in the Pacific, she likes those and so does he, and they can pick from ones with almost no royalty/residual attached, more profit for them. If AI can make those good enough to get them to come back for more; what need for a traditional publishing house is there, that would pay the bills anyway?

for once I am really rooting for the extinguish part of Microsoft's Embrace Extend Extinguish MO..

The language and the tech are fine but the proponents are mostly insufferable.