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Comment Re:Harm (Score 1) 109

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.

Comment Re: Lula won despite US interference (Score 1) 79

The Guardian turning on Labour for being unelectable under Jeremy Corbyn is an honesty. He was an antisemite who let antisemitsim grow and fester in the Labour party. Besides, his policies and lack of leadership made him unelectable and unappealing to the majority of voters, so Labour were better without him. If you want to make a difference, you have to be able to form a government, and the Corbyn fans never understood that. It's been very entertaining watching him try to form a new party and seeing the kind of people it's attracting as its candidates and just how unelectable it is too.

Comment Re:Good (Score 3, Insightful) 147

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.

Comment Re:Unbelievable what people will publish (Score 2) 17

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.

Comment Good (Score 2) 132

We stayed somewhere eight years ago where the host complained and that they were disappointed we didn't put the recycling in some bins somewhere or put the rubbish out (we didn't know where nor whether the locality had rules about these), that we didn't do the dishes (we left them air drying), that we left the place dirty (we tidied up, swept the kitchen floor, but we had a toddler too). There was an enormous cleaning fee for that place too. Never mind I had to clean the ashes from the choked fireplace before I could use it, despite it being one of the big selling points of the cottage. We did far more than we needed to in cleaning. Years later, that host is no longer on AirBnB and other hosts tell us we're great guests and they don't understand that one bad review. It's annoying, we can't even see that review or know what was actually written about us.

Comment Getting people to pay for their code (Score 1) 107

Anthropic says its bespoke system isn't right for general use. There will be no open source release. Nonetheless, the company contends that its own code scaling problems will become commonplace in other organizations over the next few months, so it wanted to share its approach

Why release the source code and make it freely available when you could train your AI on creating a source control system and then have people pay to build their own using your AI?

Comment Re: Excellent Move (Score 1) 202

This happens all the time for positions that don't have H1Bs. It's not unique to hiring and retaining H1Bs. Any business, institution or government agency that wants to fill a position and is required to publicly post a position has probably done this if they already have a specific candidate in mind.

Comment Re:What is left to change besides oven and microwa (Score 1) 282

True to a large part, but it also depends on which population you're referring to, and I don't tend to be very America-centric. For example, Britons made over 91 million overseas trips in 2024, of which 71 million journeys were to Europe:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplep...

That's for a population of 69 million. Of course, there are people like me who went abroad eight times that year, and plenty who don't. Except for Portugal or Iceland or Western Africa, all of those trips involved a time zone change. Of course, you said "most", which could be 51%. The point is: a large number of people do regularly travel across time zones.

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