I think the distinction they are making is between technology that kills people, and technology that entertains people. If someone fitted actual weapons to a Doom engine, they'd probably object.

Not a joke. I'm aware of that feature, and that's why I said it. No idea about false positives.

No, it does not. Maybe you're thinking of Pixel Watch?

Let me know when all this heart rate monitoring can do loss-of-pulse detection and call emergency services if I have a heart attack. That's worth paying for. Having slightly more frequent heart rate monitoring? Don't care. Not even a little.

Let's make the hopeful assumption that the superintelligent AIs will not "go rogue" in any way, but will correctly try to carry out their tasks as assigned by the people who designed and trained them.

Pretty much every major nation has military AIs, at this point. So the Chinese AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Americans, and the American AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Russians, and so on. In the final analysis, no matter where you live, there is probably an AI that has been explicitly tasked by its operators with figuring out the most effective ways to do you in. Not because they've "gone wrong", but because they're working as intended.

The size of the universe is increasing...
but the rate at which it is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate is decreasing is increasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate of the rate is decreasing in increasing...
[... and so on, ad infinitum...]

People commonly overestimate the possibility of "all humans dying", and simultaneously underestimate the possibility of "billions of humans dying".

People are like cockroaches that way; a disaster could wipe out 99% of us, and there would still be millions of us left to repopulate afterwards. To truly wipe out all humans would take something more severe than the asteroid that did for the dinosaurs.

Whoever set up its reward function, really. Could be any of the above. The technology doesn't care, it only follows its algorithm.

Their latest Flash model goes live tomorrow. Price for cached tokens halved, other prices lowered. Since it outperforms their latest Pro model they will reroute pro requests to it until the pro version launches. It does seem to be a frontier model in every way except price.

I'm not. $2K is an eye-watering amount to spend on a cell phone, even in 2026, and especially on a design that seems almost guaranteed to start wearing a vertical line into the display at the folding-point over time. I expect a number of Slashdot articles about unhappy Duo users demanding redress over that issue, even if everything else works as advertised.

Maybe in a better economy, people would splurge on something like this, but I don't think that's the zeitgest this season.

n/t

Here's the flaw in your logic. The vast majority of their customers WANT to turn this s**t off. But they put up with it up to a point or they don't. Either way, it doesn't matter as long as there are enough people who are engagement junkies who eat it up and therefore drive up ad impressions. They could lose 90% of their users, and if the other 10% increase their usage 10x, they're still ahead...

... but while the company may be ahead in that situation, society is still harmed by the other 90% not having access to a usable service. And of course, not all of those 90% will jump ship. Many will suffer silently while being harassed relentlessly by garbage posts by creators that they think you'll "enjoy".

I wholeheartedly agree that while algorithmic feeds are fine, there MUST be an opt out, and it cannot be like Facebook's "Most Recent" sort that disappears on its own every week or so. No matter how many times you tell them what they want, they shovel whatever s**t they want. It has reached the point where I almost never go on there anymore, because instead of being able to interact with the contents from my friends and groups that I follow, I'm constantly getting bombarded with mostly garbage posts and ads, with less than a 1:10 signal-to-noise ratio.

Please force them to do this, and to all the other governments of the world, please do likewise.

Had he done those things, you would have heard me complain.

I simply don't remember being hassled to show anyone my vaxination card.

Patents. And AI can't be the inventor for patents, so by doing this, they're potentially dropping a huge land mine on patentability of genetics research. It's kind of awesome, at least from an "our genes are not for sale" perspective. :-D

No doubt America has the resources to wreak havoc if it wanted to do so. OTOH, at this point, nobody in America (outside of Trump and Stephen Miller) wants to do so. A sufficiently popular and persuasive demagogue might change that, but Trump's debacle in Iran has demonstrated that he is not that person. I don't think JD Vance has what it takes to go "full Hitler" either, although I suppose he could (unpleasantly) surprise me.