Are they machines? Are they capable of deliberate movement? Do they have any decision-making of their own?

From TFA:

The externally generated [emphasis mine] magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil.

So, why are they referred to as robots? If I mulch my bushes — is each chip a "robot" fighting the weeds around the plant? When a brick wall is sanded, is each grain of sand a "robot"?

I gave you the link with all the data citations if you'd like to check the margin of error.

Translation: you don't know the margin of error either.

eclipsing the Dust Bowl's July 1936 by an eighth of a degree

What is the margin of error? Asking for a friend...

If only that was cheaper than hiring a human to do it..

I purchased a used Radeon Instinct MI50 with 32Gb VRAM on eBay for $360 — in December. it is quite usable with llama.cpp under FreeBSD inside an older (DDR3) workstation. I use it to filter incoming email (with a plugin to SpamAssassin).

That same model is now being sold for over $500. On the one hand, this is the first time in my life a witnessing a piece of computer hardware costing more seven month later.

But on the other limb, it is still cheaper than simply providing a Western developer with coffee for a few months — much less than actually hiring him...

The incident raises questions [emphasis mine] about supply chains, audits, and cybersecurity in the British armed forces

Raises questions? No, boys and girls — who slept through the journalist lecturer's implorations against cliches — it does not raise questions. It provides clear and obvious answers...

We should all be both terrified and ready to open our wallets

Why? If they're pausing work, that means they're not chasing profits. Without new profits, who's going to open their wallets? That does not compute.

Duh! The humans are just introducing them to see if the AIs are still paying attention!

Later in the interview he says "It's less than one in a million alerts that an officer says, 'I'm not sure if that's right.' Less than one in a million."

Also: one million alerts correctly classified for every single failure? Let's say it takes the officer 10 seconds to register an alert and assign it to a local policeman for investigation. 10 million seconds at 8 hours per day uninterrupted is 348 working days: a little under a year and a half. That's 348 days of accepting the computer's choice no matter what. Must be monotonous.

Nobody should pay for a browser. The fact that you and others are mildly considering it is already proof that evil corporations have influenced the millennial generations' Zeitgeist so much.

Mozilla didn't develop the original code for their browser. It was donated to the world, free of charge, by Netscape (who took the ideas from a university). So the code that Mozilla has been working on (and rewriting several times) was licensed to them freely, and there is a continuous chain of ownership going back decades, no matter the rewrites. The code is yours to take and modify as per the license terms.

I'm quite happy if Mozilla folds. They shouldn't charge for access to the browser, and the world doesn't need their corporate structure directing anything.

Yes, AI. And no, I didn't say that we (the industry) have a pretty good idea how it works. I implied` that we have a pretty good idea that it works in a very different way than what the general public imagines.

The general public imagines that it works like human intelligence: you train a system, you have a set of rules and safeguards, and you trust that the person will use common sense to do the right thing. If they don't, there will be unacceptable consequences for the person, which keeps most people on the right path.

The actual way it works is more like this: you draw some points on a piece of paper, and you draw a curve through the point cloud. Then you read off where the curve goes. It's all geometrical thinking, not human-like thinking.

A mistake was still made

Yep, it happens. And it was not even a mistake by Flock, apparently — not that it matters. Mistakes will continue to be made — they don't mean, Flock is doing anything wrong, or that police has to be "defunded", or Capitalism overthrown. But Slashdot is running multiple anti-Flock articles every day, it seems — like they did against Walmart some 15-20 years ago.

Can't shake off the feeling, this is a part of a propaganda campaign...

The argument against it was in the summary.

The argument, that participants can influence the outcome — if financially motivated by the betting — is but a tertiary afterthought. That may have some merits, but it is not new — regular financial markets have learned to deal with insider trading, and we have criminal laws against such activity. It is not a reason to ban the betting outright.

But the original journalist, the submitter, and BeauHD obviously emphasise the "ghastly" aspect... And this appeal to emotion is, what I find contemptible.

I'm 99% sure somebody has already been killed because of Flock

But you don't have evidence, do you? Just like those January 6th "insurrectionists". Only they don't get any "Insightful" moderation for some reason...

Flock does not pull any triggers — it only informs police, that a suspect (or, more likely, the suspect license plate) has been spotted in a certain location. That's all. The actual reaction is than up to the officers.

If anything, it is only more certain, multiple murders — and other crimes — have been prevented by the timely(ier) detention of the criminals. And, additionally, by successful prosecution of them thanks to the video-evidence. But Grok could not find any comprehensive stats for me, so I'm not including any evidence either.

Fuck Trump Musk AOC Sanders far right n' left tech bros ICE Islamophobes antisemites mullahs pedopriests nationalists

Some libido you've got there!!

I've been buying business grade ThinkPads for 30 years. How is Framework better?

still fine ?

Fine? No, I'd be devastated by the death. But why would somebody else's making money — not "out of it", but by predicting it — affect me at all? They didn't kill the child. They didn't contribute to his dying.

Yeah, going home from a funeral — of anyone close to you — and watching people carelessly enjoying their lives unaware of your tragedy is annoying. But you don't get mad at them. Or, maybe, you do — because you're a fool controlled by emotions, rather than rational thought.