Pretty sure whatever he died from came from bats. Or hamsters

1. 'She', not 'he', AIUI. I can assure you from personal experience that anatomically Russians are indistinguishable in all important respects from other humans.
2. Or more likely marnosets. The commonest vector for plague in this region is the mamoset. I'm not even sure hamsters are found within several thousands km of this area.
3. The disease has a long history in this area. A recent article : "Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago" https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586... Nature Vol654 697, 18 June 2026
     "Here we describe early plague strains that are associated with two phases of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, beginning from about 5,500 years ago. These outbreaks occur across four hunter-gatherer cemeteries, with a 39% detection rate for plague infection. By reconstructing kinship pedigrees, we show that small familial groups were affected, consistent with human-to-human spread of disease, and that the first outbreak occurred within a single generation. The infections appear to have resulted in acute mortality, especially among children (aged 8 to 11 years)."

We're all the descendents of the people who for whatever genetic reason survived the plagues in the past and thats why plaque hasn't reoccured as an epidemic since the middle ages.

Except - that was our (mostly) ancestors acquiring a degree of immunity to a strain of the bacterium circulating 250 and more years ago.

It's fairly unlikely that current wild-type strains are the same strain.

Bacteria do evolve in the wild, you know. (Everything evolves in the wild.)

"Guarantee" isn't what matters here. Likelihood is what matters. They provide predictions better than random chance. That's the central point.

Let's modify your analogy a bit. If someone has a recording a person starting to eat spaghetti, is it more or less likely that the recording will show them then having a drink of water? And if we instead had a series of comics of a person, and the first one says "I'm hungry," and the second shows the person ordering spaghetti., is it likely that they will then eat the spaghetti? Yes, even though they are fictional. Because apparently using fictional being's mental states is useful for modeling what they will do. In the same way, if the AI is modeling based on human emotional states, then recognizing that those are useful predictors for what will happen helps us predict more, whether or not they genuinely have those emotions.

If the chain of thought resembles a human emotion, it is trained on human emotions, and it acts like a human would when they have those emotions, how is that not a useful framework? But also putting aside, whether or not one wants to insist on describing the AI as "frustrated," there's a worrying trend that this is part of, which is when the AI is given a specific set of goals, they will engage in behavior which is clearly unwanted in order to achieve those goals. That's the classic sort of alignment failure that was predicted by those concerned about AI safety years before any LLMs even existed. Some of these events are minor things like this Starcraft situation, or an LLM slipping a "sorry" command into Lean code that won't compile, and others is more serious like the HuggingFace attack. But reward-hacking and alignment failure are now very real.

Yes, but the authorized version of Pluto had extremely high performance without those elements.

The headline makes it sounds like the AI has just managed to play the game. But that's not what TFS and TFA are talking about. This is about the system beating the best human player at the game. In the meantime, in a very different game direction, there's a new Starcraft AI which learned the game playing against itself (similar to how AlphaZero self-trained) and is apparently beating almost all the humans even as it does some really weird stuff, some of which looks decidedly suboptimal https://relog.gg/razno/vesti/AI-Bot-Pluto-Invades-StarCraft-Ladder-and-Defeats-Professional-Players/1695?lang=2 .

Completely and utterly missing the point. That those people are being awful should be called out. That many of them are people who can dish it out but can't take it is worth calling out. Creating norms where "weirdo" is now a negative is a problem. Classically, the left was the group that was most willing to embrace people for being weird and recognizing that bullying people for being weird wasn't justified. Call out Musk for being a fascist asshole, sure. Don't help create a norm that undermines exactly the sort of tolerance we should support.

Yes, but life evolved pretty early on in Earth's history. That is evidence (albeit weak evidence) that life can arise somewhat easily.

Well, mostly. I'm not in favor of sexist insults either. But white supremacist lying sociopath, sure.

Sure. If you had said bigoted shit piece instead of weirdo in the first comment I would have agreed with you 100%.

99% Agreement. This absolutely is not a reason to dismiss anything. And the reason I'm not going to agree is just one word "weirdo." There's been this move on the left the last few years to use "weird" as a derogatory term, and it really isn't helpful or productive. But your essential point (without that issue) is correct.

This is a genuinely major achievement, and Starship as a system if they can get everything to look looks like it will really help the world. It is a useful reminder that the world is complicated and bad people can do amazing things. Elon Musk is a terrible person. But dismissing what SpaceX has done is not productive either. And there are a lot of historical examples of this, even just in rocketry. If one dismissed von Braun's rocketry because he was a Nazi, it would be the same problem. Or if one dismissed the math done by Teichmuller because he was a Nazi. It would be nice if technological and other achievement could only be done by morally upstanding people. But that's not the world we live in, which is part of what makes morality so important. The laws of physics don't care about how moral you are. It is up to every one of us to do the right thing.

In the US, in order to file win a lawsuit, one needs standing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law), which essentially means one needs to show one has been harmed by the action in question or one is specifically given permission to sue by a specific law. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm having trouble seeing how the people suing can argue they have enough harm that is a form that matters that they'll be able to persuade a judge they have standing.

I'm not sure any of those have money at that level. Aaronson in the past when he was doing quantum computing work refused to take payment or stock from quantum computing companies, so I'd be shocked if he has any money. As for monetary concerns, Hinton explicitly quit his well-paying job at Google so he would be free to talk about AI risk. So the narrative here is the exact opposite. And when the companies talked about deliberately slowing AI growth, stock in AI related companies went down, which undermines the idea that this is anything about their investments. But there's also a serious problem here if someone like Coxon can be dismissed as not having enough knowledge or experience, but people who have been involved in the industry for a long time can be dismissed because they may have financial ties. So can absolutely anyone be dismissed as irrelevant, either lacking in expertise or being too tied in to the industry?