Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

The costs of nuclear are addressed all the time.

The problem is the nuke fanbois either ignore the costs or hand-wave them away: "Nuclear is only expensive because of protests and regulations. Next time will be different. Blah, blah, blah."

Even without considering the costs of waste and accidents, nuclear costs four times as much as wind or solar and has a 20-year lead time.

Tens of thousands of barrels of toxic waste were dumped near Catalina Island, but the vast majority are non-radioactive chemical waste.

DDT leaking from the barrels is a much bigger problem than nuclear waste and shows up in the local sea lion population.

Anyway, there's nothing realistic that we can do about it since any attempt to retrieve the barrels will likely make things worse.

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

And here I was, thinking foldable phones would allow us to go back to smaller sizes. Guess I'll be sticking with my SE, which at least comfortably fits into my pocket.

Someone please bash some sense into Apple.

I'm sure there are people who want a mini-tablet in their trousers. I'm also sure I'm not the only one who simply wants a phone. That you don't have to think about every time you move or sit.

Funny. Spam is all I use my gmail account for. It's the e-mail I use to sign up to places I don't expect to visit often or that make me sign up for no discernible reason (well, obviously the reason is that they want to send me spam). My entire gmail inbox is spam, newsletters and the occasional "here is your activation link" mail.

It's really useful as a spam-sink.

Nebula is actually the one streaming service I ever subscribed to for a while, mostly because I like documentaries and for all I've heard their business model is more in favour of the actual creators.

Dude, what is your problem?

I mention not owning a TV because it's topical - it means I didn't not notice the quality going down slowly over time, so I might notice the difference more than those who did.

Nowhere did I imply that not owning a TV makes me better in any way. It's a personal choice, that's all.

Why you jump on that so aggressively - maybe ask yourself why that is.

I haven't owned a TV in decades. My new gf has a Netflix subscription. I only now realized how much utter TRASH there is out there. So, for all I care: AI slop fits right in.

Signs that the bubble is about to burst. They are now claiming AGI despite being fundamentally away from it. An LLM can not ever achieve AGI. It may reasonably well PRETEND to be AGI, but at the core it's just a highly successfull letter-prediction machine. Or as a metaphor: It is "intelligence" in the sense that a toddler carefully placing one foot in front of the other while trying hard to not fall over is "running". Nope, isn't and never will be. You need a qualitative change to get there.

If they now CLAIM that they've achieved AGI, it's a sign we're nearing the end of LLM development and they're getting desperate selling the latest incremental updates. Which means the illusion is about to come crashing down.

Which is good news. Fewer data centers and lower memory prices will benefit us all.

Is your only connection a metered phone? Usage on the level of several TB per month on the lowest tier wired connection doesn't make an ISP angry, at least in the civilized world.

I am actually thinking about my next BMW (my current one is getting old). Knowing this, the iX3 is off the list.

BMW had a great control system, intuitive, possible to do many things without even looking. "Young people prefer" ? Really? The young people that actually buy your cars? Well, they'll learn and not prefer touchscreens anymore on the 2nd car.

Global AI tech spending is said to surpass 2.5 trillion this year.

Sorry, Gates is a small fish in that pond.

The two articles were probably written by two different ghost-writers.