Well, first of all, hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and carbon makes up something like 0.5% of the total observed mass of the universe (it's the fourth most common element), so along with other trace elements like sodium, phosphorus and the like, we're simply looking for places where there is sufficient energy to create the necessary reactions to produce organic compounds. No lack of energetic sources, in particular stellar system formation. Indeed many comets and asteroids host a lot of precursors, indicating that some fairly sophisticated organic chemistry was going on early in the solar system's development.

Panspermia would require that life itself was raining down on the terrestrial planets. Precursors would simply indicate there were a lot of strange and complex organic compounds falling on to the surfaces of planets like Earth, Mars and Venus, and were also likely constituents of bodies like Europa and Titan (well, we know Titan is covered in a literal hydrocarbon stew). What this discovery indicates, at the very least, is there was indeed a lot of organic compound in the early solar system and these organic compounds, at least on Earth, led to abiogenesis. Panspermia would advocate abiogenesis happened at some undetermined point further back.

If we find other life in the solar system, such as in Europa's or Ganymede's oceans, and it has DNA or some very close relative, with similar translation and transcription systems as we find in archaea and bacteria on Earth, then that would be a very strong argument that life in the solar system had a common origin. If however, there is no clear relationship between the two populations; say, they use something similar to DNA, but the genetic codes are different (all extant life on Earth uses the same canonical genetic code mapping codons to amino acids, strongly suggested the canonical code evolved prior to the Last Universal Common Ancestor), then we're very likely looking at an example of convergent evolution, and not in fact at two related populations.

It's remarkable how far behind the US has fallen on renewable tech. There was some movement with solar a decade ago, but now China and Europe are years ahead for solar and wind and battery storage.

Tobacco companies would argue that tobacco products existed before cigarettes and people got lung cancer back then too. Criminal liability doesn't work that way. It's based on the accused not taking reasonable steps to prevent something foreseeable happening.

OpenAI know how ChatGPT is used. They know that young people are talking to it. They know that it sometimes gives very, very bad advice, or is too keen to agree rather than to tell someone they are wrong when they talk about suicidal thoughts or crimes they are contemplating committing. They didn't do enough to stop it.

It's more like cases where cars had deadly faults that the manufacturer knew about and failed to take seriously enough to do anything about.

Taking an encyclopedia as an example, they typically do not give enough detail on certain topics to be criminally negligent. They might describe an explosive, but not how to make it. They might talk about suicide, but not details of methods or how to make them more effective.

Doing so could be criminally negligent if someone used that knowledge to hurt someone or themselves. It is foreseeable that such information is not something that should be given out freely in a book that is likely to be in people's homes, around children.

Same principle as leaving a loaded gun lying around.

A way for Elon to dilute his losses from Twitter and other missteps into all those people who buy into the upcoming SpaceX IPO.

If your plan isn't to get in early and dump the stock as close as possible to the almost inevitable price spike those all who didn't a chance to pre-buy in cheap and are now taking part in the FOMO buying / cash-out frenzy that follows the shares hitting the stock exchanges, then you *really* need to be paying attention to where all Elon's debts and loss-making business units are. (Hint - he's been steadily moving them all into SpaceX).

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are quire safe then.

Maybe they could turn it on optimizing performance and fixing compatibility issues next.

They seem to want AI in the browser, so here's an idea for free. Have an AI agent that launches when you click a "site is broken" button, and it figures out why it is broken and fixes it in the browser. Bonus points if it can handle privacy enhancing add-ons breaking sites too.

Ok, to clarify a few things:

Current designs I've put up:

1. A modernised version of the DeHavilland DH98 and Merlin engine, where I basically fed ChatGPT and Claude with all of the known historic faults and some potential solutions to various problems, then let them run wild, feeding off each other to fix, refine, and clarify the various design. The premise here is that we're using known designs with known properties, changing only materials but doing so carefully so as to ensure that the balance is unchanged from the historic design. The aircraft is probably the least interesting part, as it would be very hard to make that safe, but a fully modernised Merlin that starts where Rolls Royce left off is something that could be built with minimal risk and could be quite interesting in its own right.

2. A High Dynamic Range microphone. This basically riffs off assorted physics technologies for measurement and the basic idea in many HDR schemes that you can split an input into the fine detail (essentially an equivalent of a mantissa) and a magnitude (essentially an exponent), producing a design that aught to permit (if it works) the same microphone with no adjustments handling everything from a nearby whisper to the roar of a jet engine -- but with all of the fine detail still captured from that engine.

3. An electric guitar that operates not by magnetic pickups but by accurate mapping of string behaviour in two dimensions via lasers, where this is then turned into an accurate representation of the sound in an external device. So it's not a synth guitar in the classic sense, it's actually modelling the waveform for each string in two dimensions precisely. The reason for doing 2D modelling is that this has the potential for novel behaviours but without an obligation for it to do so.

4. A synthesiser/wave processor that looks at everything that they knew how to do, and allows you to link it together arbitrarily. It is designed in two forms. The first is engineered to match the components, materials, and knowledge available in 1964, so it is something they could have built if sufficiently insane. The second is a modernised extrapolation of that, using modern digital electronics, where I can show that the modern version is a strict superset of any existing DAW, simply because I started with none of the assumptions and metaphors around which DAWs were subsequently designed.

5. Multiband camera. An attempt to build a digital camera that is far smaller and more compact than a 3CCD camera, but (like the 3CCD design) produces a far better picture than a conventional digital camera, where I don't stop at three frequencies but support many, albeit with the limitation that the time required for a photograph is abysmal.

Each design I've put up has a detailed hardware specification (including wiring where appropriate), validation/verification documents, and testing procedures. Software is defined by means of formal software contracts and occasionally Z-like forms. The designs are extremely detailed, although not quite at the level you could build them right there and then. However, the synthesiser is described right down to the level of individual transistors, diodes, and connectors, and the Merlin engine specifies precise materials, expected temperature ranges, material interactions (and how they're mitigated), and other such information.

Again, it's precise but not quite at the point where an engineer would feed comfortable feeding the specifications into an AI, having it order the bits online, and be sure of building something that works, but it's intended to be close enough that (provided the AIs actually did what they were supposed to) that an engineer would feel very comfortable taking the design and polishing it to working level.

If, however, an engineer looking at these designs comes to the conclusion that the AIs were utterly deluded, then obviously they can't handle something as simple as selecting candidate items from ranged data.

I post the AI-derived designs to my gitlab page:

https://gitlab.com/wanderingne...

I really should add this to my journal.

That's why when Israel bombs an apartment building, everyone in it is automatically enrolled in Hamas/Hezbollah first.

Tim Cook had a brilliant career, but he had to embarras himself by sucking up to the orange utan.

Enjoy your retirement TIm Apple, you nauseating man.

This is perhaps the biggest transfer of wealth in American history. Most of those companies will just pocket the refund and no pass any of it on to the consumer. If prices go down at all, they won't be back to pre-tariff levels.

You paid the tariffs, but you ain't getting the refund.