That is a very good point. duckduckgo.com (to use an example) does not summarize the search results for you, and, once you know what to look for the ads are clearly marked. To be honest, purchasing ads on duckduckgo.com is likely a sign of good taste on the part of the advertiser as well. Honestly, I hadn't even considered using a non-Google search option for a long time. That is almost certainly part of the problem. Thanks for your response.

There was nothing automatic about Google's trustworthiness. It simply counted up links that lead back to a particular page. If it had more links it was (supposedly) a better page. Almost immediately webmasters around the world started gaming the system. Google still restricts some of the things my account can do for hidden links that were added to some ads on websites that I ran in like 2001. GoDaddy and all of the other big web hosting companies of that era all rose to prominence on the strength of gaming the PageRank system.

I am sure that other industries tell the same story.

PageRank might seem trustworthy to you, but that's only because you weren't trying to game the system back in the day. I can assure you that, right from the start, people were abusing PageRank in precisely the same way that upsets you now. The only difference was that registering a domain back then cost $70 for two years, and you probably created the links you used to game the system by writing Perl. That raised the barrier to entry significantly. However, there was still real money to be made in that arena, and whether the winners paid Google directly, or paid for back links to their content (or both), I can guarantee you that the road to your trust was paved in money.

In the end Google has decided that the most reliable way to have publishers show that their information is trustworthy is to force them to pay for the privilege. Coincidentally that also happens to be the method that makes Google the most money. For years an entire SEO industry has thrived around the idea that if you pay someone enough money they can trick Google to steal your information instead of your competitors. Now we are finally at the endgame and Google doesn't even send traffic. They simply summarize the information for their customers. Chances are excellent that you don't even leave the google.com domain.

Google's competitors are simply doing the same thing at a different domain. All of them make their money by charging publishers to show up prominently in search ranks. Whether you are rooting for Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia it's Big Brother all of the way down.

Answer: No, using AI to write an op-ed has no impact on the report about dismal math skills, besides improving the organization and legibility of the report which is a positive. The most important point is that college students lack elementary school arithmetic skills, and no test is being used to replace SATs. Actually AI might be useful in both teaching remedial skills as well as in evaluating readiness for college. Maybe some effort could be put into developing free, online automated teaching assistance that does not track you, that can be used by any prospective student to see where they stand and attempt to advance. Maybe a non-judgemental, free AI tutor with multiple teaching methods available to it could teach kids fractions for example, and it could be done long before college entrance.

The real issue is that the packaging process used to create vaccines in quantity is a process where you mix a tank of mRNA with a tank of other stuff and get a tank of lipid nanoparticles. Getting different mRNA in each dose means you only get one patient's vaccine per time you start and stop the machine. There's also a step where one copy of mRNA is used to make a macroscopic quantity of copies in a bioreactor that needs to be flushed in between different sequences, but can just run when making enough of the same thing for a large population. It's likely that the cost for each different sequence will come down if it's worth designing and building equipment that switches every dose, but there's an intermediate time between proving that the treatment is useful and being able to provide it in a cost-effective way.

It's clearly all the superfans who hear that there's a new album and immediately drive into their local record store. (Rather than doing the sensible, calm thing and entering the store on foot.)

Didn't see a link to the paper. It sounds a little like saying more advanced models are safer, but that seems to be an illusion. Perhaps a more capable model, or one with more computing resources behind it, can cause more damaged if badly aligned. But a better soul document should better align a weak model. It is not clear which is contributing to the more-aligned results, is it because the models have more collaboration built into their system prompts or is it because they become smart enough to model outcomes or otherwise realize that open warfare among agents (or between agents and humans) is neither desirable nor effective in achieving the stated goal. It also seems like the Rust agent is pretty sneaky if it made a seemingly fair rule that actually benefitted itself. The javascript one that gave up is the most trustworthy, I want that one!

Whether we like it or not, whether we use Windows or not, Microsoft is going to insist on adding the tax whether the PC comes shipped with Windows or not. This is illegal bundling, Microsoft has essentially ignored prior rulings, and it's pretty much a certainty the courts will be fine with this.

From a brief examination with Google AI Overview, apparently these are not robots at all but in nanotech/materials science such powder used like swimmers are called microrobots. There is a big problem though that to make the MXene (porous high surface area sheet-like particles) magnetic you coat it with something like Nickel, which can leach toxic ions. So if you don't pick up all the bot particles you might add another poison.. That said I'm definitely all for research into microplastic removal though mostly I want it removed from my body and MXene is not going in there.

It's a good question and I've heard it before. Certainly critical thinking and defensive approaches to finance and the Internet, and basic concepts of personal security are super important. But if you have a course about computer literacy then I think you need them to learn what a filesystem is, at least the core concepts of volumes, directory trees and file permissions. Also what are the main components of a computer. It can be covered in an hour and it seems those concepts are still useful in every day life. Without even the conceptual understanding they will lose a chance at a solid foundation and instead rely on floaty, handwavy impressions that whatever they create or need to find will magically appear if they just know the right magical hashtag. I think any country that wants to be a leader in science and technology really needs to teach a little of the science and technology that affect people's lives.

"How did you get hired?"
"I was top at Fortnite. You?"
"Combat flight sims."

"Damn, two Boeings just crashed over an oil refinery on city limits and took out half the city."
"Did you remember to save your position beforehand?"
"Yeah."
"The reload and continue from there. No-one will notice."

I love computer games. I have XPlane 12 and many scenery packs. I rank well on Elite:Dangerous. From the sounds of it, the FAA would see me as over-qualified. In reality? There's no way in hell I'd be taking those kinds of risks with real lives. There's a huge difference between having good reflexes and a good eye, versus having the complex 4D spacetime relationship mental models needed for robust air traffic control.

You see, Linus has embraced transhumanism and is testing out the new kernel as a supplementary brain function, using MOSIX to offload all of the irritable comment generation at yet more nonsense on the mailing list to an Elizabot that he has written specifically to do this. This saves his actual brain for real work.

AI is not currently capable of performing any meaningful conceptual abstraction, it is only capable of very basic mechanical abstraction. Abstraction is itself multi-dimensional. Nor is there any indication that AI could ever perform multi-dimensional abstraction or multi-dimensional decomposition. Precious few humans are capable of it either, but some can.

No, AI would need humans because the best system is not a pure system but a hybrid system, and that means transhumanism with AI operating as an additional brain function rather than as a replacement for a brain.

Tool calling is, yes, but the current approach to it is (a) overt not transparent to the user, (b) not designed for the purpose I've outlined, and (c) not remotely good enough for the AI to be able to manage data through such tools.

Yes, you can connect an AI to a PostgreSQL database. Whoopee. Not even close to an AI detecting via classifiers that some of the data is relational in nature, transparently setting up its own PostgreSQL database in response, and using that proactively as an additional way to examine the data. You would need to explicitly set up the constructs, explicitly set up the databases, explicitly tell it when, where, and how to use the database, and if that particular usage conflicted with a way the AI actually worked, the AI would not be able to use it effectively. That's not remotely close to what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is much, much deeper than that. AIs lose focus when there is too much information currently in the system. Absolutely nothing stops an AI from using a document database as a virtual memory in which it can page in and out conceptual spaces so that the focus on any given step of a problem concerns just the problem. Other than such a concept not existing yet, which is kind of a limiting factor. But you need to know what connects to what. The AI could use an ontology reasoner for that, or a relational database, or an external graph. But you cannot provide those tools and you cannot configure them, for the simple reason that the AI is the only entity with any detailed map of how the underlying neural net is connecting those ideas up.

The AI itself has to select the tools, has to configure the tools, has to do all the work. Which means YOU cannot use any sort of API. YOU should have no involvement in the underlying mechanisms needed for the internal NN housekeeping.

And that's your other error. You're assuming this is about user data. No. It's about housekeeping operations within the NN itself to maximise functionality, it has nothing to do with the user side of things at all. If the user was capable of setting up dynamically structured databases that mutated with each step of a decomposed analysis, you'd have done everything the AI would be doing and you wouldn't need the AI to begin with.

You cannot do this work, you cannot even assist in this work, it has to be dynamic and it has to be utterly invisible to the operator.

We don't need bigger models, at this point. What we need is multi-dimensional decomposition, problem space transforms, and the ability for AI to use external tools (such as SQLite, memcached, etc) so that it can externalise static data that it needs to not corrupt accidentally but still keep in easy access.

If we had that, most of the things "bigger models" will do will actually end up being done better, quicker, with fewer compute resources.

To be useful in deep space, you're going to have to deal with very harsh radiation, far harder than the Vikings dealt with. You really want to have some large number of computers, where the number has to be odd and exceed 5. The reason it has to exceed 5 is that you need 5 in order to be able to use the Byzantine General's Problem to discern which computers are working correctly and which are radiation damaged. Since some will be damaged over time and you want 5 computers still operating around the time the power runs out, you have to start with more than that.

Massively radiation-hardened highly-robust low-power chips could be done. If you were clever enough, you could do this as a wafer-scale system where you marked parts as bad and networked around them. Free space optical communication across the wafer might be doable.

They might well still end up being low-density CMOS discrete logic.

Lead-lining the electronics isn't as much of a problem if you've launchers capable of handling heavy objects and don't mind burning through a lot of ion drive propellant for course corrections. This would improve the hardening beyond what can be done through the usual operations.

But, yeah, you'd need defect-free microelectronics. You really can't handle F00F bugs or defective instructions once you pass Earth orbit. And I can't think of anyone who knows how to do that.