Your link - seriously?

"Tobacco giants say"? Dude, they said that smoking is actually healthy for a few decades. I'd trust my cat around buckets full of her favorite treat more than those companies.

What if...

Someone (say someone who was familiar with doxygen and GCC) developed number of comment types, where some stipulated preconditions that must be true for the function to run correctly, postconditions that must be true once the function has run, kernel facilities that the function definitely needs, and kernel facilities that the function definitely doesn't need. These would all be optional for any given function.

A static checker could then validate if the code meets the behaviour expected by the programmer. This is precisely what is done in SPARK, a fork of Ada for high-reliability code. Combined with existing static checker capabilities, this would greatly increase the number of bugs that could be caught with all kinds of tools, AI included.

It could ALSO build a full fine-grained mapping for any fine-grained mandatory access controls system. You'd also want includes that you could import for precompiled libraries. This would allow someone to verify if the code was making unanticipated/undesirable calls but would also make SELinux possible to develop for at the application level.

It would not be trivial. If it was trivial, it would have been done simply because it already IS done in other languages and that makes it "obvious" to anyone who has been programming for a while. However, it should not be massively complicated, simply because you can use AI as the static checker. Once it has a definite set of bounda that must be satisfied, it should be much more capable of knowing what paths would violate those bounds. Which means that the checker stage essentially is trivial today, leaving only the markup stage.

I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.

You're the one making the claim that modern frontier models still make this mistake (they don't), so how about you go to a frontier model, reproduce what you're claiming happens, and click the "share" button and post the link here?

Don't worry, I'll wait.

Your inability to reproduce the thing that you claim happens is duly noted.

You are speaking irrelevant nonsense. LLMs are trained in words

They are not. They are trained in tokens. Tokens do not align with word boundaries, and an arbitrary word can be tokenized in many different ways.

and they think in words

They do not. They don't even think in tokens. The process is: words are split to tokens, tokens point to an embedding position (latent space) while RoPE encodes a relative position, and all reasoning is done within latent space, which is not at all verbal (concepts are directions in latent space, and math is done on concepts, not words).

Also, a note: when spec'ing a generator, you need to know how much you're planning to use it vs. batteries. If it's only going to be used rarely, you prefer low mass, low volume, low cost, and low maintenance when unused (at the cost of low efficiency and higher maintenance in use), whereas if it's going to be used a lot, you prefer high efficiency and low maintenance cost in use, even if at the cost of higher mass, volume, cost, and maintenance when unused. In the former case, you'd prefer to allocate that extra mass, volume, and money into a larger battery pack.

That's why you don't use a tiny petrol generator? Diesel generator efficiencies are roughly:

Small backup generator (1-15kW): ~20-28%
Midsize backup generator (20-200kW): ~30-35%
Large industrial generator (200-2000kW): ~35-42%

Also, ironically this company's plan of the trailer providing a boost will actually make the tractor less efficient. ICE engines use "brake specific fuel consumption" (BSFC) graphs to plot their efficiencies across different RPMs and different torques. You can see an example for a small diesel engine here. Note that they require very high torque conditions and relatively high power conditions to be efficient. You can change the balance between torque and RPM within a given power band (blue) via gearing but gearing doesn't change what power band you're in. If you're in a low power band, you're fundamentally forced into inefficiency (note also that you're not going to be driving around at 1000 RPM just over a stall all the time).

Indeed, if you were forced into a low power band, you'd actually be better off with a series hybrid powertrain, as the engine can alternate between operating in an efficient powerband and shutting down. Of course, parallel hybrids are more efficient than series (albeit with added complexity and mass).

Unfortunately, the math doesn't work that way (even ignoring that a 400kWh battery is very small). Battery packs taper the closer you get to full, they're not a constant power all the way. Unless your battery pack can take 400kW at 80%, you're not charging that quickly.

Also, while 40 mins is fine in Europe (breaks: 45 minutes every 4,5 hours of driving... though using 70% of a 400kWh pack on a loaded class 8 truck going even at a slow 80kph will only take you 2 1/2h of driving in "average" conditions, so the truck's range is fundamentally undersized), the US is 30 minutes total break in 11 hours of driving, so ~6 hours on your first leg and ~5h on your second leg with 30 minutes to fill that 5h of driving. And US speed limits are usually faster for trucks than in the EU, so higher consumption. EU really needs 600kWh and >=600kW charging, while the US needs 800-1000kWh and >MW charging.

Note that in all of this we're assuming efficient-shaped trucks (Tesla Semi or the like), not your typical EU bricks, along with a well optimized powertrain and an efficient tyre config. If not, you need to increase those packs and charge powers further.

Because the cost to society is paid not by the smokers but by all of us. And health care costs are only the tip of the iceberg.

There's no culling here. Both doom scrolling and smoking kill you so slowly that evolutionary it doesn't matter.

I'm not expecting that from domestic opponents; both because the penalties are high and because people are, historically, shockingly bad at shooting for targets that actually matter. I'm thinking more internationally.

If 'AI' is half so interesting as its proponents claim one would expect being a machine learning researcher worth offering a fat signing bonus to be about as dangerous as being an Iranian nuclear physicist or a Russian oligarch who has fallen off Putin's friends list. If Zuck thinks that you are worth $100 million it seems like someone who takes the idea that 'AI' is the next frontier in state power would consider it worth the trouble to hire some local criminal to kill you in a botched robbery or have their clandestine services attempt to throw you a little tea party. So far no reports of even foiled attempts.

Anyone who thinks that the bots are going to wipe us out is overestimating the bots; but it seems like there is a disconcertingly large supply of people who are just chomping at the bit to replace people regardless of whether the bots are up to the job or not.

Honestly, the weirdest thing about the 'hard line activists' and the 'war with AI' is how much there isn't to it.

This is an industry that puts out a 'tehehe, we're an existential threat!' press release every time they need another VC round; and whose c-levels openly discuss how they will annihilate all human jobs and maybe someone should think about what we should do about that; and who routinely trample local interests to get their infrastructure builds rammed through; and what's the 'war with AI'? One idiot who tossed a molotov and a disgruntled constituent? That's it?

The same oddity is true for 'AI' companies and nation states, also very puzzlingly. To go by the rhetoric of 'AI' being an existential struggle for the future of industry and whether the AGI omnimind will speak english or mandarin you'd think that we'd see at least a bit of skullduggery. Prominent 'AI' hires occasionally dying under mysterious circumstances; sabotage of expensive GPU farms, maybe a Rosenberg-style show trial or two. But no. There's some lightweight hacking and ToS-violating 'distillation'; and a few export shenanigans; but aside from that it's basically the same as any other SaaS nonsense but with bigger numbers. Weirdly unserious.

We have duplicated code into a new language and removed all synergy effects by sharing a code base with the rest of the community. Hurray! /s

Maybe one day we can have bi-directional LLM-based translators that allow features and bug fixes to perculate back and forth forks ...

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.