I'd love to buy into SpaceX the space company. Not so much into SpaceX the AI company. Their valuation is based on xAI and X for a large part, and their outlook on their total addressable market is over 9/10ths AI - a market in which they are at the moment not all that well positioned.

That sounds like an issues with the tests, not the grades.

There are several breakthroughs on the near horizon that will help.

First up is Commonwealth Fusion, based on a technology breakthrough in 2011 is planning to have net gain sometime in 2027 (delayed from "latter part of 2026"), and is so certain of the results that they are building a commercial fusion plant in Virginia... and have already purchased (IIRC) the land and are in the permitting stage. (More info.

Second up is Tesla Robotics, which is putting the transformer model into a physical robot, so that it can do physically what the LLM chatbot can do with words. For all the discussion about AI and whether it's intelligent or any good or whatnot, it's obvious that AI systems are *useful* at glueing words together. Robots will give us access to lots of cheap labor, and part of that will be robots that to cleanup work for humans. Picking up garbage on roadways, going through landfills and sorting, grabbing bits of rope and plastic from shorelines comes to mind(*).

And finally, Verdox, has figured out a way to capture CO2 from the atmosphere electrochemically. Their system works in the manner of an oxygen concentrator that you may have seen people wheeling around (except it's electrochemical and not physical). They claim their system is efficient at extracting CO2 at atmospheric pressure, which is wildly more efficient than distillation, which is our current method.

I figure in about 50 years we should be well on our way to fixing these civilizational problems. Robots powered by AI and cheap energy, running around doing all the cleanup work that humans don't want to do.

(Cue the climate alarmists who run around and screech about "it's not enough!" and "it'll be too late by then".)

(Note that Tesla has designed its own AI processor chip and is building a semiconductor fab plant that will be able to make them in bulk. Their combination of robotics and AI processing chip will be wildly valuable in the future.)

You live in a fantasy if you think hipaa protects you from data sharing.

When you agreed to medical service and signed the hipaa notice, that you didnt read, it was you agreeing to allow them to share it for business purposes, you are not allowed to opt out and get service ... then it gets mixed in with other data and sold.

You have this false fantasy that anyone cares about hipaa beyond getting you to sign the contract.

The town can simply ban that sort of surveillance. Contract can go fuck itself if the law supersedes it, yes retroactively.

This retarded idea that a company can do whatever it wants because of a weasely contract is false.

The residents control the town, not some secretly foreign run mass surveillance company these idiots keep getting bribed by.

What he (Dolgov) is saying is a belief that stems from rationalization. It *seems* like it's a proof because that's how he's phrasing it, but in the final analysis he's a biased observer expressing an opinion and bolstering it with a rationalization.

It's what we get every time we ask an expert for advice about something they don't directly know. Ask a physicist about dark energy, or a doctor about your unusual symptom, or a nutritionist about what you eat, or an economist about whether the Fed should lower rates... you'll get a reasonable sounding answer backed by rationalization.

We don't have proof that a computer can self-drive using only cameras (and not "computer can do what a brain does", which is a much wider problem set), but we have abundant statistical evidence that it can.

Tesla claims claims (mid 2026) that self driving has about 1/7 of the collisions of human driving. Fully deployed FSD would reduce driving fatalities by 90%.

While not a proof in the inductive-logic sense, it's probably good enough to become general consensus. Given the enormous amount of data they train on (10 billion miles driven?), I suspect the p-value is astronomically small.

And of note, I recently purchased a Tesla with self driving. The system requires you to be attentive while it's active, but I can say with complete honesty that full self driving is here now.

And it works. It'll go into a crowded parking lot and back itself into a parking space, it'll correctly navigate lane closures and safety cone situations, and just yesterday it correctly stopped for a road worker holding a stop sign, waited, and then proceeded when he turned the sign to "slow".

The reason I got the car is because a friend kept badgering me about... of all things... getting old. Our population is aging, and old people driving is a constant source of problems. Having a way for them to get around without being a danger to others seems like a good thing.

Oh, and coming off a day hike or a day of physical labor or something and being really tired it's nice to be able to hit the "start self driving" and have the thing take me completely home because I'm really beat and not very attentive.

Thats cute. Now put it in front of the public without the person on the other end following your demo script...

All of the sudden its shit.

My company has done this as well, and it works great for the guy who made it, who talks to it with knowledge of its capabilities and nuances... but then as soon as anyone with a slightly different choice of words comes along ... its fucked.

Brain and brain, what is brain?! By 17 years old you're expected to have seen The Empire Strikes Back and have committed "R2-D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer" to your memory.

...requires age verification on traffic coming from known VPN addresses

A state enacting such a law should be required to publish their official list of The Known VPN Addresses.

People running websites should not be required to make up that data, or have to pay to subscribe to someone else who makes it up. If the gummint wants to force something that ridiculous on us, the gummint should make the taxpayers, not the webmasters or their users, pay for it.

The good should not be an excuse to introduce a bunch of bad, even if the good still outweighs it. The bad should be rigorously minimized. I am not against such cameras, under certain conditions:
1) Strict limitations on what they can be used for. That also sets limits on data retention and on who has access to it (absolutely no 3rd parties)
2) Audits and oversight of how the system is being used, with real consequences for violations. The benefits of each use case to be evaluated from time to time, insufficient benefit or too much opportunity for abuse means the system will no longer be used for that particular use case.
3) Ironclad security to ensure none of this data ever gets out.
And 0) Those limitations on use should be tested against a more fundamental set of (ethical) rules, to ensure that the use is not expanded from "protect the children" to "auto-fine jaywalkers".

Only problem is that I wouldn't trust most governments to get any of these points right.

This would be a good time to point out that every political argument has two sides and two points of view.

I've seen the arguments for both sides of this issue, and have come to the conclusion that there is merit for both. People should really look at the specific charges being made, with examples, before coming to any conclusion.

Every time someone tries to rein in the news media, it's received by shouts of first amendment, freedom of speech, chilling effects, and so on; and yet, this leads to insane situations. Google most egregious US media failures in the last 10 years for a list of incidents, and note how many of these affected major political events such as a presidential election or national policy.

Should a journalist be able to walk into a church during service and interrupt the proceedings, and not be held accountable because he's a journalist? Should a major news outlet be able to report something without at least a cursory check to see if it's accurate? Should an interview answer be swapped with the answer from a different question?

I've come to the conclusion that knee-jerk framing is on purpose, everyone wants to get "ahead" of an issue, and if an erroneous/misleading/false statement is made they will simply say "oops... I made a mistake" and there's no repurcussions... except that the lie went out to the audience and a small percentage got outraged in the right direction, regardless of whether the statement is true or not.

A "straw-man" argument is where you put your opponent's viewpoint in the most absurd terms and then attack the absurdity. A "strong-man" argument is where you put your opponent's viewpoint in the strongest possible terms and then try to attack it.

Choose the "strong-man" argument here. Find out what the administration is complaining about, and see if you can fault their logic.

"Needs more Excel training" should not be the answer to any problem.

Had a look at the criminal complaint just to find out where the perpetrators had gone wrong.

Sending anonymous tweets and E-mails, they purchased pre-paid debit cards to send packages to their home, various harassment techniques such as ordering a pizza "pay on delivery" at 4:30 AM, and so on and so on... how on Earth did the NPD ever figure this out?

Turns out the perpetrators flew from California to Boston area (Natick) to put a GPS on the Steiners' car, which they couldn't do because it was kept in a locked garage, so they rented vehicles to surveil the Steiners, their license plates were noted and given to Natick Police Department (NPD), and the rental agency was contacted.

Once the eBay operatives were identified, they tried various misdirects and obfustication techniques, but NPD a) verified their statements, and so figured out they were lying, and b) contacted eBay directly, which had a security team respond in good faith, and the whole plan unravelled.

One, single mistake is all that stood between a long campaign of harassment and getting found out. One good local police department who took the trouble to look deeply into the problem and figure out the truth despite a torrent of misdirection and obfustication.

I wonder how many more campaigns of harassment are ongoing, led by people who know how to conduct vehicle-based surveillance, or encouraged by ineffective or lazy policing.

Would he have handed over the phone unasked and volunteered the password? Unlikely.
As far as I know, the phone behaves in a certain way when you enter the duress password. So it seems established that that is the password he provided. And at that point, it doesn’t matter if he wiped the phone earlier or not, that fact can no longer be established, and that alone would count under the (expanded interpretation of) that law.
Yes, we make assumptions. We’re not in court, we’re on the internet. Speculating on whether the state does or does not have a solid case. That is all.

If they never got into the phone, how do they know there was evidence on there?
They demanded the phone, and he caused the contents on it to be unrecoverable. At that point it does not matter whether the phone did or did not contain anything incriminating, according to the article 18 U.S.C. 2232 he was charged with.

It also sounds like at the time, he wasn't under arrest? He had asked for a lawyer and had been refused?
This was at a border checkpoint, and the rules are a little different. Customs officers can search your stuff (including your phone) without a warrant, probable cause or even suspicion.

He's not under any compulsion to give a password is he?
He is not, even at the border. Refusal can lead to refused entry, though. But once he gave the duress password, he effectively caused the phone's decryption keys to be wiped, and the aforementioned article kicks in.

The real question is whether or not wiping a phone constitutes "destruction of property" as mentioned in that article of law. By the letter, it does not. But data seems to be "property" in the spirit of this law. Similar to eating a physical letter before the cops get a chance to read it. Guess this is what is about to be tested in court.