While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

They really humiliated all the traditional supercar brands out there.

Uh, what?

Sure, go far back enough (and yes, I was on computers at that time) but surely he's not saying, "Man, computers were better when you could only run one process at a time, and the operating system let you do literally anything" etc etc and if so, the answer to that is, you can still do that if you want .. you just can't do it *inside* somebody else's software architecture. You still own the hardware, do whatever you want.

huh? it's trivial to write any code you want and run it on your phone

But with respect to your "dawn of the PC era", unless you wrote the operating system, you couldn't write and run code that could do anything and everything your computer was capable of - only code that could do what the operating system would permit you to do.

That's no different today.

Here's a little sticker for knowing what Firefox is tho. You must be good at computers.

There have been numerous articles about it recently. You have the internet. No need to stop the class just because you're the only lazy ignoramus around here.

you're an old and bitter man, and you've only yourself to blame

and I'm old too and a loooong time c++ professional dev (and still am) and somehow the idea of change or the word 'Rust' doesn't make me shit my pants

I feel bad for you

Patents, buddy. Developers know things better than you do. Plus other reasons, but I suspect you'll just handwave them all away because you're very very smart. It's definitely not vastly better than JPEG XL.

There's no possible way you're a programmer.

Google says that patent expired in September of 2025, as it was filed in 2005. Yes, we are getting old.

Personally, I prefer the old rectangular Thinkpad charging connectors.

It's not expensive to add AM coverage to the radio itself. However, many cars, especially EVs, flagrantly exceed FCC limits on RF noise pollution, and this is far worse on AM (which picks up noise as signal) than FM (which suppresses some noise and receives less due to the higher frequency). So the cost is not in the radio but in fixing the el cheapo badly filtered car power system so that the AM radio isn't wiped out by it.

Of course after you do all that almost all that's on AM is junk, lots of Rush wannabees, though there is diverse ethnic programming in some cities.

Young whippersnapper, hold your tongue.

I grew up eating Gros Michel and remember it fondly. Cavendish is not nearly as tasty. And yes, I am over 70 -- it was the 1950s.

If you hunt around you can find a few sellers offering Gros Michel bananas as exotic specialty fruits, grown in remote (from other bananas) areas like Miami. But they're not in stores. And a blight is coming for Cavendish, so they'd better have new varieties lined up.

Its reply to me:

"Yes, in large part."