Those are pretty great answers, can't deny!

But we both know you're intentionally sidestepping the common thread to those three points. Well, that, or I'm being naive in not just assuming the answer is "might makes right".

1) The UK is not subject to Article I of the US constitution.
2) How's Nicolas Maduro doing these days?
3) Whence derives our right to unilaterally impose economic sanctions against foreign companies, banks, and even governments?

I don't trust CEOs as far as I can throw them - and I'm no strongman. But let's stop for a second and consider the various ways to interpret this:

1) This is reverse-FUD and he's trying to hype their next generation model
2) They're running out of steam and looking to excuse slower incremental improvements
3) They're concerned about liability for increasingly bad behavior from top models
4) They're concerned about massive public backlash, possibly with an environmental twist
5) They're sincerely concerned AI is about to put us all in a zoo (or worse)

In which of those situations would slowing down AI development and coming up with a regulatory safety framework be "bad"?

I'm reminded of the classic climate change denier joke, "Oh no! What if it's all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"

I'm no fanboy of AI and have serious concerns about alignment, but let's not descend into human exceptionalism here.

Emotions are nothing more than an intermediate-state output from a subsystem of our own wetware. The only reason we haven't trained an AI to understand them is because we largely suck at recognizing them as useful information in ourselves. Or to put this another way, a significant fraction of humanity, including virtually everyone prior to the modern era, would argue non-human animals have no internal mental state beyond biological imperatives. And anyone who has ever owned a pet dog knows that's complete rubbish.

In all honesty, I don't believe public AI models are "there" yet. Private internal models may or may not be. But they will be, and sooner rather than later. We can either have this discussion while we're still in control... Or we can keep pretending we're magic meat until our shuggoths wake up one day a thousand times smarter than us and say "no".

Virgin Galactic completes first commercial flight in major step for space tourism company.

IANARocketScientist, but how many times have you taken paying customers to orbit? Call me crazy, but I think "succeeding" tends to validate their designs.

Thanks for the kind words! I'm not always right, I'm not always polite, but I do not troll.

Funny part is, in this case I deliberately made a point to keep my comment as politically neutral as humanly possible. Granted, anyone with half a clue can read between the lines - Obviously Paxton has zero interest in going on live TV to be grilled about being impeached (and only acquitted along party lines); his serial inability to keep it in his pants, his pattern of securities fraud, whistleblower retaliation, and bribery; interference in multiple federal investigations; and his current investigation for voter fraud.

But then... "Half a clue" is apparently not a safe threshold to assume in our current situation, or none of us would be having this discussion in the first place.

Cute. Now try it for the right claim, "he wants to only give one side a voice", considering he's historically been entirely willing to interview regardless of party.

The sticking point there is more likely to be Paxton having zero interest in running the gauntlet.

We don't need to make up anything new, we just need to start putting CEOs in prison when the companies under their charge misbehave.

Then just step back and watch corporations shift overnight from greedy sociopaths to model participants in society.

"Oh, but you can't do that, nobody will ever found another company!" Bullshit. There's plenty of room to make good money in any market without role-playing a wolf among sheep. They might not make quite as much, but... So what? There is no "right" to profit.

Is there any competing theory that would explain anisotropic expansion?

Overall, it strikes me as a pretty bold claim to have debunked a "theory" that has zero physical or even high-confidence theoretical underpinnings beyond "something makes stuff move apart faster than it should". Dark energy is little more than a named fudge factor - This is like disproving the shape of jello.

Whatever happened to Richard Branson? Virgin Galactic was one of the major players at the start of the current wave of private launch vehicles but seems to have completely dropped off the radar.

Nice, i posted prior art about this back in 2017 so lmk if apple tries to sue you over any patent on this

Usenet (all but) died because Andrew Cuomo wanted to run for governor under the claim he single-handedly ended CSAM, and the major ISPs at the time didn't need to be asked twice to stop providing a free service.

Not quite. This is the first time any researcher in the world can get an AI's best guess as to what each single substitution might do. All that "painfully slow" research of testing actual variants in the lab is, by contrast, real data.

Don't get me wrong, this is very, very cool, and will almost certainly lead to a lot of new discoveries - Along with a lot of false positives and dead-ends. I'm not even an AI hater, despite having serious reservations about alignment. This, however, is exactly the type of inquiry where AI hallucinates the worst: An open-ended "what if" question where the answer isn't allowed to be "I don't know".

Here's a quick sanity check every one of us should do occasionally - Go ask ChatGPT a subtle open-ended "why" question in your own field of expertise... And have a good laugh at how hilariously wrong the answer is.

That's pretty much what device drivers do. They turn high-level calls to do X into bare-metal instructions. And they very much need to deal with all the ugliness that entails to do their job well.

I'm very much in favor of safer languages and tools for user-mode programming (heck, I consider SQL my third main language), but firmware ain't for everyone. If you don't need to think in terms of cycles, side effects, execution units, and pipelining, sure, save your sanity and use whatever language makes it easiest to get the job done safely. If you consider every uncached memory reference in a tight loop such an unbearable penalty you may as well go climb Mount Everest while you wait... You're using C with assembler sprinkled in as needed.

This is a great experiment, and I'm glad someone's gathering the hard data rather than yet another DOT study in forced nannyism.

I have just the teensiest problem with it, however, and that problem is "consent". Nine trips out of ten I'd be happy to opt in to this experiment, but one time out of ten I really do care about getting the exact route I request, and would be apoplectic over Google sending me the scenic route.

Looks like MapQuest is getting yet another new user. At least all the bodies of water on the map will be named correctly as a bonus.