I'm disappointed that no one is shooting them. That would be the American way!

"Do you blame the 19-year old airman working the military ID desk"

If you're working for an organization that's engaging in immoral, unjustified and/or illegal activities, and you're not already on your way out the door, then you're part of the problem.

Regardless of whether the organization is governmental or solely commercial. Or both.

Actually, it's exactly the same issue. Just using a different program.

The pdf redaction folks drew black bars over extant text and hid it that way.

The excel chap clicked on "hide this tab".

So both of them used what they assumed was a method to hide the data. It turned out to be nothing of the kind, of course, but in both of these situations they made exactly the same mistake using exactly the same set of expectations and ended up with the same results.

And how many times have "redacted" pdf files been found to have simple black bars draw over text that still exists in the pdf file.

Google refuses all of that. Basically all of the tech companies do.

No way Google would do that. The potential liability for making mistakes would be enough to make them run screaming all by itself, even assuming there's no risk if the information is accurate -- which is at least not clear and probably not true for many of the things you listed.

Google is leery of even having such information, and definitely isn't going to be giving it out to anyone who doesn't show up with a subpoena or a warrant.

Slippery slope fallacy. Given that this is strictly opt-in, for children only, under parental control, there's absolutely no reason to think that any of the rest of that is soon to follow.

They already have a planned rotation. There will be two crews, rotating every four hours. This isn't unlike existing long-haul flights, except that instead of the crews rotating at the same time, they will be on two-hour offsets. One pilot will stay for the first four hours, the other for the first two hours. A replacement will swap in at two hours and stay through the sixth hour, and then the other will swap at four hours and stay through the eighth hour, and so on. Qantas said that this will apply to all flights of 20 hours or more.

I find it interesting that their intention is clearly based on concerns about IP ownership, unrelated to quality. They're not banning "AI slop", they're banning code with unclear ownership. They clearly want to avoid a situation where they take a code contribution which the AI model owner might claim to own, or which owners of the AI's training material might claim to own. If those claims were upheld, it would mean the contributor didn't own the copyright and therefore couldn't license it under the relevant open source license.

I think this will ultimately prove to be needless caution. I think courts will end up deciding that AI-generated code is no different than code generated by any other sort of code generation tool, and that the copyright is held by the person using and directing the tool. But it's definitely not impossible that things will go a different way.

I disagree with your conclusion. We don't need "more", we need "better"... and a key aspect of the "better" we need is that we need more focus on identifying and addressing regulatory capture.

Anti-trust law is largely a bust. You can't point to any case in American history, for example (I'm guessing you're not American, but I reach for the history I know; if you have good counterexamples from elsewhere I'd love to hear about them), where there was an abusive monopoly and the government stepped in and fixed it. What happened in every single case is that market forces were already taking down the monopoly by the time the government took action. I don't think anti-trust law is bad, per se, I think it defines some useful boundaries and probably warns a lot of companies away from abusive behavior just by defining clearly what is abusive. But I think the effect is ultimately just to decrease the amount of abusive behavior that happens before the market takes the monopoly down, which would happen even without the laws.

The real exception, the case where you get long-running, entrenched monopolies that the market doesn't eventually undermine, is when government regulation creates or maintains the monopoly. And the more regulation you have, the easier it is for industry to get that regulation tweaked in its favor. We need regular and intense scrutiny of possible cases of regulatory capture, and then we need to refine the regulatory regime to prevent capture -- the best way to do that in most cases is simply not to give regulators the type of power that businesses can exploit. Note that I said "type", as in "kind", not as in "degree". I'm not arguing for weak regulations, I'm arguing for regulations that primarily focus on shining a bright light on corporate operations, rather than regulations that control or restrict.

The primary role of regulation in business operations should be to ensure that companies operate with honest and full disclosure, of their financials, of their labor practices, of their product quality and characteristics, etc. Note that it's also important to ensure that the regulatory burden of information disclosure doesn't become another form of capture, preventing the entry of small players who don't have the necessary expertise to fill out all of the necessary forms.

Nationalization is its own can of worms, unrelated to regulation. It's generally a bad idea, though. In theory it seems like a good idea to eliminate the profit-taking that private enterprise necessarily engages in, but the savings that provides are basically always swamped by inefficiency created by the reduced need to be competitive.

Obviously, there are exceptions; industries with natural monopolies, where control-oriented regulation or even nationalization make sense. Most of these are near-universally government-run already, such as road networks and air traffic control. Utilities, however, aren't really natural monopolies, even though they're generally treated as such. The last-mile delivery of power, water, etc., are natural monopolies (we don't want five water companies digging up our streets to install their own pipes), but the industries as a whole aren't, and shouldn't be treated that way.

Above all, I think market regulation should focus on enhancing transparency (which is what prevents bad behavior) and removing barriers to competition. Markets are the most powerful mechanism we've found for reducing poverty and increasing wealth. Harness them, don't hobble them.

Only in certain sorts of games. Your point is that this particular case is one of those games, which makes sense to me. My point was more about the higher-level question of whether AI acts this way because it emulates humans or because this sort of behavior is inherent to cooperating/competing entities trying to maximize advantage; I lean toward the latter explanation though it's obviously hard to untangle.

The fact that these LLMs aren't smart enough to understand that such collusion and backstabbing is ultimately counterproductive doesn't affect my point. In fact, humans also don't generally understand that such collusion and backstabbing is counterproductive; the research results are subtle and non-obvious. The emergent effect we see in large-scale, long-running enterprises is that they settle into patterns of fairly forthright, honest behavior because that's what keeps the cash flowing decade after decade, but these kinds of shenanigans are common among humans who don't have that long-run institutional experience.

Increasing a country's human capital, its supply of skilled labor, is never a bad thing. It increases the country's capacity and lowers its costs. This isn't always great for people already in the profession in question (but it's not always bad for them, either).

Yeah, the wage spike will end and wages for those professions will go back to normal, maybe even dip somewhat, but supply induces demand. If the skilled labor portion of construction costs less, either in wage reductions or in availability increases, that motivates more construction -- and if we can get our collective heads out and fix the various regulatory obstacles blocking housing construction around the country, and especially in the cities, making use of that new supply of skilled labor for a housing construction boom would be great for everyone.

This is article is just someone looking to find clouds amongst the silver linings, and invent them when they're hard to find.

Alternatively, this is just the normal emergent behavior you can and should expect any time you have groups of entities competing and cooperating.

We didn't evolve to work the way we do because something made us evil, we evolved to work the way we do because it was effective. And that includes both the cooperation and the backstabbing. Being always and thoroughly evil to everyone quickly gets you excluded from everything. Being a perfectly-honest naif means you quickly get taken advantage of by someone slightly less-honest. So the most effective strategy is a well-chosen mixture of cooperation and betrayal, while trying to convince society that honesty and cooperation are the only correct values.

Heh. I still occasionally find people using Y2K as an example of "ludicrous sky-is-falling" claims that turn out to be a big nothingburger. That and the hole in the ozone layer and the dangers of acid rain.

What all of those things really are is examples demonstrating that when we decide we care about large-scale problems enough to invest in solving them, we actually can. I'm really hoping that climate change turns out to be another one that we solve before it becomes really bad (it's a little bad now, and definitely going to get somewhat worse, but not really bad), but it's not looking great.

To be precise, it turned Senate elections into a different kind of popularity contest. Previously they were a popularity contest within the state legislatures, whereas the 17A made them a popularity contest within the states. Well, in some states. 29 of the 45 states used some sort of direct election of senators by the time the 17A was proposed.

An interesting (to me) footnote to the 17A is that my state, Utah, was the only one to reject it. Six states ignored it, all in the Southeast. It was ratified in barely over a year, the seventh-quickest ratification thus far.