""At 3:42 p.m., a power line sagged into filbert trees near Hillsboro, Oregon, just southwest of Portland." This developed into a cascading failure that affected a very large region.

Horseshit: Blackout of 1996. Memory of this is acute, having flown into Los Angeles while it was happening.

Apocryphal to Mark Twain, true origin unsubstantiated. If I'm near the coast, I always have a sweater or jacket and a watch cap in the car.

And, of course: Dillon-Edwards Investments online

CAISO daily data shows that hot season demand in California peaks around 6 PM: the "duck curve". Batteries here help to cover that demand peak as solar fades.

It's extremely naive to think Anthropic wants the slowdown of AI research out of some sort of social conscience. To begin with, AI companies have shown time and again that they don't have any. This is a desperate attempt to do two things. First, to try and freeze the AI landscape while their models still have some advantage over the competitors, mainly to stop the Chinese from doing the Chinese thing of reverse-engineering Western technology and then trying to improve on it or at least selling cheaper versions. Second, and maybe more important, is to sell the idea that AI continues to significantly improve and will continue to improve at the same high rate, to the point where it eventually becomes dangerous. In reality any actual recent technological improvements have been very small and incremental and most AI improvements came either from people figuring out how to use the existing technology better or from the same technology being deployed at greater scale.

If the goal is to stop AI from doing evil stuff, then theoretically you would need more AI research into how to put better guardrails into AI. Except by now it's become extremely obvious that people will always find ways round any guardrails. Also if the supposed goal is to stop AI from hacking websites, then stopping or slowing down research would be shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted. We know quite well that most website code on the internet is chock full of vulnerabilities and does not require any sort of superhuman intelligence to hack. AI with its current capabilities is already more than enough for the task. Also, I understand that AI agents doing similar things to what's described in this story are increasingly being used as white hat hackers, in order to find vulnerabilities and fix them.

Yes, they know that in the minds of the people they're trying to sell it to, i.e. upper management all the warnings about the AI being dangerous will translate to 'it's powerful and can make us a lot of money'. At the same time it may make them sound caring and responsible to the larger populace, assuming anyone believes them, but particularly gullible people still might. Also, they can say that the progress of their AI stalled because they're trying to avoid it's dangers and totally not because they don't know how to improve it any more.

I'm not sure how much trust in the tech industry there was to begin with. After continued enshittification, numerous user data mishandling scandals, outright psychological manipulation of people in order to increase engagement, pushing ads into everything etc etc it was already pretty obvious that the main goal of a lot of tech industry is not to make better tech. Plus they've already tried to create similar hype based bubbles with cryptocurrency and NFTs (which are also technologies that have some uses in very limited number of situations but which they claimed were going to change everything). But certainly what trust still remained has been damaged.

Mostly because the online dispatch system works more reliably than trying to phone a taxi desk, especially if you are away from familiar situations, getting someone who is unintelligible, and who misunderstands the pickup and dropoff points.

Nixon, schmixon. They Saved Hitler's Brain

Yes, a Sun keyboard that suffered a soda spill during trade show setup. It worked fine afterwards.

Defense identified: It's an insecticide and a condiment

"When the exalted clanker does it, it's not a crime." -- R.M. Botnixon

Acceleration of large numbers of slugs will be required to decimate the crops of uppity Mars colonists.

"As a group, they tell good stories well. This is because Texas is what anthropologists call an oral culture. That means people here don't read and write much." -- Molly Ivins, 1982