I believe you, but that might be one of the saddest things I've ever heard.

I agree that the problem with wages are policies pushed by the billionaire class, but now that they have more political power than ever before nothing is getting fixed. Things are getting much, much worse.

Immigrants have not hurt the American middle and lower classes. Our regressive tax system that gets more regressive every time Republicans seize power is a problem. A complete lack of functional antitrust law is a problem. Private medicine is a problem. Private education is a problem. Urban sprawl is a problem.

All the problems that have contributed to massive wealth disparity are supported and magnified by the current administration.

I have met plenty of rude idiots who explain their own shortcomings as misunderstood genius.

I used to think I was really smart. I was young, dumb, and arrogant. As I grew older I met more and more fantastically talented people and that put my own abilities into perspective. We are all on this world for a very short amount of time and the truth of the matter is that you can only be an expert in so many things, and your worldview will always be limited because it is constrained by your own experiences.

In grad school, the one thing I noticed about the top tier students was a basic humility. They were never embarrassed to admit if they did not know something or if they were wrong. In fact, they were excited when they were presented with something they did not know because it was an opportunity for learning. That is real intelligence and IQ tests do not test for it.

The burning desire to correct someone when they are wrong has nothing to do with intelligence. Children do that to assert dominance over one another. It is an emotional response that has nothing to do with intellect.

Most IQ research is bogus. IQ researchers routinely confuse the ability to quantify something with the ability to draw meaningful conclusions. Just because you can make a chart out of something does not mean your chart actually conveys useful information.

Disable Snap by default and fully support apt again and I might consider installing Ubuntu again. Until then they're dead to me.

While what you said is true, I'm not sure it really applies in this case. In this case the rich and powerful are being forced to bend over due to a court order.

I might have a different perspective if this were a peer to peer chat app and the logs are private conversations between people (and especially if it were a peer to peer encryption solution and the judge stupidly said, "you have to intercept that!"). But just because people pretend they're having a conversation with a chat bot doesn't make it so. It's like how boomers fill in complete sentences in the Google search box. They probably think that's private information. They're crazy if they think any Google search is private in any way, though. Many a stupid criminal has been caught because they thought they could Google their way to the perfect crime.

I am not a lawyer, but as a layman I don't see how a court order for documents is functionally any different than a warrant. That's what discovery is, no?

If you share any sensitive information with ANY entity, you should assume that at some point a judge or law enforcement officer might be able to look at that information should the entity become the target of a criminal investigation or a litigant.

That's probably the better choice regardless of this court case.

Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.

Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.

It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.

Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.

The real problem with biodiesel would be its impact on agriculture and food prices. Ethanol for fuel has driven global corn prices up, which is good for farmers but bad in places like Mexico where corn is a staple crop. Leaving aside the wildcat homebrewer types who collect restaurant waste to make biodiesel, the most suitable virgin feedstocks for biodiesel on an industrial scale are all food crops.

As for its technical shortcomings, if it even makes any economic sense at all then that's a problem for the chemists and chemical engineers. I suspect biodiesel for its potential environmental benefits wouldn't attract serious investment without some kind of mandate, which would be a really bad thing if you're making it from food crops like oil seeds or soybeans.

Email is an interesting counterexample of how terrible things can get when things are too open. Operating your own email server is prohibitively difficult not because the core technologies are hard to implement, but because bad actors have forced us to stack all these ad-hoc filters and trust systems on top of email. Setting up an smtp server is easy. Sending an email that will actually show up in an inbox is not.

Just one point: "free love" actually has a historical definition. It means that sexual activity should not be regulated by governments. That would also, technically, include the right to practice celibacy.

They will have to increase the price eventually as demand for transport overall rises. The point of the pricing is to deter driving enough that the street network operates within its capacity limits; if driving becomes more desirable than status quo ante, they aren't charging enough and will have to raise prices to keep demand manageable.

Think of it this way: either way, traffic will reach some equilibrium. The question is, what is the limiting factor? If using the road is free, then the limiting factor is traffic congestion. If you widen some congested streets, the limiting factor is *still* congestion, so eventually a new equilibrium is found which features traffic jams with even more cars.

The only way to build your way out of this limit, is to add *so* much capacity to the street network that it far outstrips any conceivable demand. This works in a number of US cities, but they're small and have an extensive grid-based street network with few natural barriers like rivers. There is simply no way to retrofit such a street architecture into a city of 8.5 million people where land costs six million dollars an acre.

So imposing use fees is really is the only way to alleviate traffic for a major city like New York or London. This raises economic fairness issues, for sure, but if you want fairness, you can have everyone suffer, or you can provide everyone with better transportation alternatives, but not necessarily the same ones. Yes, the wealthy will be subsidizing the poor, but they themselves will also get rewards well worth the price.

I think the problem is really that the iPad Pro would be better suited for something more macOS-like while the other iPads (used by kids, POS systems, kiosks, and the computer illiterate) are better suited for the existing iOS.

iPad Pro could definitely be super cool with a more computer-like OS, but that's probably their smallest chunk of sales and it would require the biggest investment.

If you look at web stats for pretty much any website that gets a lot of traffic, you'll see that tablets are almost always in the single digits (iOS and non-iOS tablets combined). But tablets are everywhere. People just rarely use tablets to browse the web or do any general computing. They are primarily used for streaming video, playing games, or running specialized apps in business settings. It's hard to justify more computer features when people rarely use tablets as general computers

Well, yes -- the lies and the exaggerations are a problem. But even if you *discount* the lies and exaggerations, they're not *all of the problem*.

I have no reason to believe this particular individual is a liar, so I'm inclined to entertain his argument as being offered in good faith. That doesn't mean I necessarily have to buy into it. I'm also allowed to have *degrees* of belief; while the gentleman has *a* point, that doesn't mean there aren't other points to make.

That's where I am on his point. I think he's absolutely right, that LLMs don't have to be a stepping stone to AGI to be useful. Nor do I doubt they *are* useful. But I don't think we fully understand the consequences of embracing them and replacing so many people with them. The dangers of thoughtless AI adoption arise in that very gap between what LLMs do and what a sound step toward AGI ought to do.

LLMs, as I understand them, generate plausible sounding responses to prompts; in fact with the enormous datasets they have been trained on, they sound plausible to a *superhuman* degree. The gap between "accurately reasoned" and "looks really plausible" is a big, serious gap. To be fair, *humans* do this too -- satisfy their bosses with plausible-sounding but not reasoned responses -- but the fact that these systems are better at bullshitting than humans isn't a good thing.

On top of this, the organizations developing these things aren't in the business of making the world a better place -- or if they are in that business, they'd rather not be. They're making a product, and to make that product attractive their models *clearly* strive to give the user an answer that he will find acceptable, which is also dangerous in a system that generates plausible but not-properly-reasoned responses. Most of them rather transparently flatter their users, which sets my teeth on edge, precisely because it is designed to manipulate my faith in responses which aren't necessarily defensible.

In the hands of people increasingly working in isolation from other humans with differing points of view, systems which don't actually reason but are superhumanly believable are extremely dangaerous in my opinion. LLMs may be the most potent agent of confirmation bias ever devised. Now I do think these dangers can be addressed and mitigated to some degree, but the question is, will they be in a race to capture a new and incalculably value market where decision-makers, both vendors and consumers, aren't necessarily focused on the welfare of humanity?