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Comment Re:No protection for them. (Score 0) 133

The claim that safety in utility and food industries was entirely absent until modern federal regulations were imposed is historically inaccurate and ignores the powerful roles of market self-regulation, private liability, and consumer trust. While early technological transitions certainly carried risks, industries did not operate in a vacuum of indifference; private incentives and local standards drove safety innovations long before federal agencies existed. Gas companies voluntarily added odorants to prevent costly resource loss and explosions, insurance conglomerates founded independent testing bodies like the Underwriters Laboratories to mandate insulated wiring as a condition for coverage, and food producers relied on brand reputation and local municipal codes to avoid ruinous civil liability and business failure. Ultimately, safety has always been a prerequisite for commercial viability and customer retention, proving that progress and protection are driven by market demand and legal accountability, not government mandates.

Comment Re: How specifically could AI kill all humans? (Score 0) 133

There were a bunch of people from other countries and also Epstein hung out with various liberal and progressives who were not members of the US Democratic party. So yes, it was along entirely Democrats but not all.
Republicans voted to release the unredacted records, and leadership actively pushed to release everything to the public rather than following the Democrats push for cherry-picked releases. So, if pushing for a full release instead of releasing items out of context is "carrying water," then yes, Republicans were "carrying water."

Comment Re:insanity (Score 1) 133

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Comment insanity (Score 4, Interesting) 133

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

Comment No protection for them. (Score 5, Interesting) 133

Every time humanity invents a tool that fundamentally changes how we live, a wave of panic follows. When writing was invented Socrates warned it would ruin our memories. When the printing press arrived, critics claimed that an overload of books would make people foolish and immoral. steam trains were feared, with experts claiming that traveling at the high speed of 30 miles per hour would cause the human body to disintegrate or drive passengers insane. In every case, these technologies did not destroy us; they simply became normal parts of daily life. Todays fears about AI are being heavily pushed by the tech companies themselves, but for a very different reason. By keeping everyone focused on sci-fi scenarios about killer robots ending the world, these corporations divert attention from immediate & real-world lawsuits. They are actively lobbying governments for protection against copyright theft claims and suing for immunity when their systems cause real world harm. Calling for strict safety regulations allows them to create a "regulatory moat", making it too expensive and legally risky for smaller competitors or open-source projects to survive, while keeping the big players legally protected.

Comment Re:Ok, but⦠(Score 5, Insightful) 162

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

Comment agencies (Score 1) 172

agencies can't be trusted to oversee themselves.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

Comment oh drat (Score 2) 96

And here I was, thinking foldable phones would allow us to go back to smaller sizes. Guess I'll be sticking with my SE, which at least comfortably fits into my pocket.

Someone please bash some sense into Apple.

I'm sure there are people who want a mini-tablet in their trousers. I'm also sure I'm not the only one who simply wants a phone. That you don't have to think about every time you move or sit.

Comment Re: slop on TV? you don't say... (Score 1) 70

Mine too. I was starting to run out of storage and I _finally_ took the time to set up Thunderbird. This made it easier to delete all the accumulated spam.

Funny. Spam is all I use my gmail account for. It's the e-mail I use to sign up to places I don't expect to visit often or that make me sign up for no discernible reason (well, obviously the reason is that they want to send me spam). My entire gmail inbox is spam, newsletters and the occasional "here is your activation link" mail.

It's really useful as a spam-sink.

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