And the article also includes this skeptical quote from the shop's first customer. "I want technology that helps humans flourish, not technology that bosses them around in this dystopian economic hellscape.

Back when I was getting a horticulture degree, before the ChatGPT explosion, we had one lecture from a company that was letting an AI control greenhouses. Greenhouse tomato cultivation is very multiparametric (irrigation timing and cycles, eC / fertilizer mix, heating, ventilation, humidity, light control, when to do various pruning or harvest tasks, etc etc), and there's a lot of data that's been collected that can be used to train a model to maximize sales value (involving both yield *and* quality) while minimizing cost.

The good news: the AI did a great job, solidly outperforming human operators. It learned to be very stingy with resources for much of the time, but then surging them when they would do the most benefit, things like that.

The bad news: it was an asshole boss. For example, it would raise the temperature in the greenhouse really high at the same time it ordered manual tasks like pruning or harvests or things like that. It was given no incentive to care about worker comfort.

To be fair, at least with a LLM manager, you have a vast and diverse training set, so a LLM would be far more likely to consider factors like employee well being than a simple DNN trained only on greenhouse data.

"I want to be straightforward..."

Why, hello Claude! ;)

You would think, but I've definitely heard of situations where that was not the case, where first responders from fire departments could talk to police, but not the other way around, or other similar situations, and IIRC, they blamed a misconfiguration in the encryption for those problems.

I'm guessing that the encrypted radios have a key that they use for sending, and have multiple keys that they can receive, so that you can always tell which entity's radio is sending. If that's the case, then if radio A had the key to decrypt traffic from radio B, but radio B did not have the key to decrypt traffic from radio A, you could have a situation where communication only goes one way.

But I'm entirely speculating here based on vague memory of a news story from probably at least half a decade ago, so who knows if it has any basis in reality.

Except for the tactical radio failure after they landed, where they had to relay comms to Houston and back out to sea because the rescue team couldn't hear them. That was pure comedy gold. When I heard the words "Did you press the push-to-talk button," I wept with joy.

No idea what the actual problem was — probably some encrypted communication misconfiguration, channel misconfiguration, stealth mode setting, bad PTT button, or other similar weirdness. And of course, the internal clocks would have drifted by probably several hundred microseconds over the course of the mission because of time dilation, so in the unlikely event that they're using encryption that is ridiculously timing-sensitive, that could also be an issue, but that seems unlikely.

Strong reason to use plain VHF radios if they aren't already.

Anyway, I'll be curious to hear the postmortem on that one.

Antitrust enforcement can't fix very easily.

Breakups that divide users into multiple pools will just result in immediate user consolidation.

Breakups by product will result in exactly the same amount of competition that we have now, because the various parts of Facebook don't really compete with each other meaningfully, and wouldn't compete meaningfully even if they were owned by different companies. They have mostly disjoint user bases, i.e. most people either use Insta or FB exclusively or at most auto-crosspost from one to the other, but still basically use only one. And users would just keep using the one that they use, and the only difference would be a slight reduction in communication, or people adopting a third-party posting tool that posts to both, neither of which would cause one to steal users from the other in either direction.

The *only* way to solve this is through mandating that all social networks with more than a certain number of users provide federation to other similar social networks using a public API, requiring published interoperability specs for all new features (along with a published interoperability test suite), requiring that the social networks publish a list of criteria for federation, mandating compliance with reasonableness standards that govern what those criteria can include, and mandating that the social networks enable federation for any social network that meets their published criteria, without any further discrimination.

Once you do that, the network effects cease to be important, and you have a functioning free market, where anyone can build a Facebook-like site with its own interface, where users on that new site can share things with Facebook users and vice versa, and so on.

If you want to deinstall the app, blowing up the owner's house is not he way to do it.

This was stupid, reckless, does nothing for actually improving AI safety, risks worsening that very safety, risks OpenAI letting their systems being used on more and more extreme products (because all publicity is good publicity), and in short does the exact opposite of anything that anyone could possibly have imagined going through the mind of of this dweeb.

However, it is what we've come to expect from the Nu Society that is emerging - violent extremism, senseless violence, thoughtless acts, utter stupidity.

Welcome to the "brave" new world where nobody has any brains but plenty of explosives. Any claim America might have to rationality is degraded every time something pathetic like this takes place, and the rest of the world is honestly in no better shape even if it hasn't degraded to open violence yet. I am really not happy.

Does anyone remember when the US State of Massachusetts went to switch to OpenOffice and the ODF file formats? The MS-MiBs were all over the place making sure MA senators got trips to One Microsoft Way for a bit of the 'flashy thing'. Then the MS-MiB sent out worldwide to MS-ISVs with checks and scripts in hand to flood the ISO in order to vote MS-OOMXL( MS-Office Open XML ) format as an international standard so the Massachusetts government could vote it as their open standards format for public documents.

The MS-MiB were sent out worldwide to shut down the One Laptop Per Child initiative so that poor children around the world wouldn't be forced to use a Linux based laptop which could operate for 8 hours on a charge, be charged with a hand crank and was readable in full sun besides having built-in mesh networking. The MS-MiB have been instrumental in other things too. Like when school districts across the US were getting notices of required district wide licensing audits costing many $10s of thousands of dollars or sign new license agreements with the MS-MiB folks. When a couple of districts rescinded their licenses and switched everything over to Linux and started to show other school districts how they too could do it. Did the MS-MiB get recalled back to One Microsoft Way.

Tucked neatly under the MS-Marketing department lives the MS-MiB offices and if they've been reduced over the recent years, surely France has given them reason to throw a few hundreds of millions of dollars into upgrading the offices.

LoB

It's reasonable to assume that if you erase an app on a mobile OS that the system will delete the app's data.

That ought to include any data stored in OS databases that is tagged with the app. It's not at all unreasonable to expect this. I suspect it's an oversight though Apple got weird after their standoff with the FBI over the "San Jose bomber". The GPU backdoor to read arbitrary system memory that Kaspersky found is an example.

Apple should make the change and really secure-erase the flash blocks that were being used. This can be done in the background and collected into the free block map later.

The best some people can do is trust their vendor but having a secret-source platform to trust makes it harder.

And, yes, it would not be surprising to learn Qualcomm and Samsung have similar 'features'.

I just checked my Android.

I have it set to not show sensitive info when locked.

But Signal now also has an option to show nothing, name, or name and content in a notification.

It appears to have defaulted to the least secure option.

There's that inherent tension between convenience and security and the Tyranny of the Default.

On paper, the barrier to entry is staggeringly high, which is why Facebook effectively has a monopoly on text-based social media and (via Instagram) photo-based social media, and you have to include radically different things like video sharing (short-form and long-form), private messaging, and microblogging to be able to claim that it has any competition at all.

But those things are really fundamentally different types of communication that appeal to fundamentally different audiences for fundamentally different reasons. And while they might be "competition" in that both take up your time, that's a bit like arguing that TV news competes with gym memberships. In any sane universe, they should be treated as entirely different markets. But Facebook has managed so far to convince judges and juries that they are all "social media" to avoid antitrust scrutiny, despite having killed the only viable competitor ever to exist (Google+).

The reality is that true competition in social networks — social networks fighting for the same eyes — is basically impossible unless you have government-mandated federation between social networks. What happens instead is that everyone of a particular age suddenly gets old enough to join social networks, and they join whatever is popular with young people at that point, because everyone they know is on that network. About once per generation, that social network starts being seen as "the social network for old people", and some new competition has a chance of taking the new folks. And they compete for a year or two until one becomes dominant, and then the market becomes static again.

So you get a brief moment of competition every decade or so. And that's it. The rest of the time, your choice of social network is dominated by network effects, where people choose a social network almost exclusively because everyone their age is on that network.

Can you imagine if someone said, "I'm going to create a competing telephone network that doesn't talk to the existing telephone network?" Everyone else would laugh in their faces. Yet that's exactly what social network competition is like.

So no, the barrier to entry is not and has never been low. That's why one of the wealthiest companies on the planet tried to compete head to head with Facebook and still couldn't pull it off. Anyone arguing otherwise is depending on a Frankensteinian hybrid market that treats competition as being between companies instead of between products. Facebook Reels competes with YouTube Shorts. Facebook Messenger competes with dozens of other companies. Facebook Groups competes with Discord. Facebook (as a friend-based text sharing social media platform) doesn't compete with anybody. Instagram (as a friend-based photo sharing social media platform) also doesn't compete with anybody meaningfully.

Put another way, the barrier to entry is low if you can come up with a totally different type of content to share that no other social network supports, and that takes long enough to support properly so that Facebook won't duplicate your feature and kill your momentum by week 6. Otherwise, network effects combine with monopoly market power to make the barrier to entry startlingly high. It is the "social" part that makes this true.

It can hallucinate all it wants and nobody will be able to tell the difference.

I assure you, you're paying for them. Dell doesn't give away free product. The cost of those components is included in the price you pay.

By not spending all their time grouping people into different "races" and judging them by their stereotypes of said races as invariant characteristics of not only first-generation immigrants, but all descendants therefrom, despite the latter growing up in your society, while freaking out about any change, as though every society is constantly changing, let alone one that specifically formed as a melting pot that prided itself on inviting everyone in?

Not that there haven't always been racists.

1840s-1880s: "F***ing Irish!"
1850s-1940s: "F***ing Chinese!"
1880s-1920s: "F***ing Italians! F***ing Slavs! F***ing Jews!"
1890s-1940s: "F***ing Japanese!"
1914-1920: "F***ing Germans!"
Late 1800s-Present: "F***ing Mexicans!"
1970s-Present: "F***ing Muslims!"

Who do you think will be next, while the previous groups become "normal" in the US? How many people of Italian descent do you see going around speaking Italian and living as if it were Italy in the early 1900s? In general, often even in the second generation, and esp. by third and beyond, immigrants' origins generally just becomes a historic fact rather than a daily lived thing. There may be some signature dish that you cook, or you may have a dream to some day visit the country your ancestors came from, or you (might) still be the religion of your ancestors, or whatnot. But you speak the local language, your hobbies are and interests by and large in-distribution for the country, your education was the same standardized education, etc. And over time, due to intermarriage, ancestry increasingly becomes diverse and less defining - "I'm X% Irish, Y% English, Z% Italian..." etc. Skin colour or part of the world doesn't change it. Ever met a south Asian-ancestry Brit? They're not out there talking like a call centre operator from New Delhi and eating curry every day, they're eating at Nandos and calling each other "bruv" and the like.

This is how all "peoples" form. Do you think there just happened to be 143 million people defining themselves as "Russian" living across this massive landmass? No - the Russian empire conquered a massive diverse range of people, and then assimilated them to be "Russians", through education, intermarriage, etc. At least in the US people are living there willingly and had a choice in the matter.

It's like this everywhere. Do you think there just happened to be a people called "The English"? No, there were Gaelic peoples there, then Romans, then Angles and Saxons, then vikings, and on and on. Flows of people are the nature of history, both during wartime and peacetime. I'm as white as they come, but genetic tests show a tiny bit of African ancestry - from a percentage basis, maybe back into the 1600-1700s - because hey, there were "Moors" in Europe then too. "Most" genetics in Iceland sees Y chromosomes *mainly* showing Scandinavian roots and mitochondria *mainly* showing British isles roots, but there's also, for example, a not insignificant bit of Greenlandic genetics here.

Even the most isolated places in the world see a free flow of genetics. Tristan da Cunha is considered the most remote settlement on Earth, with its 238 people. Boats only arrive once every few months, and to visit you have to get special permission from the Island Council. There were 7 surnames on the island, from the island's original male settlers. This expanded to 10 in the 1960s after some islanders intermarried during an evacuation due to the island's volcano. But genetics show the presence of an Eastern European ancestor from the early 1900s, possibly from a Russian sailing ship. Even on the most remote place on Earth, genetic flow exists - and it does not harm a damned thing, and is in fact, very much a good thing.

And culture flows even easier than genetics. Culture is constantly changing, radically. Even the things that ultraconservatives see as timeless and want to force society back to aren't nearly as timeless as they think. Think, for example, of the idea of the "housewife", a woman who stays at home and raises the kids while the husband goes out to work. That's a Victorian invention that only became the "norm" for a few decades in the post-WWII period. Traditionally (after the hunter-gatherer phase, and the agrarian phase), the standard family unit was the family business. People work from home, and everyone - husband, wife, children - all work on different aspects of the business. Maybe the husband is a fisherman and the wife a fishmongerer. Maybe it's a family of cobblers, and the husband cuts the leather pieces while his wife stitches them. Etc. But everyone worked. In comes the Industrial Revolution. Now most everyone still works, but they're working out of the house. The home becomes a refuge, separate from the workplace. An increasing (though small) percentage of the population is starting to gain a comfortable income and gain airs of nobility. The notion of "separate spheres" arises, with the workplace being "the man's sphere" and the home being "the woman's sphere", and it became an aspirational goal to have a wife at home who doesn't have to work, a status symbol of wealth. Very few people actually lived like this - most people still needed to work. It wasn't until the post-WWII boom that this actually became any sort of "norm" in society, where it was the status for most adult women and those who had to work were looked down on for it. And it was a status that most women found they hated, which is what led to the later liberation movement.

Genetics shift. Culture shifts. And people are not their ancestors. Societies are fluid things, where genes flow and a marketplace of ideas works not based on ancestry, but what people enjoy. Focus on actually competing in the marketplace of ideas. If what you define as your "culture" is so great, convince people that it is. "Being a racist bigot" is, I hate to break it to you, not a good way to accomplish that. It's always the most cringeworthy inbred yokels out there drawling "The WHITE RACE is the SUPERIOR RACE!".

There is no left in America, they moved to the right.

The Dems are probably about level with Ronnie the Ray gun, possibly a fraction more to the right.

If you think the Dems moved 51% to the left, then the reality is you moved 55% to the right, and the Republicans moved even further.

Except none of that actually happened.

You're so brave!