Time to turn in your geek card. A "watt" is a unit of *power*. People pay for *energy*. Energy = power X time.

Electricity is often sold in energy units called kWh (which is 3.6 megajoules). At a retail price of 20 cents/kWh, five dollars of electric ital energy is 25 kWh.

With a power consumption rate of 1000 kW, that amount of energy is used in 90 seconds. Presumably, the 1MW peak power rate was only used briefly, just like a car with a 300hp peak power engine usually cruises around only generating a couple of dozen hp.

I'm not familiar with that game, but this story does remind me of Missile Command.

Look, you didn't get the memo. Stay on message. It's the democrat governor.

We generally don't let the general public have access to enriched uranium, high explosives, or chemical or biological agents. These are also just "technologies." Anyone sufficiently intelligent CAN gain access to hazardous materials. But we don't allow it because society has recognized that these things are too dangerous to not tightly regulate. Unauthorized possession is itself considered a crime, and this is because of the risk level.

AI agents might not reach this level, but this example serves to illustrate that your arguement--that "outlawing technology is not the answer"--requires more nuance. Many gun owners are fond of saying that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." That is also a specious argument. The gun makes it much, much easier to do it, and to do it in a way that is faster, more deadly, and more difficult to trace.

And the way these AI systems are designed is similar: whereas before, a competent hacker could go in and manually find vulnerabilities, now the process is automated and not even explicitly asked for. That's the crux of the matter: the more capability we train this technology to have, the more dangerous using it will become--just like a revolver pistol versus a chain gun.

The solution is not just technological or even legal. It's a societal one. We need to first acknowledge that agentic AI technology is intrinsically burdened with very serious risks, by understanding what it is actually and potentially capable of doing. We are at a phase of LLM development where there is a great deal of power exhibited by and granted to these tools but very little regulation due to the lack of such understanding. It might evolve to a point where computing systems have built more robust protections against abuse (whether intentional or not). It might evolve to a point where laws will be passed restricting certain uses. But to your point, the genie is already out of the bottle, and unlike, say, the relatively successful proliferation of age-verification laws and censorship of legal adult material worldwide under the pretense of "protecting children," the real reason why there hasn't been a massive concerted effort to prevent AI abuse is because the people who have the power to restrict it are the same ones who are making billions of dollars off promoting its use.

The AI companies and hardware companies and hyperscalers have trillions of dollars in circle-jerk obligations which will definitely force them into bankruptcy when the ridiculous revenue forecasts fail to come true.

You're overthinking this.

The top of the blame flowchart starts with: "If state has democrat governor: blame democrat governor; Goto end."

"Blame the environmentalists" is several layers down in the other branches of the flowchart.

How difficult is it for an operating system update to detect whether or not a service is installed, and if not, then not install it unless it is explicitly requested?

I find it strange that this simple design philosophy is ignored. When a user installs or updates software, they should be presented with a dialog box with a list of components that can be checked/unchecked for installation, with any dependencies reflected as appropriate. The whole paradigm of "automatic" and "background" updates is absolutely bizarre to me. I never want the OS to decide if or when to update itself. I never want it to decide by default to install and enable a new service without giving me the option to choose. Microsoft seems to violate this principle with alarming regularity.

The fact that OneDrive at one point its its development caused massive data loss for users who found it had exfiltrated their locally stored files means that at no point in its future development can it be trusted. The risk is too high to not check whether it has deleted the local copy, relative to the inconvenience of performing the check.

Who and what are we to believe here? LAPD audit says the 2-month error rate was 32.3%, yet Flock CEO says misreads are less than 1 in a million.

While both statistics can be correct, they are probably measuring very different things. If any given camera is reading thousands of plates a day, then an error rate of 1:10^6 is plausible. But that's not the correct metric by which to understand the consequences of false positives in the system, because most reads--correct or not--are not associated with criminal activity. And for that reason (as well as others not from the article), it's obvious that both the Flock CEO and the various law enforcement agencies are engaged in this public finger-pointing exercise to make it seem that they aren't the ones who are primarily responsible, while behind the scenes they're still cooperating with each other.

If instead we look at it from the point of view of data that is believed to be associated with criminal activity, and then using the system to locate a match, then we can see why even a very low read error rate can result in many false positives, because there are so many cars out there, each having their plates read repeatedly and under varying conditions.

As much as I am opposed to Flock for their role in the creation of a surveillance state, I place just as much blame on law enforcement. They are racist, lazy, stupid, corrupt, and too eager for violence. Tools like Flock merely enable them to be even lazier, all while getting fat on the taxpayer's dime while they parade around their militarized weaponry and vehicles. Actual honest detective work is a thing of the past. And this is not just a problem in the US, but also in other countries, with the proliferation of mass surveillance and automated systems for gathering data. Even if they weren't lazy, they lack the capability to think critically. And idiotic legal doctrines such as qualified immunity further remove any incentive to investigate properly, because they cannot be held accountable for their mistakes.

Then there's this: "A recent report from Business Insider shares a worst-case scenario." No, that was FAR from a worst-case scenario. I'll tell you what "worst-case" is. It's an overzealous, violent cop with a itching trigger finger who gets bad data and ends up killing innocent people just because a computer said they were a criminal.

Fundamentally, the problem is not really about technology. It's about a society and government's approach to policing and crime. The abuse of technology only makes the systemic deficiencies easier to see, by making them happen more frequently and indiscriminately. The very principle of mass surveillance is unjust and undemocratic; the (mis)use of the resultant data is merely the proof.

TFA: "If you want to ban profiting from the failure of clinical trials, you would start with the stock market, where the financial incentive for this type of profit is orders of magnitude larger," said Kalshi spokesman Jack Such, pointing to stock market short sellers who have profited from clinical trial failures. "While Kalshi and the stock market are the same in this regard, they do differ in one important way: the stock market doesn't give any valuable information to researchers," Such said.

This is either ignorant and/or maliciously deceptive for the simple fact that there are rules against insider trading. Investors in pharmaceutical companies are not (or at least, should not be) privy to modifying the conduct of a trial in order to secure or deny approval. There is no similar oversight for these betting markets. Sure, they might say that your wager could be disqualified if it comes out that you interfered in the outcome, but that is little comfort for the trial participants and the drug sponsors, who can't just hop into a time machine and run it back.

And that's why there are so many regulations surrounding the conduct of clinical trials. People might argue that there is corruption and untoward influence already--that FDA approvals (especially under the current administration) are not necessarily based purely on scientific and medical legitimacy. But that's a very strange argument to put forth in defense of enabling MORE interference.

While I'm at it, let's also just shut down the absurd idea that betting markets somehow facilitate better information sharing about novel treatments. The point of these trials is to gather the evidence in an unbiased, objective, scientific way. Betting on them is not going to gather you any more meaningful evidence than what the trial designers have specified in the study protocol. The idea that "the market is efficient" is not in any meaningful sense a scientific approach to deciding whether an investigational product actually works. If that were the case, the FDA would be basing approvals off stock prices.

Honestly, who do these assholes think they're fooling? The only reason why they want to do this is because the house takes their cut, win or lose.

We can debate ad nauseam about the appropriateness of Asimov's laws, their historical context, how he as a SF writer applied them in his work, whether or not he was "right," etc. But the essential problem remains: the current framework that we are using to develop these technologies are inadequate for the purpose of ensuring safety.

Now, some people would argue otherwise--that, to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs. Every technology has the potential for misuse. Nothing can ever be 100% safe. And I don't dispute this, but that is also not the point, because, again, the central question of safety has to do with designing systems that will not destroy us. We're not talking about individual adverse impacts--which, mind you, we should strive to avoid as well--but the kind of technology that has the potential for global impact. Not enough effort has been made to safeguard against this contingency.

And we also have people who would say that such worries are needlessly alarmist, and assert that current systems are nowhere near that level of capability. That may be true. But that kind of thinking is much like climate change denialism in that it is rooted in a failure to anticipate and plan. Scientists warned us about climate change over 50 years ago and nothing was done; the evidence continues to mount and there still are people who have a financial and political motive to deny it. And for similar motives, there are people who insist on moving forward incautiously, with no regard for safety or ethics or consequences, because it gives them power and money.

I'm less interested in the specifics about whether Asimov's laws are appropriate or sufficient or correctly ordered, than I am about what we actually need to do as a race to prevent disasters. Let the historical record show that have been profoundly cavalier--we literally discovered planet-destroying science (nuclear fission) and then treated it like a toy. I don't think it is unreasonable to express doubts about our ability to have learned our lesson.

The fact that you had to point this out is in itself very telling: it shows that the issue isn't simply the extent of corruption, but also the overwhelming success with mass disinformation and censorship.

I know the term is overused, but Americans really are being gaslit into believing that these brazenly criminal acts are things that previous administrations have always done, or that the current administration deserves to do it because they have secured the power to do so. And neither of these are even remotely true.

There's this insidious mass delusion facilitated by the oligarchy and mainstream media. Their fascist playbook is:

1. Commit as many crimes as possible, as quickly as possible, so that people don't have time to react or investigate. This is Steve Bannon's "muzzle velocity" strategy.

2. Control media messaging and suppress honest journalism by taking ownership of media corporations and threatening those who refuse to be silenced.

3. Delay or bury investigations through misuse of government resources and agencies. Ignore court rulings.

4. With cooperation of tech companies, set up mass surveillance to make people afraid to oppose them.

5. Instill hopelessness in the public by showing that they are still getting away with these crimes.

Astra correctly answers all 10 questions in the $2000 lightning round!

And now on to the final round. To win $32,000 cash, a brand new Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, and an all-expense paid vacation for two to Puerto Vallarta, all you have to do is answer this single question to the satisfaction of our judges:

The Riemann Hypothesis: True or False?

Tim Waltz is a criminal mastermind. He's been hacking other states' water so that he can keep all 10,000 of his lakes topped off at the expense of hard working Americans.

Changing out running code on the fly probably increases the number of corner cases by an order of magnitude.

What could possibly go wrong?

Their actions aren't really about reputation, whether their own or the company they represent. It's all about ego and control for these people. It's about demonstrating power and influence, to show that they belong to a privileged class for whom certain consequences do not apply.

When we think of it in that way, we can explain so much of the behaviors we have recently witnessed (and continue to witness). These are people who believe they can act with impunity because they have not been held accountable in any meaningful way. And for the most part, that belief has proven to be correct, which is why we repeatedly see corrupt acts go unpunished.

It isn't really about the corruption per se. That's just the cherry on top. In fact, the real purpose is to demonstrate and signal to others that they CAN and DO get away with it, with no or minimal consequences. And the reason they want to demonstrate this is because it creates a feedback loop of more corruption and identifies those who will suck up to them versus thsoe who have ethical standards. How else do you know who to trust if you yourself are not trustworthy? Who do you know to target if you are a psychopath? Signaling that you can get away with murder is the key.

And I would argue that, in this case, the punishment was far too lenient, because if you think of the crime in this context, it really says that these people DID get away with it. They got a slap on the wrist. The company paid the bulk of the damages. And so, this settlement again signals that, yes, the privileged class is above the law, because even when the law finds them culpable, the penalty is nominal for them. It's a cost of doing business.