Which is, of course, nonsense. Nothing stops you from making a copy of encrypted data. What sucks is that for a backup, you likely can't do incremental.

The Culex quinquefasciatus (from Google's EPA request) is not native to N. America, it likely originated in Africa and came across due to human activity.

There are over 200 species of mosquito in N. America (worldwide about 3500). Taking one out will have negligible effect on the food chain.

Bats, specifically, will eat mosquitos but prefer larger insects. Mosquitos are small relative to the effort the bat takes to catch therm.

The specific mosquito mentioned is available in lots of places around the world (not native - see first point above), so we could repopulate if we notice a problem.

Google is breeding these mosquitos, so we have breeding populations and we could repopulate if needed.

It's the primary vector for West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis virus, Avian malaria, and Wuchereria bancrofti (a parasitic worm).

I've been following the progress of these sorts of activities for many years. With proper care and monitoring, it's possible we could fix a lot of invasive species problem such as Cane Toads in Australia, Mongooses (mongeese?) in Hawaii, and Aedes aegypti. A. aegypti strongly prefers to bite humans and is carrier to disease, and is also not native to N. America.

The US used to have screw worms. The screw worm would lay eggs in an open wound on mammals (usually domestic animals such as livestock, but sometimes humans) and the larvae would develop under the skin by eating healthy tissue.

The US government began a program of releasing irradiated screw worm males, which are sterile, into the environment to compete with healthy males. This reduced the population, eventually down to zero, and now the US is largely screw worm free. This only took about 10 years.

Good riddance.

Now do ticks.

The full explanation is Sterile Insect Technique.

That site is blocking VPN clients (sus) but here's another one you can pick up at CVS:

https://www.cvs.com/shop/ijoy-...

Imagine how much jet fuel was wasted on being stupid.

This is an example of "sometimes you can be too careful".

In your case it might simply be that there was not enough of this kind of tasks in the training data.

Exactly, we would have had cataclysmic earthquakes if the summary were correct.

The poles have shifted dramatically in recent decades and the field has weakened substantially leading to bright auroras in Florida and Hawaii at low KP numbers.

Models have the North Pole arriving at the Bay of Bengal sooner than anybody would expect. Christmas will be awkward until we change our vocabulary..

I agree in general, but not with this strong phrasing. I've let AI build a good amount of non-trivial code. But my consistent experience is that it works best when guided by an experienced coder who can correct it, and when implementing well-known algorithms rather than coming up with novel solutions.

Example: I let it write up a quadtree implementation in a language for which there was no ready solution online. It took 2-3 correcting prompts to get a good result. I could've done it myself but it would've likely taken a few hours to get it all right instead of the half or so hour it took with AI. The important part for me was that there's nothing unknown in how to implement a quadtree. All the AI needs to do is take the 100s of existing implementations and translate them into a different language.

True but too simplified. The Luddites had an entirely different motivation: The fact that factories now employed women and children at very low rates meant that the men lost their status in the family as bread winners and head of household. That was a major social disruption, which we don't have with AI.

I'd compare it more to teamsters or wagoners when cars became common. Your job is threatened by a different way of doing the same thing, a way to which your skills don't cleanly transition. Some choose to pick up the new tech, some want the old ways to persist.

In the end, coachmen became chauffeurs, because rich people prefer to be driven around oder driving themselves, no matter if it's a horse or an engine doing the pulling. But much fewer teamsters and wagoners became truck drivers.

The term assault rifle is a useless term and has no meaningful definition anymore.

Many people think the definition is you can bolt a scope to the barrel, or the gun is black, scary, whatever.

It is, and has been for for almost a century, illegal for an average citizen to own a weapon that is capable of firing more than one round per trigger pull. That is the true definition of assault rifle. What people talk about now is banning weapons that resemble assault weapons, but are only capable of firing one round per trigger pull.

33 out of how many people? I think you'll find the percentage is quite small.

Being pardoned for an illegal parading conviction does not make someone more inclined to commit other, non-parading related offenses.

They already do, and they do go after them. (Hello, "largest state sponsor of terrorism"?)

What if it was? Are you assuming facial recognition was the sole evidence used against her? I suspect the German authorities had her fingerprints and other compelling evidence, the Facial Recognition by the journalist merely gave them something to investigate.

Please explain, specifically, how the "poor terrorist" had her privacy "violated"?

Did the terrorist place cameras in her home, or rely on existing footage from security cameras or deploy their own cameras IN PUBLIC SPACES?

Is there some right not to be recognized in public? In Germany? By a private citizen?

Did the journalist have her arrested by journalists, taken to journalist prison, and tried in journalist court? No. The journalist said "I think she's someone you are looking for" and the police, using all the legal means at their disposal investigated, arrested, tried her and secured a conviction.

If the tip was wrong, if the police turned up no connection/evidence, what would be the problem?

Did the journalist go to police first and not publish until confirmed, or did the journalist publish first, then go to the police - the last one is bad, the first I'm OK with.

In case you're too young to remember, this is kinda how we found lots of former Nazis a (actual Nazis, not just folks that didn't vote for Harris in 2024) - survivors would "recognize" their "faces" walking around town and tell the authorities.

It was OK then, and it's OK now, even with a little help from Facial Recognition.

Does either option mitigate or magnify her earlier crimes?

The journalist gave a tip to the police, the police followed up, and secured a (presumably) evidence-based conviction.

What exactly is the problem?

If you tie the hands of law enforcement, and you take issue with private citizens employing effective tools privately, you are making it much easier for criminals to escape justice.