Paper and glass boxes is the best technology for voting. It's easy to spoof, but it's also easy to detect when someone is spoofing the result.

The most essential property of a voting process is that anyone can understand how it proceeds, and with digital voting you need to rely on techno priests reviewing that everything went as intended. That's not secure, no matter how complex cryptographic algorithm you create to avoid tampering.

Because laws must reflect whatever society collectively considers ethical. The monopoly is granted for an ethical reason (at least in theory), so corporations must comply and accept that, even if they like to pretend it was created only so they can extract profit and ethics was not concerned.

If you believe that computers are fully deterministic, I have a PC I want to sell you...

Theoretical computers may be fully deterministic, but physical computational machines are made of electrical signals running on rare earth semiconductors, and with AI we have complex statistical chaotic interactions on top.

Any small unpredictable perturbation at any later may swing the whole system in a whole new direction. Hardly what we'd call deterministic (unless you believe the whole universe is deterministic, in which case the word loses all differentiation power).

So, basically the weights of an AI model are a compilation of human knowledge, i.e. an encyclopedia - or its equivalent for the XXI century. They don't contain just what human authors select and have the capacity to write, but everything that they're exposed to and that is frequent enough to leave a trace in the weights.

Any content generation of an LLM which isn't guided by a human is merely a random walk through that compressed encyclopedia of everything, following the most well-connected paths more frequently (that's why long generations often get caught in loops btw). There's no real agency in those 'agents'.

None of them. They're borrowing trillions in a triangular scheme of circular lending; the computing platform company invests trillions in the AI company which invests trillions in the energy company which invests trillions in the original computing company, increasing their overall valuation until they're all Too Big To Fail before the bubble pops.

+1 Informative, you

If a new development is going to leave large numbers of people unemployed, it would make sense for the government to seize it so that the wealth created by it can be invested in supporting those who lost their jobs because of it.

However, for some reason I suspect Anthropic's CEO may be hoping for the opposite result, having the government subsidizing the private company with whatever excuse.

It's a lot easier to remember that your asterisks will be converted.

For neurotypical people not trained in programming languages, it actually is easier to use 'symbols' for *emphasis*, because they work as augmenters of the written text (i.e. they take the same role as punctuation, parentheses, question marks and exclamation signs), instead of changing the reading processing mode into a totally different mental context (i.e. as code tags instead of natural text with markings). Markdown was a clever hack to get that natural reading experience to digital text formatting.

For the untrained eye, <i> and <b> look more like alien ships from an Invaders videogame that somehow got stuck in the middle of one paragraph, not as helpful commands to change the behaviour of the computer; you need to have a quite thorough understanding of how a computer processes digital text in order to understand those tags, which is simply not needed to use markdown.

We need to organize. All of us who are not billionaires, it's in our best interest to ensure that they don't get that much power; this time there won't be enough marquisates, counties, and baronies to fight over among ourselves for the crumbs they're willing to give us to keep us in line.

This time, socialism won't do; we're not proletarians doing work on a production line. We need to be able to create our work projects without being able to sabotage us or buy from one of these great feudal platforms.

For once we have the necessary tools and knowledge to make it viable. It is true that platforms centralize power, but we have enough free software and open computers to create an alternative that does not depend on that central power. We only lack awareness that it is necessary to achieve it, and the organization to carry it out.

While what you say is true, I think you're indeed missing the GP's point: that in this market of cheap low quality items, a significant portion of the economic activity is not lead by 'needs' but by 'wants', and those wants are easily manipulated by aggressive marketing.

If that's the case, a reduction of activity in that specific market does not mean a recession nor a reduction in quality of life, as those impulse buys were destined to have little practical use. In this case regulation could result in a more efficient distribution of resources by redirecting that 'waste money' to more useful ends. It can even be argued that such market did not provide an increase in the level of live, as the psychological manipulation to keep the impulse-buy going on has negative mental health effects of their own.

And you bet people will be waiting in line on day one to buy it...

Open source Figma competitor has just added MCP server support, allowing designers and coders to design and code user interface with support from any AI agent.

Uh no, that's civilization. Humanity is about caring for the 10 members of your tribe, who also happens to be close family members.

That's how it was for the large majority of time for the human kind; having enough people to be able to marginalize some of them only came about after the invention of agriculture, where groups settled and started to grow large and have different income levels.

Darwin awards are won by removing yourself from the gene pool. These traitors to their own species may end doing that not by killing themselves, but by wiping out the entirety of the human kind.

Yup, that's basically what the 'next step' means. "The goal is to eventually expand beyond summaries to agent-like tasks". The agent will read the summary an make actions on your behalf.

The end game is not needing to have you around at all.