While true, Idi Amin, e.g., was not white.

OK. That puts them in the same basket as Flock.

What does it matter whether or not they're white? I've seen examples from Asia and Africa that were worse.

I'd put him as one of the top 3 or 4, or at least one of the top 10, because of the power of his position, not because he's intrinsically the worst.

Well, if all cars do the same thing, you have a good point. I haven't looked in the last decade, but the last time I did there were lots of alternatives. I admit many posts over the months have been saying that this isn't true any longer...or that this is why they only drive (some model) used car.

But it's still not as bad as Flock (et al.), which doesn't even ask for permission.

But I believe that Lexis is only selling the data of those that have agreed to have their data sold, even if they didn't realize it.

It may not stop tracking, but it lets you do the search for something without losing your place.

Claiming that "Most psychology experiments are not replicated" is both true and irrelevant. Most psychology experiments are done to satisfy arbitrary rules. When I took a psych class, I had to sign up for, I think, one experiment per week. None of them were either replicated or significant.

There *are* psychology experiments that are replicated. Some survive replication, some don't. The ones that aren't replicated aren't important...and there are lots of experiments in other sciences that aren't replicated unless there's a good reason. Many are so expensive that replication is done only if it appears to be needed. (The experiment was done and it agrees with theory. OK.)

Actually those two stances are NOT incompatible. I'm not sure they're both true, but they might well be.

Finding a code exploit is a task with an easily validated result. That's where AI is best.
Writing code that doesn't have exploits doesn't have a easy check. So AI is not as good there.

You could use a harness to check for exploits after you wrote the code, but that increases both time and cost, and isn't guaranteed to find all the exploits. (People and AIs think differently, and don't recognize all the same patterns.)

This will probably change. AIs have "jagged competence", but the areas that they are weak have been getting stronger. For now, however (and as I understand it) there are still many areas where humans are more competent than publicly available AIs.

It's quite plausible that sometime next year Yang's reported claims will be appropriate. OTOH, that would imply massive other changes, also. And it's also possible that the claims will still be exaggerated.

I was referring specifically to an AI agent interface, but that does drop my estimate of how long until it appears. Now I'd say it may appear within months.

Unfortunately I've found that no single search engine does a particularly good job anymore. I end up searching in Duck Duck Go, Google, and even Bing of all things because they all do a crap job of returning good results now.

I suppose if altavista.digital.com was still working I'd try it too.

Things like that will appear eventually. It's too early to expect them. And eventually it will be the user that has the read-only access...and it will never be used. But eventually may be a couple of decades from now (and it may also be a couple of years from now...there's a large variance in that prediction, but I'd be really surprised if it were less than a year from now or longer than a couple of decades).

I actually think that you could craft good arguments for allowing trojans. It's the stuff in temporary resonance orbits that I was really thinking of. There are a lot of orbits that are only semi-stable, say stable for a century or two, but not for millennia.

Don't be hypnotized by the names. What is most significant (after the orbit) is the mass. And that's a pretty smooth gradation (at least on a logarithmic scale).

If you want "planet" to mean "stuff in orbit around the sun", you end up with most planets weighing micrograms...or possibly less.

N.B.: By the strict definition of "planet" used by the IAU, even Jupiter wouldn't really qualify, because it hasn't cleared it's orbit. There's a lot of small stuff and, of course, the trojans.

Yeah, but...
The guess at the size is based on the guess of the albedo. If it's covered with something dark, it a LOT larger. (I'm presuming they're guessing it's covered with methane ice.)