Interesting discussion but I'm not sure the conclusion is sound. Judging difficulty on a sample size down around one or two isn't great. I could just as easy put out that zero is the number that indicates it's hard. Knowing life arose once suggests it's not "hard". Given the time-spans involved here, it could be very, very unlikely in any meaningful sense but the sheer amount of time allowed it to eventually happen, twice even... while leaving it statistically unlikely.

As for the Fermi's Paradox, I think the Occam's answer is Adam's Observation: "space is big. Really, really big..."

For any civilization to both want to and actually do something so incredibly massive that it's observable with our limited perception and rigor is... fantastic. There could be plenty of civilizations within two hundred years of maturity of ours very close and we'd never know unless we were really lucky.

Touche. Well-done.

Because there are four categories of people here:
1} Non-indoctrinated non-investors... are freaking the fuck out right now but are powerless.
2} Indoctrinated non-investors... don't have money so don't care what Trump does to the stock market.
3} Non-indoctrinated investors... are quietly more interested in any money-making opportunity than principles.
4} Indoctrinated investors... have been encouraging all of this.

Category 1 is way, way outnumbered.

Remember when the very hint of being shady like this would disqualify someone from a office nearly as high as President? This is why I was upset when Trump started lying in his first term. He normalized deceit then and he's been normalizing corruption now.

This is Pandora's box; there's no real reason for anyone in the future to not follow this precedent because America statistically condoned it. Frankly without an armed revolt making it clear that misbehaving won't be tolerated, it obviously will be.

I'm skeptical of this conclusion.

When we were primarily a farming civilization, the physical distances between kids and the nearest kids they weren't related to wasn't orders of magnitude different from what it is today. Indeed, considering how many people live in cities - offsetting the weirdos who live dramatically far away from any neighbors - things are much better for kids today.

Also, there's a difference between social media and contact. There's nothing preventing Australian kids from texting, calling, or even video calling each other. They don't need Facebook specifically. Stuff like TikTok isn't about person-to-person contact. It's about attention-adhesion.

You're not wrong. But the same data that describes what is and isn't human input can be used to create activity that matches that data. If Cloudflare has gathered the information, someone else can as well.

This mirrors the spam arms-race that started a couple decades ago.

What?

There's a whole slew of "games" that involve looking at a Google Street View image and figuring out where in the world it is. Timed competing teams try to get it as close as possible before the other team does.

Point is... if you can see what the camera sees, it's not so hard to figure out where it's at. You won't get them all, and almost none of them will be useful to you, but if you filter by geo-IP and get access to enough cameras, it's worth the time.

I'm going to go ahead and ask what - specifically - Google "admitted" in said hearing. I doubt it's "don't really work" but leave open the possibility that's what was admitted, so please provide quotes.

Really? It's my understanding that they're autonomous the vast majority of the time, remote-controlled in very rare circumstances, and driver-assist never. Passengers in these cars aren't permitted to manually drive them, so driver-assist isn't a thing. I grant that I may be misinformed, but again, I invite you to provide details for your assertion.

Frighteningly

Well, yes. The media - be it traditional or social - is rather good at that, regardless of objective statistics.

That feels like an odd thing to be frightened of. It's not Mars where there are minutes of latency. Why would the Philippines - specifically - be any more (or less) concerning than if the drivers were in a building a kilometer away from the vehicle?

That's not been a secret for ages now. In complicated situations the autonomous system can't cope with, it can call in human assistance. I've not heard that's a common or nominal mode of operation, but maybe I'm lacking in some facts. Which - unsurprisingly - you are invited to provide.

That's the obvious problem? I'd've thought there are plenty, but fine. We've all know there are a lot of refinements and adjustments needed, both for the car operators and the rest of us outside of them.

Sure.

Okay, I'm no fan of these things and wouldn't volunteer to ride in one but really, this is exaggeration. The actual safety records have shown they're marginally better than human drivers. Sure, there are outliers, exceptions and downright frustrating things like what this article is about but as far as I've had any information, they're just that... outliers. Human drivers are the ones I really worry about, personally.

Yes.

"Meta has previously tried to discourage tampering with the LED light. For example, starting with its second generation glasses, blocking the light with tape or other objects will trigger a prompt asking users to uncover the recording light."

Yup.

"You're not burning through tokens fast enough to make any of this profitable for us so we're sending someone to show you how to waste resources faster."

Remember folks... every time you ask ChatGPT what Ford's web site is or ask Claude to paste in a buggle version of someone's broken code for you to debug, or ask Grok for pictures of some naked totally-adults, you're driving the price of RAM and storage up.

I hear you. I've addressed this in my reply to the AC above. In this case no wooshing required.

I don't normally reply to ACs but this one is worth it.

Yes. Sarcasm indicates opposition to the statements being made. However that means the person I replied to doesn't believe climate change etc are harmful. Which they are.

When you tell a teenager to do something - for instance putting on their seat belt - they often reply sarcastically with things like "yeah, because we're totally going to get in an accident and I'm going to get flung out the window. As if." They don't believe what they are saying. They believe the opposite of what they are saying.

So hey, yeah, when someone posts things that are fundamentally accurate, or at least accurate enough to be considered and adds a sarcasm flag they are fair game for correction.

So thank you for the attempted correction but I'm afraid you're off base considering the ways sarcasm is used.

In the event that you don't know/understand the answer already, I'll try to illustrate it.

Imagine life-expectancy is say... 80 years and there are exactly 3 causes of death named A, B, and C with evenly-distributed probability.

Imagine we eliminate CoD A entirely. That changes odds of dying of CoD B or C from 33% to 50%.

Imagine also that by eliminating CoD A it adds an average of 5 years of life before death, putting L-E at 85 years.

Imagine we start injecting people with a lightly toxic substance (metaphor for microplastics etc), which damages the body but doesn't kill. Say that knocks 3 years off the average lifespan, dropping L-E to 82 years.

All of the things you're reading about can be true at the same time because words mean things. Bad things are bad, and the take-home is that the bad things are what is keeping things from being better than they are. As another illustration, getting a raise is a good thing, someone making a shitty decision that drives up inflation is a bad thing, and it's possible for you to have marginally more buying power after the two but the shitty decision still sucks.

I sense great sarcasm but...

"...Ford is using the rehired gray beard engineers to train younger staff — and, to reprogram its AI tools."

These re-hires are going to train new engineers and the software that will replace them. Ford is very much going to be using more AI, as you say.

If it doesn't matter what we know or believe, why not chose to believe what you know, regardless of the elites you invoke here?

Once again... you are in control of you. You've been called out on spreading misinformation and FUD. You've admitted it. Now man up and stop it. Continuing to spout the nonsense is random. Contributing to the shittiness of the world... why?

Me? I'm in the real world, with real people, and I do my best to not make their lives worse with meaningless lies. Psycho? I think not.

That said, I think this has run its course. Feel free to pop in the last word but I'm pretty comfortable letting my position stand.

As long as you've got anecdotes, statistics and facts don't matter. Got it.

You're cable of being a rational person. Just elect to do so. This isn't subtle and subconscious. It's not like going to the grocery store and they say "limit 12" for an item that's on sale so you mentally start at 12 and count down to how many you might want versus starting at 0 and counting up to how many you want. You've seen the stats. They're readily available. You know the facts. So whenever you feel the urge to say - or type - anything that isn't in line with the facts... don't. "Oh... it's so hard... my personal observations tell me the world isn't round but I know it is... so maybe I should just not post flat-Earther stuff."