They'll remember after the first couple of times.

Mobility scooters are much heavier. They're also less manouverable and have slightly restricted sight lines compared to your typical walking person. The 4mph reduces your chance of running over babies crawling in front of you.

I have a friend who suffered sever spinal injuries in her 20s because a mountain biker crashed into her when she was walking down a hill. The rider had lost control (they didn't mean to be going that fast) but he got away with minor grazes, and she's the one who can barely walk.

Even without electric assistance, the mass and speed of an out-of-control bicycle + rider is not to be underestimated.

It's short-sighted. How expensive are people's lives going to be when the earth is 3 degrees warmer? That's not "turn up your air-conditioners", that's "massive natural disasters every year" and "farm yields drastically decline" and "some countries become unlivable" and "fish stocks collapse" and "water wars".

If you want to forget about the ethics of making many species extinct, we can just play the economics game instead - but it still doesn't look good.

There's Nepenthes, and it's open source, though it sends back slow, Markov-chain nonsense rather than actual falsehoods.

Plot twist: the attacker already got in, and that's why they pushed for cloud-saving to be the default.

Yes, but my point is that populating the database would be a front-end generated by an LLM, not (or not primarily) end users directly chatting with an LLM.

You'd still have a form, with validation rules, but the form would have been made by CRM admin asking an LLM to generate it, subject to validation rules in the system, then signed off by HR and Legal, then deployed for people using it. The form might have a chat option where you can ask the LLM to help you fill in the form if you wanted to, though, and because the LLM has a model of the underlying data it can answer those questions accurately.

I suspect we're still a way off from all of this working smoothly though, and I'm not really sure it's possible to solve the privacy, security and data lifecycling issues reliably (though we have those problems with existing ERPs all the time too).

I think the idea is you populate your vector database with facts, and use the LLM to process queries against it. Some of those facts will be information about customers, some of those facts will be policies/laws, some of those facts will be point-in-time data. Then you can ask your CRM AI: write a custom query to gather all policies/laws that relate to customer X in situation Y. Save that query, then present it as webpage Z. Do that for everything anyone asks a CRM, and you have a bespoke CRM, which you can update with new features whenever you want.

The policies would have to be super-reliably encoded. Maybe you'd have red-team AIs that try to poke holes in the query. You'd certainly have (non-LLM) models that exist solely to analyse the graph to find what else needs adding or removing or improving. But at the end of the day the actual solution is a chain of logic that can be followed by hand if need be, not a hallucinated string of words.

Think of it as a graph database with a natural-language query front-end; you have your data repository, but it's in a complex and changeable form that can capture more of the nuance and be expanded more naturally than your average SQL DB.

No idea if this would actually work but I wouldn't dismiss it entirely.

One of the common ADHD drugs is dexamphetine (Adderall and Ritalin are examples of similar name-brand drugs). It gives you energy but helps you focus; it's widely abused by students to help them get through college. At small doses the effects aren't that different from caffeine; elevated heart rate, alertness. High doses? Well, we all know the stereotypes around meth-heads.

Numbed? Nah. Antidepressants and antipsychotics will do that, sure, but many of the ADHD drugs are pretty much the opposite.

Speaking as someone without a horse in the race (an Australian).

The Chinese government is totalitarian and ruthless in its political control, and well-practiced at suppressing dissent and information. But, if you don't act against the insterests of the government, they are remarkably effective at Getting Stuff Done, and remarkably rational about their non-ideological policies. As a rule, they don't make decisions without reason, or without research. The party is full of engineers, not lawyers. The "spirit of the law" is often more important than the letter of the law, and yes that is abused, but "getting off on a technicality" is rare. They have their share of "above the law" people; but they have to be both poltically connected and rich, and losing either is very perilous. Party deals are routine and an accepted part of society, and the party has absolute control, but individual corruption is relatively rare and harshly punished.

Perhaps their greatest weakness is a cultural leaning of "it doesn't matter if it's morally right - if you can get away with it, it's okay". I wish they were more cooperative with the rest of the world (though I gotta say 'Western society' is pretty uncooperative with them), and I wish they weren't so harsh on Uyghurs and Tibetans and Taiwan. I wish they were better at trustworthiness and professionalism, and I wish they they did more than the bare minimum of every business deal. I wish they weren't so patriotic, and I'm alarmed that they're getting more hawkish. I do think their research tends to be unimaginative and "it's okay as long as you don't get caught" undercuts a lot of their research efforts with cheating and fakery. Because they're so xenophobic and unwilling to worth with foreigners that limits the quality of exceptional researchers that they can attract, too, though they have such a large internal population that they can get away with it a bit.

The American government has been semi-dysfunctional for a long time; they are so paralysed with partisanship that they Don't Get Stuff Done; funding shutdowns are a very easy example of that. The government is stacked with lawyers and businessmen and career politicians; there are only 35 congresspeople with a background in STEM. Bribing (lobbying) is a billion-dollar industry, and many laws are written by corporations and not even read by the legislature passing it. And all of that is before Trump.

In the age of Trump, the rule of law is effectively out of the window. Open bribes to Trump's family are common and effective, things like Trumpcoin are transparently obvious ways of funnelling money. Congress has effectively no purpose at all. Innocent civilians and institutions are routinely intimated or harassed without legal cause or recompense. I hope the justice system catches up with the pace of MAGA's antics but I honestly doubt that it will. And they still Don't Get Stuff Done (really they have no interest in doing so). Public infrastructure continues to be woefully out of date, crime and corruption is on the rise, taxation is routinely dodged, social supports are farmed out to religious groups.

The US's technological prowess, such as it is, is largely due to a huge head-start, strong international ties with Europe, dominance over international trade, and a large internal population to draw on. They've been able to attract excellent foreign talent (no more), they have some of the best universities in the world (that now have to beg Trump to continue their research, eg: Columbia and Harvard ), and plenty of capital (until Trump collapses the bond market). Your pride in the USA's excellence is understandable... but Trump has undermined so very much of that in the last six months, and I strongly suspect your excellence won't last.

Time will tell, I suppose.

Occam's razor only says "likely".

So you turn to the Sagan standard, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", which is effectively a more nuanced version of Occam's Razor. Wegener made a pretty extraodinary claim, and sure he proved to be (approximately) correct, but the extraordinary evidence was just not available yet (or at least not well-communicated), so his American contemporaries were correct to be dubious at the time.

This is the scenario predicted by Slaughterbots.

It was dystopian science fiction then, but not all that far out there, and I think we're slowly watching it come true now.

If we're lucky it'll prove impractical to have that level of AI on a drone that small, but I doubt we'll be that lucky. Otherwise? I don't really see how we can stop it.

He said inject disinfectant, not drink bleach, at 0:46 in the video. Bleach is the most commonly-known surface disinfectant (name another off the top of your head? No brand names. Alcohol's the only other one that springs to mind for me), and "drink bleach" is a common enough suicide/poisoning method that "inject" morphed into "drink".

Semantically speaking, a disinfectant is anything that removes an infections; and antibiotics or antivirals do that. But I very much doubt that he had that in mind - he was saying "a disinfectant kills it in a minute", which is clearly referring to a surface treatment like bleach, and if you injected that you'd kill yourself just as much as you kill the virus.

If you skipped your asylum hearing, you're an illegal immigrant, but no one who entered since 2022-2023 has been able to skip their hearing yet. If you entered the country with a bogus asylum claim but your hearing hasn't happened yet, you're a legal immigrant (innocent until proven guilty).

If I were emperor of the world, I think I'd have very strict amnesty periods - if someone isn't processed for a crime or anything else within, say, 1 year, then they're automatically considered free/innocent. Then all the tough-on-crime/tough-on-borders people (they're usually the same people) can pay for sufficiently-efficient processing or take a hike. It's inhumane to leave anyone in limbo for multiple years.

I'm Australian, and we have a similar problem with detention centres for refugee processing - people get stuck in what is essentially a prison for years while their application is being processed, which is simply unjust. They haven't been convicted of any crime (innocent until proven guilty). And even if they get a temporary protection visa and can lead a "normal" life, they're living with the shadow of possibly being kicked out as soon as their status is processed.

And yet the Australian governments (of both parties) have kept funding detention centres and kept not funding immigration processing. They use detention centres as a way of discouraging migrants; unjust punishment as deterrence. They've been found guilty of violations of human rights; many of the ones on this page are examples of that. It's a national disgrace.

...and the US is worse by any measure.

I think madbrain's referring to the terminal pun - endshittification, not enshittification (which is Cory Doctorow, 2022).

This resonates with me - I had something of an epiphany a few weeks ago actually, and you've just expressed the bulk of it quite concisely.

I've always been pretty bright: quick thoughts, complex reasoning and broad general knowledge. But the truth is that anyone who is employed in something specific - software engineering, teaching, management or even parenting - has spent 40 hours a week doing just that, for years, and has developed a situational intelligence that can't be replicated without that broad experience, no matter how wise or clever I may be in other ways. Even if they're "not smart", they've made (and learned from) countless small decisions, navigated countless unforeseen obstacles, and developed a "feel" for what they do that's hard to articulate but often profound. It's not that what I think about the topic is wrong or useless, but it is, as you say, constrained by my experience.

It's a very common human tendency to value what we ourselves know best. Once you realise that nearly everyone you meet has knowledge, instinct or experience that outstrips your own in some area or another, it's actually quite freeing. Instead of feeling the pressure to be the "smart guy" in every room, you can lean into your personal strengths (your experience, as well as the generalised intelligence) while also respecting and leveraging the deep, specialized knowledge of others. It creates opportunities for true collaboration and learning, where different domains and forms of intelligence complement each other.

And of course all of the above is "really obvious, duh!" as my 15-year-old self probably said to my dad. But I think I really grok it now (in the Heinlein sense).

That epiphany was pretty recent, and I'm still trying to learn from it and act on it, but I honestly think it'll help me be a better person, in both emotional affect and in functional productivity. I'm sorry that it took me nearly 40 years to get here.