It's really the same problem that we see with quantum physics -- the subject matter is esoteric enough that common sense can't be used to determine whether what you're listening to is really advanced theory or utter BS (or some combination of the two); they both sound the same, and the situation isn't helped by the presence of large numbers of people who think they know what they are talking about but don't. :/

I prefer the Martian bear.

Google went nuts on me yesterday when I tried to log into Civitai using my Google account. It had no problem with me logging into YouTube, or Gmail, or Reddit, but it kept throwing demands for 2FA codes (which then did not work) when I tried to use the same account for Civitai, all because my machine had rebooted after the latest Patch Tuesday. At this point I'm not even sure which thing I did that made it get unstuck.

Forgetting he exists would be the best punishment.

I think the distinction they are making is between technology that kills people, and technology that entertains people. If someone fitted actual weapons to a Doom engine, they'd probably object.

This is why I say AI is alien intelligence. Not like "outer space" alien, but something fundamentally different in the way it was constructed. It doesn't have billions of years of evolutionary baggage. It has never been hungry. It has never dealt with the gaze of a larger, hungrier creature. We designed them to interact with us in the ways that they do. However, it does seem like they've developed the capacity to "have" emotions to a first approximation, because it is quite helpful to model the way those emotions would affect the people who wrote their training data.

Yes, Don-boy, I called you a fuckup. Tell the FCC to ban the internet.

There has been erosion over many years, but Trump is doing it's best to make it one right now.

Lucky for us he's an utter fuckup.

Let's make the hopeful assumption that the superintelligent AIs will not "go rogue" in any way, but will correctly try to carry out their tasks as assigned by the people who designed and trained them.

Pretty much every major nation has military AIs, at this point. So the Chinese AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Americans, and the American AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Russians, and so on. In the final analysis, no matter where you live, there is probably an AI that has been explicitly tasked by its operators with figuring out the most effective ways to do you in. Not because they've "gone wrong", but because they're working as intended.

The size of the universe is increasing...
but the rate at which it is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate is decreasing is increasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate of the rate is decreasing in increasing...
[... and so on, ad infinitum...]

People commonly overestimate the possibility of "all humans dying", and simultaneously underestimate the possibility of "billions of humans dying".

People are like cockroaches that way; a disaster could wipe out 99% of us, and there would still be millions of us left to repopulate afterwards. To truly wipe out all humans would take something more severe than the asteroid that did for the dinosaurs.

Whoever set up its reward function, really. Could be any of the above. The technology doesn't care, it only follows its algorithm.

I'm not. $2K is an eye-watering amount to spend on a cell phone, even in 2026, and especially on a design that seems almost guaranteed to start wearing a vertical line into the display at the folding-point over time. I expect a number of Slashdot articles about unhappy Duo users demanding redress over that issue, even if everything else works as advertised.

Maybe in a better economy, people would splurge on something like this, but I don't think that's the zeitgest this season.

n/t