The costs of nuclear are addressed all the time.

The problem is the nuke fanbois either ignore the costs or hand-wave them away: "Nuclear is only expensive because of protests and regulations. Next time will be different. Blah, blah, blah."

Even without considering the costs of waste and accidents, nuclear costs four times as much as wind or solar and has a 20-year lead time.

Tens of thousands of barrels of toxic waste were dumped near Catalina Island, but the vast majority are non-radioactive chemical waste.

DDT leaking from the barrels is a much bigger problem than nuclear waste and shows up in the local sea lion population.

Anyway, there's nothing realistic that we can do about it since any attempt to retrieve the barrels will likely make things worse.

Whose bright idea was it to store nuclear waste right next to an ocean coastline?

The key word is "it." There is no singular "it". Flattening the category of AI-enabled software to a singular "it" implies that there is a flat truth that applies to that entire category.

The AI-enabled software "it" that is running a store into the ground doesn't present a meaningful threat to anyone.
the AI-enabled software "it" that is being used by black-hats to find security vulnerabilities does.

AI is a tool. Think of it not unlike nuclear. Nuclear power plants aren't an existential threat, despite the harm a plant accident can cause. Nuclear weapons are.

What's clear is that trying to simplify complex topics into bite-sized "common-sense" topics doesn't work in 2026.

No, I don't think the tech-bros are being honest. But I don't think it matters anymore. Someone is going to weaponize this technology and a lot of people are going to suffer because of it. Not Skynet scenarios but rather Cyberpunk / Blade Runner scenarios. There's a real danger to the health and well-being of a large portion of the human race, for sure. The tech-bros aren't going to let that stop them from getting richer, for sure.

What we - the 99% - can or should do about that, I don't know.

You do understand that Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency that exists, right?

A few days ago there was a story about how an AI store was failing horribly. It can't do that, but at the same time will destroy us? It's pretty clear that no one has any actual answers or little interest in being honest about the exact capabilities of AI when their bottom line depends on hype or their job position relies on prognosticating doom.

You're discounting the ability of the actor to bring something to the role that the director couldn't envision themselves. The whole point of having casting auditions is so the director can find an actor that either fits their own idea of the part or blows them away with something transformative that they could not have envisioned before seeing it. Not every actor is capable of that and not every part calls for it, but when it does happen it creates something best described as the magic of cinema. If this weren't the case, the phrase "Hello, Clarice" would be completely meaningless to everyone who reads this post, and yet there are some for whom it is not merely memorable, but evokes an entire range of emotions and even causes them to read it in a different voice. Tell me that Anthony Hopkins was just a middle man with a straight face.

20%, but it's only when loading very large images that are scaled down for display. And when you zoom in on them, it has to decode them again.

The PDF viewer isn't really a gain, it just pre-loads it like the bad old days of Internet Explore pre-loading itself on every boot.

To get out from under the SEC regulations then they are going to be buying a presidential election for anyone. Elon Musk dropped a quarter billion just on Trump's last election and he's going to spend the same amount of money getting the Republicans the midterms. Maybe some more.

Years ago I saw an interview with a multi-millionaire woman who was complaining that she couldn't get the time of day from congressman anymore because the billionaires could outspend her. That's the level we're at.

It's not just that you and I don't matter. If you've only got a few hundred million to spend that's not enough anymore to buy an election. That's how much money and power we have given the billionaires. Or should I save the trillionaires...

Punches very obviously not connecting suggests it's been trained on Hollywood fight scenes. The other giveaway is rapid hard cuts and shaky camera so you can't see how badly the punches are not connecting. Everything feels weightless and fake.

There is a lot of AI slop, but I wouldn't discount it being able to do something decent with the right person at the helm.

Preferably, but even in areas where police fight tooth and nail to keep them we can fix the problem. Granted the fix will probably result in them being removed.

The fix is a couple parts:
1) Requiring a warrant issued by a state judge to access the cameras at all, with the requirement that the officer personally testify to facts. No fobbing it on random informant, they are required to own it.
2) Accessing the cameras without a warrant is a felony worth a minimum of 5 years in prison, but up to 10 years.
3) Regular transparency conducted by an independent group, not associated with the police.
4) Since we're dealing with cameras make it a felony worth 10 years in prison to hamper, mute, disable, modify, or otherwise obstruct, the operation of a body / dash camera during an interaction or when discussing an interaction. No blocking the camera, mic, or secret conversations with your coworkers.

Of course the ideal solution will be to keep pushing for these things to be shoved off into oblivion.

As a side note, if they try to claim that a warrant is too high a burden because "it needs to happen fast" or whatever false emergency situation they dream up, then ask them again if the cameras are active surveillance. They have to say no. Then you can remind them that it's not hot pursuit or anything similar since they're looking at historical, not real-time, data so they should be able to take a few minutes to get a judge to issue a warrant over the phone.

Wait, that's not what we're being sold. We're being told it's just about, or possibly is, AGI that can do ANYTHING and could decide to KILL HUMANITY!!!!

/snicker

Most entertainment has always been slop, this is nothing new at all. A decade ago it was reality TV, before that it was gameshows and daytime soap operas.

The interesting story here is how this demonstrates the basic different in attitude between the US and China when it comes to new technology. In the US the established players are very concerned that new tech will affect their business model, so they try to hold it back as much as possible. In China it gets embraced and there is a rush to adopt it.

And meanwhile, you keep presenting nothing more than absurd pedantic deflection from the means that LLMs actually use to achieve tasks, trying to mislead people into thinking that they're just disguised probability tables, ignoring the actual consequences of your derailment of the conversation from actual mechanisms to an exponentially-exploding model of the consequences of said actual mechanism, and even in your pedantism, failing to understand the difference between a Markovian state (the physical hardware state) and a Nth-order autoregressive process (the linguistic processing).

First of all, congratulations on constructing the most blatant false dichotomy Slashdot has seen this year. You genuinely seem to believe the only two options that exist in human parenting are:

1) Striking a defenseless human being who weighs a third of your body weight.
2) Being their "buddy," never setting boundaries, and letting them run feral.

If the only tool in your parenting arsenal to enforce a boundary is physical force, that isn't "discipline", it's an intellectual and emotional failure on the part you, the adult. Hitting a child is the lazy shortcut for an adult who threw an emotional tantrum because they ran out of words and patience.

And as for your demand for "logical and factual" explanations? Modern society didn't "fail to justify" why we stopped hitting kids. You just chose to plug your ears and ignore five decades of research. For example, the Gershoff & Grogan-Kaylor meta-analysis, looking at 50 years of data from 160,000 children across dozens of peer-reviewed studies, found NO evidence that physical punishment improves compliance or long-term behavior. None. Whatsoever. What it did find, consistently and across every demographic, was a direct correlation with increased aggression, antisocial behavior, anxiety, depression, and impaired cognitive development.

It teaches the exact opposite of accountability: striking a child doesn't teach them why an action was wrong; it teaches them fear of getting caught, resentment toward authority, and the core lesson that might makes right - that when you’re bigger and angry, you use violence to impose your will.

Take crime trends, and examine your thesis: if removing physical punishment created "unaccountable grown-ass children wreaking havoc" then violent crime in the west should have skyrocketed as corporal punishment collapsed over the last forty years. In reality, violent crime has fallen dramatically since its peak in the early 1990s.

there is a fundamental difference between a spanking and a beating.

Try that defense anywhere else in civilization. If you hit your spouse to "correct" them, it's domestic battery. If you hit an employee because they rambled or disobeyed you, it's assault. If you hit a dog with a board for chewing a shoe, it's animal cruelty.

The only context where people like you defend physical violence is when the victim is a small child who can neither defend themselves nor escape. You rebrand assault as "tough love" solely because the victim is powerless.

the single motherhood rate went from 20% to 70% in the last half-century.

I mean, why not add some completely fabricated statistics to top it off, sure! (21% of children in the United States live in single-mother households, not 70%). But why let basic demographic facts get in the way of a misogynistic rant designed to distract from the fact that you think hitting children makes you a tough guy?

The only lesson you're teaching is "be violent".