Remember back in the early days when they were pretending that they weren't an illegal taxi service, but rather were just normal people "sharing a ride" to where they wanted to go anyway, and so called it "rideshare" to avoid prosecution?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

I've lived all over, in all sorts of dwellings and properties. At the moment, I'm in the sort of neighborhood you have in mind.

FYI: On large properties — when you have private roads, culverts, shared fences lines, trees and other growth, property line issues, etc. — you do have to interact with neighbors. Repairs, maintenance and other issues come up, and this has to be coordinated with neighbors. Properties are often unoccupied, and neighbors rely on each other to deal with things. In the pricier neighborhoods, there are HOA officers that are in regular contact with property owners. In rural properties, where no HOA is involved, you and your neighbors are on the hook for everything, and everything has to be worked out among you.

When I've lived on smaller properties in dense neighborhoods, this is where I've had little to no contact with neighbors. Similarly when living in apartment complexes.

So I think our tech bro coastal city dwellers have a naive view of what goes on on all those pricey surburb and exburb properties they hate so much. It isn't what you imagine.

My level of pessimism about things like regrowing limbs has declined a lot in recent years. I mean, there's literally a treatment to regrow whole teeth in human clinical trials right now in Japan, after having past clinical trials with mice and ferrets.

In the past, "medicine" was primarily small molecules, or at best preexisting proteins. But we've entered an era where we can create arbitrary proteins to target other proteins, or to control gene expression, or all sorts of other things; the level of complexity open to us today is vastly higher than it used to be. And at the same time, our level of understanding about the machinery of bodily development has also been taking off. So it will no longer come across as such a huge shock to me if we get to the point where we can regrow body parts lost to accidents, to cancer, etc etc.

Whether someone is "curable" or not doesn't affect the GP's point. A friend of mine has ALS. He faced nonstop pressure from doctors to choose to kill himself. Believe it or not, just because you've been diagnosed with an incurable disease doesn't make you suddenly wish to not be alive. He kept pushing back (often withholding what he wanted to say, which is "If I was YOU, I'd want to die too."), and also fighting doctors on his treatment (for example, their resistance to cough machines, which have basically stopped him from drowning in his own mucus), implementing extreme backup systems for his life support equipment (he's a nuclear safety engineer), and the nonstop struggle to get his nurses to do their jobs right and to pay attention to the warning sirens (he has a life-threatening experience once every couple months thanks to them, sometimes to the point of him passing out from lack of air).

But he's gotten to see his daughter grow up, and she's grown up with a father. He's been alive for something like 12 years since his diagnosis, a decade fully paralyzed, and is hoping to outlive the doctor who told him he was going to die within a year and kept pushing him to die. He's basically online 24/7 thanks to an eye tracker, recently resumed work as an advisor to a nuclear startup, and is constantly designing (in CAD**) and "building" things (his father and paid labour function as his hands; he views the world outside his room through security cameras).

He misses food and getting to build things himself, and has drifted apart from old friends due to not being able to "meet up", but compared to not being alive, there was just no choice. Yet so many people pressured him over the years to kill himself. And he finds it maddening how many ALS patients give in to this pressure from their doctors, believing that it's impossible to live a decent life with ALS, and choose to die even though they don't really want to.

And - this must be stressed - medical institutions have an incentive to encourage ALS patients to die. Because long-term care for ALS patients is very expensive; there must be someone on-call 24/7. So while they present it as "just looking after your best interests", it's really their interest for patients to choose to die.

(1 in every 400 people will develop ALS during their lifetime, so this is not some sort of rare occurrence) (as a side note, for a disease this common, it's surprising how little funding goes into finding a cure)

** Precision mouse control is difficult for him, so he often designs shapes in text, sometimes with python scripts if I remember correctly

So now we're getting daily or more stories questioning the value of machine learning, discounting the importance of machine learning, declaiming the feasibility of AGI, downplaying the impact of models on employment, criticizing the hype around it all, predicting crashes in investments, etc. Every day, someone, somewhere is furiously writing another think piece on along these lines. There are at least two on the Slashdot main page right now.

Meanwhile, the makers are making, the investors are investing, the users are using and Big Tech is profiting.

Sure, there will be a crash. Given the amount of money sloshing around, a lot of it will be misdirected, and those dead ends will reveal themselves. However, this is a ratchet. Machine learning, LLMs, etc., will not regress: their getting better with every new day, and those gains are forever. Making predictions at this point is foolish: the best you might eventually hope for is being correct twice a day. For all anyone knows, we might be dealing with a sentient superintelligence before the snow flies.

I don't think there's anything wrong with those sorts of general observations (I mean, who remembers dozens of phone numbers anymore now that we all have smartphones?), but that said this non-peer-reviewed study has an awful lot of problems. I mean, we can focus on the silly, embarassing mistakes (like how their methodology to suppress AI answers on Google was to append "-ai" into the search string, or how the author insisted to the press that AI summaries mentioning the model used were a hallucination, when the paper itself says what model was used). Or the style things, like how deeply unprofessional the paper is (such as the "how to read this paper"), how hyped up the language is, or the (nonfunctional) ploy to try to trick LLMs summarizing the paper. Or we can focus on the more serious stuff, like how the sample size of the critical Section 4 was a mere 9 people, all self-selected, so basically zero statistical significance; that there's so much EEG data that false positives are basically guaranteed and they talk almost nothing about their FDR correction to control for it; that essay writers were given far too little time for the task and put under time pressure, thus assuring that LLM users will be basically doing copy-paste rather than engaging with the material; that they misunderstand dDTF implications; the significant blinding failure with the teachers rating the essays being able to tell which essays were AI generated (combined with the known bias where content believed to be created by AI gets rated lower), with no normalization for what they believed to be AI, and so on.

But honestly, I'd say my biggest issue is with the general concept. They frame everything as "cognitive debt", that is, any decline in brain activity is treated as adverse. The alternative viewpoint - that this represents an increase in *cognitive efficiency* by removing extraneous load and allowing the brain to focus on core analysis - is not once considered.

To be fair, I've briefly talked with the lead author, and she took the critiques very well and was already familiar with some of them (for example, she knew her sample size was far too small), and was frustrated with some of the press coverage hyping it up like "LLMs cause brain damage!!!", which wasn't at all what she was trying to convey. Let's remember that preprints like this haven't yet gone through peer review, and - in this case - I'm sure she'll improve the work with time.

If blowing up chunks of their Potemkin military is all it takes to make them revert to non-secularism, then their supposed enlightenment has the same value as their dissidents, and it's not worth our worry.

Half a century worth of patience has been squandered on Iran, and there is nothing to show for it. No more pallets of cash. No more Hezbollah missile complexes. None of it. The jig is up.

"Normal citizens" typically don't face a court order allowing the gov't to root their phones. If you don't trust European courts, then your Whatsapp messages are the least you have to worry about.

No, they have a plan to exploit the insecurity of known to be insecure phones - which is pretty much all of them. This is neither new, nor special, and dictatorships have been doing this (without need for independent court order) for many years now.

Mr. Snowden said no such thing, to the contrary, he confirmed (back then), that the "math works". None of these pundits here seem to know, how the Austrians are going to listen in to Whatsapp&friends: they'll remote root the phones (with court permission) and then just monitor what happens on that phone. Nobody will have to reinvent the internet for that.

Indeed. Between Analog and TI, the bulk of the entire high spec conversion chip market (ADC/DAC) is locked up. Maxim, Linear, Hittite and others were gobbled up by Analog. TI grabbed National, Burr-Brown and others.

Naturally, prices are high, innovation is slow and supply is limited. Garden variety oligopoly.

These devices are critical to every non-trivial sensor and communication system. Military applications are legion. And now basically two companies have it all locked up, yet I don't expect anyone that matters will begin caring about this for some time. Relative to any given Big Tech company, both TI and Analog put together amount to a rounding error. The size of the claimed build-out in this story seems dubious for a company that only had $15.6 billion in revenue last year.

Not even a Google Search. Literally just talking to it before giving the toy to their children to see if, asked to talk about something harmful, it does so or refuses. Are the parents in your mind too tired to literally speak?

Nothing of value has been lost. Whatever dissidents Iran has aren't worth much: they've had half a century to deal with their atavist strongmen with nothing to show for it. Obama tried buying off Iran: they just funded their proxies and bred another generation of fanatics. So were giving war a chance, before they have nukes. Our decades of patience has expired. No more rockets and parasails for pallys. No more Houthis firing missiles at everything. No more Hamas. No more Syrian civil war. No more centrifuges for the Ayatollah.

Trump stood with the G7 yesterday while they all endorsed what Israel is doing. Not even our rivals and enemies want a nuclear armed Iran, and they're happy to let the proxies we fund do the dirty work. The leaders of Iran can either get the message, or they can live out their lives in a bunker, praying to their God about the nature of stealth aircraft and Western bunker busters. Either way, the world is a better place.

I would prefer to replace myself, yes.

I have a 37 year work history of finding ways to replace myself and folks like me. I already offer my clients free Ai consulting on the side to help them replace me. I'm already onto the "next thing" that will replace Ai in the headlines anyway.

I don't own a computer. I am not a programmer. I do everything from my iPhone.

In the past 10 years, I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on human programmers to create 3 web apps. Zero of them ever were finished. ZERO.

I used Grok AI to create 5 web apps. 3 of them were monetized almost immediately and have paying clients. All 5 have passed security checks that look for bugs or hack entry points.

One of the 3 monetized web apps took me all of 30 minutes using Grok, on an airplane, using my iPhone. I was able to download the files and upload them to a web server and the site was live. Literally 30 minutes and that website has created thousands of dollars of passive income.

I use vibe coding DAILY to make spreadsheets better for me and clients (I am not in IT). I use vibe coding DAILY to come up with cool functions for my web apps that people pay me to use.