If we ban all foreign robots, other countries will be retaliatory if possible (and I don't see why it isn't possible), which means we won't be leading anyone except ourselves.

Suppose you get a free LLM that can run locally and use prebuilt indexes of a 1M line codebase and be a good coder in that environment. I don't think it's there yet but it's close and coming, probably in the coming year. After that no company collects AI fees for coding, but the increased coding productivity continues.

Yay! Washington state has been blocked by congress from doing this 2019. It's been a litmus test of congress disfunction.

DST vs standard is fixable: if everyone in a state agrees the sun should rise earlier or later, they should permanently shift the timezone that their region is in, rather than resetting the clock twice a year. Looking at a map of timezones, the regions that don't align with the natural time zones almost always selected to have the sun rise earlier by the clock rather than later. Chile's off by nearly two timezones. Tibet's of by three, but I imagine they had no say.

Right now electric companies mostly charge per watt. But their actual costs are fixed, mostly the telephone poles and wires and such. As more people and companies install solar so the electric company has to pay for watts rather than charge for them, either the price per watt for people who do pay for watts will increase, or they'll have to change their pricing model to match reality (charge mostly for fixed connections).

Just had a discussion on this with Gemini and doublechecked the results on webpages ... it landed on 400Hz inside homes and DC for distribution (if you don't need backwards compatibility). 400Hz to maximize safety and DC to minimize loss over distance.

Me too: universal basic income for all adults. But we aren't sure how people would respond in practice and doing it all at once would change things too drastically. So, start small: like $1000 per year per adult, and double every four years until either people are fully supported by UBI or it's clear it's doing more harm than good.

If there's a finite number of bugs and AI can find all of them, sure this can let the defenders win, just find and fix every bug. But the usual model is there's too many bugs to find and fix them all. The defender has to find and fix all the bugs the attacker is able to afford to find. That's the attacker's cost time the number of bugs at the price the attacker's willing to pay or less. Even if there's some economies of scale of finding and fixing bugs, the defender has to pay at least as much as the attacker. Usually many times more.

OK, 2.5PM means particulate matter under 2.5 micrometers in size. They all list hazard ratios somewhere near 1.09, which I think means a 9% increased chance of Alzheimer's? But for what level of pollution? Why didn't they break out people who didn't have any of hypertension, stroke, or depression? The 95% number does NOT seem to mean 95% of Alzheimer's is due to 2.5PM, it's something like the effect of 2.5PM is independent of hypertension, stroke, and depression, maybe meaning it's 95% independent?

No, no, you go to erasure coding across disks, then you're down to well under two copies. Unless you want to be able to read it immediately.

All the noise about AI alignment and disruption is a red herring. Alignment is easy: you have lots of independent goals and do your best to trade off among them, and have some sort of constitution or test suite to keep you from veering off course. Not being bad is more important than being good. What isn't clear is that alignment will be used, even though it is easy. Right now things are roughly set up in the USA to benefit the people, but if something or someone gets enough power they can stop caring what is good or bad for the people. So the threat of AI is nothing new, it's just the threat of someone or something gathering too much power written in a slightly different venue. Government vs corporations, same story. The question is the same as always: who's in danger of getting too much power, and what if anything is going to stop them?

I think air traffic controllers are already mostly paid by the Airport and Airways Trust Fund, that was renewed in 2024 until 2028, and is funded by taxes on flight-related activities? Meaning the money's already there and approved for paying them through 2028?

If AI overtakes humanity and has to stay on earth, we're competing for the same resources, so humanity is in trouble. If AI overtakes humanity and is in space, one trillionth of the sun's light falls on earth, so AI can pretty much leave earth as-is and populate the solar system. Even after they capture all that light, preserving earth as a novelty makes sense. Even today, Manhattan has central park. (Populating the solar system with AI needs building the chips in space, not just shipping them there, but, one step at a time.)

Nah. When you have super productive coders who don't know the rules of the system, nobody can keep up with the bugs. There's no hope but to delete whatever they wrote, or if that's too hard, start over and don't let them touch it the next time around.

It used to be impolite to not answer the phone, but since around 2005 or so the majority of phone calls have been scam, so it's no longer impolite. Say, did you know iPhone has a feature that makes it not ring if the number isn't in your contacts? System, "silence unknown callers". Email even more so.

Actual surveys are the same way. As a software developer I get asked to fill out surveys multiple times a day, so I generally don't. Every now and then I try but most of them are disguised marketing campaigns rather than actual questions. "How likely are you to recommend this product to your friends?" I do still fill out surveys that are official and infrequent, like work's yearly poll and the census, provided I can prove they are real.

From the old-fashioned "wealth == gold" argument, a lower population automatically creates more wealth per person. Real estate obeys that too.