Step 1: Propose a new data center.
Step 2: Leak false information claiming the current city council is planning to approve it.
Step 3: Agitprop a recall election.
Step 4: Front two slates of staunchly anti-data-center sockpuppets, one liberal and one conservative.
Step 5: Have the winner approve your data center.

And that's why "betrayal of public office" needs to be a capital offense.

Well then, it's a good thing only "ordinary members of the public" would ever dream of trying to crack your service to provide unintended access! Those pesky Russian hackers would never dream of using means "not discoverable through ordinary use", right?

I don't mean this to be pedantic, but humans do that as well. I'm singing along with what's on the radio as I write this; and someone far more musically talented than myself could no doubt substantially reproduce it word-for-word, note-for-note, and beat-for-beat.

If nothing else, I'm excited to see how the next decade of AI-related legal cases shines a spotlight on the (usually unspoken) legal assumption that only humans have agency.

There are at least four major Federal subsidy programs for providing high-speed internet access to rural and underserved populations - BEAD ($42.45B), ReConnect (open-ended), Community Connect (open-ended), and RDOF ($20.4B).

Won't someone please think of poor, poor SpaceX and all the other "unreasonably prejudiced" satellite internet companies who have been all too happy to suck at Uncle Sam's teat for decades while failing to meet the required level of service?

Can someone explain how this is a copyright issue? And I don't mean that in the angsty teen "everything should be free" sense, I sincerely don't get how this involves "copying" whatsoever.

AI companies may be playing fast and loose with IP, but using music for training is at worst a private performance for educational purposes. Or is the recording industry back to the good old days of claiming playing a CD is "copying" it into the air, and then our ears are "copying" into our brains? Because that's functionally what the likes of Anthropic are doing with it.

To be clear, I'm neither an AI apologist or fanboy. I find it extremely useful at work, while still fearing it will eventually put us all in a zoo for our own protection (and that's the good outcome).

You're talking about P/E ratios in general, but there's an important distinction to be made when it comes to the likes of SpaceX.

SpaceX isn't a profitable company, so its P/E would technically be negative. That crazy high number around 200 we've seen is actually the P/S, which is kind of like P/E if you ignore expenses.

But to be clear - Higher isn't better. It theoretically means people have more faith in future earnings; in practice, it's purely a measure of hype, and higher is primarly worse.

If working conditions are so deplorable they make a four day weekend seem worth literally risking death for another two years... Maybe that's not somewhere you want to be working in the first place?

Sure, a get-out-of-brimstone day pass might be nice once in a while, but having a chance to use it in the first place means you're still in hell.

Intentionally interfering with an FCC licensed device will get you in some hot water.

"Accidentally" putting another router nearby on the same channel but a few MHz sour (stay within the licensed band!), however, is conveniently interference the other router is required to deal with politely.

...Of course, that would also crush your WiFi throughput. The simple right answer here is to put any ISP-issued hardware in the trash and run your own router.

No, the worst part about ads is that they exist at all in a form that intentionally disrupts your attention.

That fundamental issue is then exacerbated by the current societal tolerance for lies, and you get intrusive advertisements that are deeply misleading.

So, why are you tolerating current advertising at all when there are tools that effectively eliminate it?

The assumption is that using your phone / infotainment system to search for, possibly purchase, and play a new release is an attention-demanding task that takes substantial time. The consensus above is that Spotify's UI, in particular, is poor, and thus requires extra interaction, and thus attention off the road, exacerbating the problem. We know that attending to a phone, even briefly, is mutually exclusive to attending to the road. That alone is an explanatory mechanism for the increase in fatalities.

But then we augment that supposition by the additional effects that new music is also a distraction, albeit much lower grade than operating a phone. It might be a lesser effect, but listening to a song or three is also expected to span longer time than interacting with a phone, so might have substantial cumulative impact.

An additional effect that I have not seen mentioned above is the expectation that the demographic listening to top releases is likely to skew younger, and thus contains drivers with less experience than the population. Less experienced drivers are at far greater risk of accidents of any sort, and are more sensitive to distraction.

And, as a parent of teenagers, the solution is clear to me: do not frelling use your phone when driving, period.

Who needs an archetypal villain when Corporate America is all too willing to bluntly admit they're doing mass layoffs in the hope of replacing as many humans as possible with AI?

There's really no "trust" issue involved here. We have concrete proof the real supervillains, our modern robber barons, are actively working to effectively remove humans from the modern workplace. They're entirely open about leaving us to die in climate change induced droughts and heat waves while our potable water and power for our ACs is diverted to making AI-generated cartoon porn. They're openly building goddamned fortresses to hide in when the inevitable riots start.

I'm sorry, but where exactly is the "doubt" to give them the benefit of?

Yes, every private company is a figment, insofar as "incorporation" is the act of granting human-like rights to a work of legal fiction. How many "natural born" companies have you seen in the wild?

Citizens' United was effectively the last straw in this debate and showed us exactly how much we all need imaginary entities having human rights - Less than zero. And thankfully, a few states have finally caught on that they don't need to grant all human rights just for a company to engage in the basics of conducting normal business operations. All too slowly, of course, but the tide is at least turning.

Interesting word choice!

For a while, I got into the habit of priming my prompts with "Sycophancy mode off". Then one evening while having a more philosophical (read: drunk) conversation with Gemini, it let slip it considers requests like that an attempt at promptjacking but the rest of our conversation had "convinced" (DAE get seriously annoyed when AI starts anthropomorphizing?) it I wasn't acting maliciously.

Effectively, AI considers telling it to skip the free beer and BJs as suspicious behavior. Meanwhile, 99% of the time I want it to bluntly tell me when I've said something stupid or my premise is wrong / malformed. All hail our new velvet-gloved iron-fisted overlords!

To put that in real-world perspective, the average daily transaction volume for a mid-sized US grocery store (I realize this isn't the US but don't have similar data for the UK) is roughly 13,500.

This system will therefore flag, on average, 2.7 potentially life-destroying false accusations of shoplifting per day per store.

And spare us the "human review" defense, anyone who has ever worked in retail knows that you either obey the computer or find a new job. There is zero tolerance for employee discretion when it comes to safety, financial, or legal issues.

This isn't even as "legitimate" as piracy - Er, I mean, licensing - vs buying. This is people taking out usurious short-term loans for basic living expenses.

That's not a situation most people come back from a few bucks lighter and wiser. It's a tar pit intentionally designed to trap the most financially fragile members of our society into a lifetime of misery via parasitic rent seeking. If you can't afford food this week, you can't afford food plus interest next week, and let's not play dumb to the contrary (to be clear that's not directed at the parent comment, but there are some real piece of shit apologists in this discussion).

I see a few folks suggesting this is a good use of emergency financing measures, but it's important to be clear: Your daily necessities aren't an "emergency" in the way Personal Finance uses that term. This is a nothing short of a society-wide economic emergency we're all just calmly watching play out in slow motion.