If we build it, then it will frictionlessly tell us what to build.

This reminds me of a segment I saw about 15 or 20 years ago on a show called "How It's Made" that played on a channel like the Discovery Channel (before all cable became reality TV).

The segment was "How CRTs are Made". I was kind of surprised that CRTs were still being made, but I was especially surprised by the fact that they appeared to be American workers in the factory. They were doing everything pretty much by hand with no automation, and they were making some rather skinny looking CRTs. The show never elaborated on what the CRTs were for, but they sure didn't look like TVs.

I dug into it a bit after that using some clues I noticed in the show, and found out that these were cockpit displays for F15s or similar military aircraft. It's probably an item that you just don't go changing the specs on, and they understandably aren't going to farm out to TCL. I can't imagine how much each one cost, though. And I certainly wouldn't try to rack it up as a "win" for any of GWB's or Obama's trade policies.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

Uncopyrightable just means public domain. Using public domain code doesn't make your whole work public domain.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

Who's going to be able to scrounge up an extra 12KB of RAM in today's market?

It looks like if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

You keep using that word in the narrow terms of a computer programmer who just finished a training course where they drilled in the technical meanings of "authorization" vs "authentication".

However, a news article for the general public is not constrained by that context. The dictionary says that "authorization" in general is permission to do something. If you prompt an AI to do one thing with your bank account, then you didn't give it permission to do something else entirely, even if it got the logon credentials to do so. It wasn't authorized by you to do the other thing.

Here's another example: It's wartime and you got drafted. Usually you're not allowed to kill people, but the government handed you a gun and you're now authorized to kill enemy soldiers. That doesn't mean that you can just shoot your comrade next to you in the trench. And you certainly can't make the claim "But I was authorized to shoot Corporal Smith. You gave me a gun, after all!"

Oh, fluffernutter.

ICE is only convenient because of a hundred years of infrastructure build-out. But you think having an electrician spend two hours running a 50 amp line from your panel to the side of your house, which takes a few hours, is somehow an insurmountable block.

"Nice horseless carriage, Mr. Ford, but can you produce enough to switch *all* transportation to it? As of today, call for horseless only transportation means that personal vehicle ownership becomes impossible. To put it differently, you can drive your horseless carriage only because other people drive horses."

US male life expectancy is 76.5 years. If I tell you every year that you're probably going to die by the time you're seventy-seven, and you hit seventy-eight, do you now believe you're immortal?

Consider a human analogy: In many cases, people give financial advisors access to one or more of their accounts so that the advisor can make trades or other transactions for the benefit of their clients. However, if an advisor suddenly starts making transactions that do not benefit the clients or are contrary to their agreed instructions, then that activity is unauthorized, even if they have login credentials.

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.