And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

True, but at least this way the warmongers had to take time out of their day to make me a gameboy.

I can certainly understand not wanting to put money in the pocket of a weapons manufacturer, but like 20-30% of our income goes to them anyway. The only way to avoid enriching them would be to earn no income, and therefore pay no taxes. So since we all bear the ethical and moral burden of having blood stained hands already, we might as well enjoy that sweet retro handheld.

Witness Houston Space Flight Center, which was LBJ's quid pro quo for getting the Apollo program through Congress, and is responsible for the handoff of manned launches from Florida to Texas just after the vehicle clears the tower.

It was about the principle of the thing when it was Apple and Google.

Except it wasn't when it was about Xbox and PlayStation.

This is just an extension of the $ituational ethics here.

and "We're not doing that anymore."

And nothing else will happen...

Offer everyone who has either of the old plans a subscription to the new merged service.
Which will cost more since it is "worth more" because both sides now have access to new content.
Anyone who doesn't want to pay more is free to quit.

This will create a bunch of new revenue for the merged service, or a mass exodus.

in the historical training data, so it's hard for an LLM to induce those "rules" from so little example text.

I bet they know a lot more about chemical weapons than they do about biological weapons, for similar reasons.

AI, that doesn't suck, running locally on your phone.

You know who's most likely to get to the doesn't suck stage first?

The phone maker who makes money off hardware, and not ads and surveillance, which inherently suck.

Now, all they have to do is get their software under control again... *sigh*...

Now that I am in my mid-fourties, I think I will find a lord to whom I will pledge my undying fealty.

It's going to be recycled into products that we'll use. In fact, some of its constituents are "forever chemicals." One sip from a bottle derived from a bit of the cable, and it will be with us for the rest of our lives!

Yes! Clearly, this story was written by the 1% who wishes everyone's shoulders were like theirs.

He drew on chess as precedent: 15 to 20 years ago, a human checking AI's moves could beat a standalone AI or human, but machines have since surpassed that arrangement entirely.

Chess programs got better because the machines running chess programs got Moore's Law better and Denard-scaling faster, so the same costing machine could search deeper.

Machines running LLMs are not getting better at the same double-every-18-months rate that we had until about 2012. Moore's Law for storage and gates is not quite dead yet, but clock speeds are basically standing still.

Government dragnet searches used to be unconstitutional - Fourth Amendment and all that.

Then we got the third party doctrine which says it's OK for the Government to ask third parties to give it info on people without a warrant, and it's OK for those third parties to comply. Some of the biggies like Apple and Google usually won't comply without a warrant, others cooperate.

Today, there are third parties like Flock who basically sell dragnet searches to anyone who can pay - auto dealers who want to repossess cars, etc. Other third parties like Ring default to taking their users' data and making it available to the Government - you can tell them not to when you sign up, but the vast majority don't see the harm in contributing to mass surveillance.

Short of new overarching privacy laws like the GDPR, we're screwed.