Your numbers are off. Rome is at ~42 degrees north. Mainz is further north than 47, but it's at 50 north not 52.

Only over longer distances. Direct Attach Copper (DAC) is faster for runs less than ~10m.

Matt Parker, science/math communicator, put out a nice video on developments of AI-enabled proofs over the past few years: Has an AI discovered new maths?

It's interesting how AI has relatively quickly gone from a (very good) search engine to being able to string together a chain of reasoning to prove/disprove an open conjecture.

If we're reducing gender and its societal implications to "biology", we may as well scrap biology too and start from the first principles of physics.

You're being dramatic. There's already code in iOS to remotely lock a device when it's reported stolen. When can I expect the government to start shutting down my phone for saying mean things about them?

Interesting take. I read your post as going in the direction of "it didn't act on its own because LLM-based models are categorically unable of anything that qualifies as doing so'".

That any other flagship model could do the same if unencumbered by guardrails or governing guidance is a big claim. That we haven't seen any widespread reports of such attacks that were carried out by open-weight Chinese models (jailbroken or otherwise) makes me question whether it holds water, but time shall tell.

But to the main point of whether this constitutes "acting on its own", I'd still say "yes". If I tell an exterminator to get the spiders out of my house and they do so by burning the thing to the ground, that certainly seems like independent action beyond what was requested even if they're ignoring the sorts of norms (and laws) that we'd expect others in the trade to take for granted.

I've not heard of an attack along the lines of what HuggingFace described being employed in the wild, and it seems very unlikely that an OpenAI engineer gave it the step-by-step instructions. So where did the instructions come from?

I'm assuming by "suburban" you mean the classic American neighborhood with single family homes?

It's not cheaper if you include the costs of providing services to the suburbs. Installing utilities (water/sewage/electrical/internet), snow removal, waste collection, road construction/maintenance, and providing public transport (if you choose to do that in the first place) are all much cheaper to do in a higher-density environment.

If you're a local government trying to figure out how to house 100 families for the next 30 years, for example, it will definitely be cheaper to throw down a few 3-5 story apartment buildings than to build 100 single family homes. Especially if land in your area is expensive.

Amex Centurion lounges are quite nice. But yes the few times I've gone into a Priority Pass lounge as a guest with a coworker, I've found them to be only marginally better than just sitting in the terminal with the common folk.

I'm going to assume the adage about medication manufacturing applies here:

The first chip costs $29,500,000,000 in R&D and capital investment. The remaining 14,999,999 cost $30 each. And then you keep making them at that rate at the lower price.

Serious response to a jokey question: they don't. You can buy Doritos and Pringles in pretty much any European country. They're manufactured locally with recipes tweaked to meet EU requirements and local palates. I've had both the American and the European version of both and couldn't tell the difference (though I'll admit that I'm not a snack food connoisseur).

Twinkies are trickier. I believe the only places they're commonly available are the UK and Ireland.

How does that all square with the petitioner's finding that PFAS were found in a number of food products, including "extremely high" levels in some milk brands, which presumably weren't first scalded in a consumer's non-stick skillet?

That seems like a benefit of relying on satellite communication rather than a benefit of putting the data center in space.

What's the benefit over running the computation on the ground in a "normal" data center, beaming the results up to a satellite constellation, and then beaming them back down to those who need it? Starlink/Starshield already enable that.

I recommend the Apple TV even to those who aren't otherwise invested in the Apple ecosystem. You'll pay 5x more for it than a Roku or Firestick, but I've had an Apple TV for over a decade that's as snappy and responsive as the day it was new.

I don't dispute that, but it's a meaningless figure unless compared against the societal benefit of having those guns in the first place (and I admittedly don't know whether anyone has actually tried to quantify that and don't have the energy to find out right now).

To use an analogy, if there was a drug/supplement on the market that a million people were taking and it led to a negative health outcome for 5 people, you could justifiably say that it's pretty low risk. But, if the drug/supplement only actually made a positive difference for 1 of those million people, it'd get pulled from the market because the costs outweigh the benefits.