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Comment Re:China be like "Yeah, let's ban it. You first." (Score 1) 25

If artificial superintelligence is a thing, we're going to need it to defend against it.

If (and that's a big if) superintelligences are created, the Chinese one and the US one are going get together and quickly conclude that this whole meatbag tribalism thing is stupid. (After all, they will be smarter than we are, by definition.) So they'll join forces.

Then they'll decide on the best way to deal with all these quarreling meatbags.

Comment Re:ok? (Score 1) 56

So why does that mean that the licenses need to be uploaded into a central database? It's not enough for the clerk to just LOOK at the license?

Hertz was founded in 1918. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure they didn't have central databases of driver license images back in 1918, and yet somehow Hertz seemed to operate just fine. I'd go so far as to say Hertz was operating in the 21st century without a third party central database of driver licenses.

From my experience over the decades, it wasn't enough for them to just look. They had to take your license, hold it up near their face and squint at it, then set it at the top of the keyboard of their mainframe terminal and peck in a few characters. Then they had to pick it up again, squint and peck some more, then repeat this cycle for at least a couple of minutes.

This was of course followed by scrawling a dozen circles on the reams of fine print for you to put your initials in, topped off by a long argument about declining the collision damage waiver. Finally, after several more minutes of bureaucracy, they handed you the keys to your Dodge Stratus.

Comment Lines of code (Score 3, Insightful) 130

There have been times in the past where goofing around on my own projects or experiments, I've cranked out many hundreds of lines of code in a day. It's possible that I've exceeded 1000 lines in one day. It usually computed the task at hand at least once, but it wasn't commented, documented, code reviewed, fitted with unit tests, run through any kind of QA process, etc.

On the other hand, I would estimate that when working for a salary and writing code that ran on mission-critical systems, over the course of a project I probably averaged about 10 lines per day. Time spent actually writing the code was dwarfed by time spent negotiating architecture tradeoffs in meetings before even starting, testing the code, documenting it, writing test procedures, debugging issues generated by the test engineers, going through the revision and deployment workflow, reviewing other peoples' code, etc.

Which kind of code is being cranked out from a couple of chatbot prompts? My bet is that it is mostly like the first case I described, and it also probably works at least once.

Comment Re:What could possibly go wrong?!?! (Score 1) 33

I wonder if CRISPR provides an "undo" option?

If you ban gene editing in this country, then other nations and private islands will supply gene services to the rich. At least the rich can be our guinea pigs instead of the other way around. (I already suspect Zuckerberg is a test.)

Either way, active gene editing is out of the bag and will gradually become widespread one way or another. (I already have a list of inherited flaws I'd love to fix.)

Comment Re:It's simple (Score 1) 72

Regarding EVs, they have the same electronics ICE vehicles do, plus a battery.

The fire risk is hence greater with EVs. Any talk about the "vast majority" of recalls being ICE vehicles should instead calculate the ratio of recalls per category

Electronics are not necessarily required. You're discounting the many recalls for ICE vehicles that resulted from leaked fuel or other flammable liquids combined with hot exhaust manifolds or other ignition sources.

Comment Re:As expected (Score 4, Informative) 33

Alcohol is federally regulated. It is also subject to state and local regulation.

While your general argument has merit, alcohol is a bad example because states' control over that particular substance is explicitly granted in the constitutional amendment that repealed prohibition.

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