Reminds me of one of the conflicts represented in Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" regarding centralization of control, though in that case it was about who is in control when nanotechnology can be used to conjure virtually any physical thing you want. In the here and now, we're talking about how computer technology can be used to conjure virtually any digital thing you want. My 1980s perspective, informed by an age of ownership when your computer was your own, hopes for a time when an AI can run on a home computer and open source can give us the power to use it without someone else's guardrails chaining our choices.

If agentic AI were involved, given sufficient prompts and naivete on the part of Toner-Rogers, the AI could have performed the registration of the false Corning website on its own and even fooled the human researcher into believing the materials were real. Won't be long before we're all questioning whether the answers we get from our computers are legitimate or a tremendously detailed hallucination conjured to match what we appear to want to see.

The whole purpose of trigger warnings is to advise people who already know that they have psychological triggers that can cause an uncontrollable cascade of emotions. It's not to keep the queasy from tossing their cookies. It gives empowered individuals (like those with properly diagnosed PTSD) the information they need to use that power.

The biggest problem with this approach is that no one part of the ATC system exists on its own. All the pieces communicate with each other in an ancient architecture. You can use this approach to upgrade any one piece, but you can never replace the ancient architecture without a much more invasive and risky transition

No. No one knows what's going to happen. That's exactly the problem. Sales taxes, where they exist, inevitably cause prices to be off the 5 cent mark. With no national legislation planned at all and state legislation likely to be slow to have any influence, the effect will be chaos as different vendors, different local jurisdictions, and different states struggle to find an equitable balance.

The best part is that, because nickels cost the US government even more in overhead than pennies do, the whole thing will end up costing the taxpayers far more than it will save them.

But the worst part is that Steven Wright's amazing joke will just disappear:

How come it's a penny for your thoughts but you have to put your two cents in? Somebody's making a penny.

So... not his personal money, not his legislative agenda, not his deal, not his plan, not even his idea. Just announced in his hallway.

In preparation to become a new parent decades ago, I bought and assembled a motorized rocking swing. When I got ready to start it for the first time, though, I found a slot on the side with the label "Insert Coin." I nearly exploded in anger at the notion until I realized it was just telling me how to open the battery compartment.

Indeed. Most LLMs seem to act like 12-year-old children. They can get things right with a script, but they're easily fooled by intelligent malicious adults. You wouldn't put a 12-year-old child on the front line of your customer service. Why would you put an LLM there?

Ever since those robotaxis started roaming, I've been have Waymo sex in moving vehicles!

Most of these deep neural network systems seem to lack the equivalent of a mental model. There was an article a while back with a line that has really stuck with me (emphasis added):

When engineers do peer into a deep neural network, what they see is an ocean of math: a massive, multilayer set of calculus problems that—by constantly deriving the relationship between billions of data points—generate guesses about the world.

That ocean of math doesn't correspond to any of the kinds of abstractions about the world that humans use in their conscious thinking. And since language is created by humans for the purpose of conveying information about human conscious thought, it's all about mapping words onto those abstractions... abstractions that simply don't exist in a modern AI system. So it's little wonder that they have trouble mastering it.

I hear you, but it all comes down to how you much it costs to have control over your own destiny. Building your own data center and scaling it at just the right rate is difficult and expensive. Companies like Amazon and Microsoft that invest billions in that and sell it as a service have to be careful to protect their reputations in order to protect that investment. This arrangement makes it cheap to do lots of stuff but doesn't translate well to controversial activities, since the world is full of snowflakes (I count myself among them) and lots of them have a problem with calls for violence and will vote with their dollars (as we expect in a capitalist society). If you want to do something that upsets the apple cart, you can expect the First Amendment to keep the government out of your hair, but you'll still need a lot of people, a lot of money, or both to come together to take the risk.

For all you URL hackers out there, fastcompany's image server hands out an arbitrarily high resolution version of the first snowflake (the highest I tried without a server error was 9100x5119: Ice Queen), but only 1280x960 versions of the other two: Yellowknife Flurry and No Two Alike.

I'm sure MS characterized the use of Google in their web browser as an edge case not needing to be tested.

Given the discussion about how visual cortex defects can predict schizophrenia, it sounds to me like it's like being born without an appendix (not saying whether that's possible, but just suppose): you can't get appendicitis. Born without sight, the visual cortex doesn't develop, so it can't get "sick" and cause schizophrenia.

Oxygen fasting!