Also the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer. An informant brought it to the FBI's attention before the attempt was made, but it seems to have been a relatively serious conspiracy.

This stuff is not just talk.

This is an example of the broken windows theory from sociology (not to be confused with the broken window fallacy from economics), which states that if visible signs of low-level disorder (e.g. broken windows in unused buildings) are tolerated, then more serious forms of social disorder will occur as well.

This definitely holds in online fora. As the level of abuse you allow rises linearly, the abuse that occurs grows exponentially. Up to a point, I guess. Once you're 4chan there's just nowhere worse to go unless people start using your forum to explicitly plan and conduct crimes. But if you try to draw the line at "anything that isn't illegal is perfectly fine", your forum is going to get nasty. Slashdot addresses this with community moderation, but that only works as long as the community isn't too permissive. If Slashdot were to someday get its own Eternal September (not likely; /. is fading, not growing), it could become a cesspit in short order.

I'd put this more strongly. AFAICT, and I've been involved in various privacy-sensitive international standards processes, Germany is the most privacy-protective jurisdiction in the world. In general, if you have a problem that creates a tension between privacy and enforcement, one of the best things you can do is go find out how Germany handles it. Their solutions aren't always good, but if you don't like their approach you're far more likely to walk away shaking your head at their excessive focus on privacy than the opposite.

That's one perspective. Another is that while the US shouldered the cost of defense for much of the world, the US got a lot of goodwill for that, and that goodwill and other aspects of its reputation helped to build and extend a massive, decades-long economic expansion that outpaced the rest of the wealthy world. There's a good argument to be made that being the world's superpower was expensive, but came with an enormous ROI that justified every penny of it and more.

It also provided the more-concrete benefit that the western world bought a lot of their weapons from the US defense industry, which helped to keep it strong and able to provide US needs (somewhat... our actual defense manufacturing capability has been gradually eroding for a long time because Pax Americana was so strong that no one needed to expend our munitions at scale, so we lost the ability to build them at scale).

That's likely all gone now. Europe is re-arming, and they're not going to be buying American weapons if they can avoid it, because in part they're arming against us. The Greenland threats did not go unnoticed. Trump has turned us from a global, mostly beneficent superpower into a regional bully, able to push around the likes of Venezuela (though apparently not to cause a regime change), but struggling with a low-middling power like Iran.

Breaking GPS won't break digital maps. They'll still work just fine, and will be up to date. The devices just won't be able to identify your current location, you'll have to work that out from context, the way you do on a paper map.

Or not... our smart devices use other signals in addition to GPS, to help address the fact that GPS requires a relatively clear view of the sky, and that's not always available.

Circa 2010 I navigated halfway across the country using Google Maps running on an iPod Touch. The device didn't have a GPS receiver, but I didn't even realize that for quite a while because its database of known Wifi locations was able to give me reasonable location data most of the time. Once I understood that constraint I was able to use it quite effectively. I expect that the databases of fixed Wifi and BLE beacon locations have gotten much more extensive and effective over the last 15 years.

I inadvertently repeated the experiment about four years ago. I bought an iPad to use for navigation while sailing, not realizing that Apple only includes a GPS receiver in tablets that have a cellular modem. I spent a little time experimenting with the Navionics app on land, making sure it would work for me, and it worked just fine around town and even in the moderately-rural area where I live (I have to admit this testing was cursory). Then when I got a few miles offshore, the stupid thing stopped updating its location. I decided it must be faulty and switched to using the app on my Pixel phone to double-check my location, still using the iPad's larger screen for charts (including using the charts with azimuths to visible reference points to calculate my location -- a good habit when navigating in coastal waters, to maintain the skills).

When I got home I mentioned the situation to a friend who is a private pilot and uses an iPad for navigation while flying. He asked me whether my iPad had cellular data and explained that Apple uses a single-chip solution for GPSr and modem, so an Apple device has both or neither, and told me to exchange it for the more expensive iPad. I exchanged it for a Samsung tablet because it pissed me off that Apple would even make a smart device without a GPS receiver.

Anyway, my point is that if the GPS network went out, your digital navigation might not even notice for a while. And even if you lost location service entirely, you'd still have maps. Maybe if there's a massive EMP that knocks out all electronics you'll get use of your paper maps. Though you'll probably have to do it on foot or on a bicycle.

And reading comprehension is not your strong suit.

My point was that the other part of your comment, "They just regurgitate random stuff they found on the Internet", is clearly false.

"Lots" and "one that is widely accepted" are not the same thing at all, which is my point. There's no point in discussing intelligence without first nailing down which definition the interlocutors are using.

Also, nearly all of the definitions are extremely fuzzy.

Indeed.

The claim you made was not about whether machines can currently perform like a brain, nor about complexity. The claim you made is that the human brain cannot be simulated by a Turing machine, which is a much, much stronger claim.

So I repeat, why do you think that?

38 of the 50 US states are "one-party consent" states, which means that as long as one person present (e.g. the person wearing the glasses) is aware of the recording, it's legal. Roughly half of countries around the world either allow any party to a conversation to record it without telling the rest, or don't have any restrictions at all.

Since there's no clear definition of what "intelligent" means, much less one that is widely accepted, that's a pointless argument.

You clearly have not used them much. Try using an LLM (one of the top commercial models, e.g. Claude Opus 4.7) to debug code that has never been on the Internet. I don't think anyone knows what "intelligent" means, so arguing that point is a waste of time, but LLMs clearly can observe results, reason about them, form hypotheses, devise ways to test those hypotheses, perform the tests, evaluate and reason about the results, etc.

My guess is that the face blurring happens on the car, before the data is even uploaded to Waymo, as a way to protect the privacy of random passersby from Waymo and Waymo employees. They likely never had possession of imagery with unblurred exterior faces, so there was no way they could provide it.

There's no way that Waymo is just defying a court order.

Why do you think that?

SMRs that utilize 1950's designs and require intense operational oversight and maintenance could never be economical. SMRs that use better, safer designs that can safely operate with no active operational oversight and little or no maintenance, which can function without intervention and without refueling for 20-30 years, then be inexpensively disposed-of and replaced, and which can be manufactured in large quantities to bring the unit cost down, promise to be very economical.

Will the new designs actually achieve all of those goals? On paper it looks good. Whether that theory will translate into practice is something that can only be discovered by trying.

The risks are a lot smaller than you think they are, because of new reactor design. Nearly all of the nuclear reactors in the world are still using a design that's 70 years old, that requires active cooling and doesn't fail safely. We have much better designs now, at least on paper, designs that simply can't melt down, whose failure mode is to simply stop. But no one builds these new designs on industrial scale because they're unproven, and there hasn't been much funding for doing all of the engineering and research needed to develop them into fully-functioning designs that can be.

I'm skeptical that small reactors are really the best way to actually deploy nuclear power on a large scale, because of security concerns, but starting small is the best way to validate and refine new designs. And modularity is clearly a good strategy for making deployments of varying sizes cost-effective. If you can develop a cost-effective module that can be manufactured in large numbers, you can build large plants by clustering them.

The new designs shouldn't actually need much operational oversight -- if something goes operationally wrong, they just stop functioning -- but they'll still have highly radioactive cores which, if extracted, could be pretty terrible weapons. Not to make nuclear bombs, but to greatly enhance the damage done by conventional explosives, by adding radiation hazards that linger for years. So, security will remain an important consideration, and the SMRs should only be deployed where security can be assured, which will in practice mean that most are deployed in large clusters.

This all assumes that the safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the new designs proves out, of course. The only way to find out whether that will be the case is to try.