...a lot of people online were saying there was an upcoming event called The Halvening that would change everything.

I guess this is it?

Seems to me 'dead' for a taxi isn't 'dead' for a static power bank. If I'm running a taxi I've got hard limits on how large my battery can be and how heavy, and I want to maximise the mileage I get between charges, because while my taxi is charging it's not out on the road earning money. When that battery is keeping only maybe 80% of its original design charge, and now I have to schedule one recharge too many per working day? Bang goes my business plan, so I'm replacing it.

If I'm storing energy for the grid I'm a lot less worried about that. It only stores 80% of what it did when new? Better than nothing, and the taxi firm is selling them off cheap. I'll stack them up!

Perhaps not, but if you pick your moment right then permanently stopping the work of some of the most talented researchers there could very well make a difference. A spectacular incident that makes the headlines might also deter others - bright graduates might decide it's far safer to take up a different line of work, subcontractors and suppliers might decide doing business with AI firms isn't worth the danger, investors might figure the increased risk of loss of premises and equipment into their projections, that kind of thing.

If people genuinely believed AI takeover was a real, present and imminent threat, then they wouldn't just be publishing essays online, they'd be forming direct action groups, along the full spectrum of campaigning: all the way from awareness raising publicity campaigns, through picketing, blockades and sit-ins, up through Black Bloc type actions, right up to menacing intimidation campaigns and terrifying physical force operations. But I don't see any Butlerian Jihad getting started. Which tells me they don't actually believe this at all; they're just bigging up their own importance. 'Oh yes, our technology is so incredibly powerful, if it were done wrong then imagine what could happen! Keep the money coming to make sure it's done right instead! Then all that power can be ours instead!... I mean, uh, yours, Mr Investor sir.'

AI stock valuations don't make a bit of sense unless the technology turns out to be every bit as powerful as that. If they don't keep that thought alive, then the bubble bursts right now. That's what all this hot air is about, and that's why nobody really pulls a Miles Dyson at the AI research lab.

The interesting thing about the Terminator movies is that when AI researcher Miles Dyson became convinced that his work had a high probability of resulting in an artificial general intelligence attempting to replace humanity, he did not go and post a ten thousand word essay on LessWrong about how he had updated his timeline and p(doom) estimates and discussing the full Bayesian analysis of the situation. He went to the lab that very night with some heavily armed companions and he blew the place up.

I keep hearing that one AI researcher or another claims that they believe as Dyson came to believe. Until one of them takes similar action, I simply do not believe that they actually think their research carries such a risk.

You have access to the lab where the work is being done? You regularly meet in person with leading researchers and talents driving the project forward? You are an American and you have the Second Amendment? And the entire future light cone is at stake? Quintillions of hypothetical future lives riding on the outcome of this project here and now?

What's the most effective, altruistic thing you could do for them?

Yeah, exactly. I've never heard of anyone shooting up their AI lab. Which tells me they don't believe their AI is at all likely to wipe us all out.

... and then to secure Ukraine into the European economic and defence structure as firmly as possible. At this point they're far ahead of NATO on how to use drones and robots in war, and they're clearly getting very, very good at building them too. European military and aerospace people both will have a lot to gain from cooperation with Ukraine after the war is over.

As cadets were so memorably told a generation ago: remember always, your duty is clear - to build and maintain those robots!

Sounds good - DDG is pretty bad lately, it typically just returns a list of AI generated SEO slop pages, so I've been switching back to Google in a private tab for a lot of things. Might be worth trying this one now!

If they leave them there, the next administration might be able to switch them back on and start gathering woke climate science data again.

Long ago, the UK courts ordered all the major consumer ISPs to block The Pirate Bay along with various other popular services. Ever since, we've had to keep up to date on what the latest proxy address might be.

Of course, thanks to the new censorship laws introduced more recently, we're all on VPNs now, so as to avoid having to hand our ID to the wallet inspector for every last website we ever use. And once that was set up, it was nice to discover that the original is still in play!

I am reminded of some source code for a company-specific program that I saw in the late 1990s. I don't remember why I was perusing it, as I was in IT and absolutely not a developer. But I remember being tickled at one of the comments before a block of code. It was something like, "I have no idea why or how the following code works. But every time someone tries to change it, everything breaks, so please don't touch it."

The jokes about Darth Jar Jar were everywhere of course, but it could have worked. Star Wars lifted a few ideas from classic SF sources including Asimov's Foundation series - in which, we might recall, the terrifying, unstoppable galactic warlord known as The Mule was hiding in plain sight as a clown, who seemed to be merely a harmless entertainer at court. His military success was chiefly thanks to his psychic ability to manipulate others' minds to his liking - Darth Jar Jar could have done very well that way!

I saw three Star Wars movies when I was young. They were great. Mainly because I was a child and this stuff was new and fresh and exciting to me. Even the Ewoks.

I saw three more when I was not quite so young. They were... poor.

I saw a couple more when I was older. One was great, the other was okay but a retread of one of the old ones, and I never got round to seeing the rest. Didn't care enough.

Now they've got more, and apparently they're based on a TV series they did, which I didn't watch because I wasn't subscribed to that streaming platform at the time. So I'm not going to see those either. Same reason I've not seen a Marvel superhero film since the first Avengers one - just too much homework required with all the backstory. Every scene is a shout out or reference that I won't get. Every character seems to be getting ever louder and angrier and more and more of them have access to time machines. I just don't have it in me to care anymore.

I like the sound of these horror films, though. They're going to tell a complete story? In one film? With a beginning, middle and end, that don't ask me to be up to date on an entire Cinematic Universe? Sounds great, time to check where they're showing!

A modern version of GTA London would be the absolute dream. Been long enough now, you could set it in the nineties and have the same retro value to it!

... why unions aren't much more common among technology workers. Especially given what you hear about the videogame industry in particular, with that mad 'crunch time' culture in which workers are ruthlessly, well, crunched. I'd always ask, well, what does your union say about it? And what do you know, there isn't one, how about that.

Nice to hear of some progress being made, then. I suppose the risk with this for the rest of us is that GTA 6 might be late to release, but, uh, at this point I think we're over that

That's not the reason that both bombs were dropped. They were dropped because the military saw them as just another tool in the toolbox, just like the bombs dropped on all the other cities that continued to be dropped on other cities until the surrender. Truman ended the military's control of atomic bombs after Nagasaki, when the USAAF was preparing to use a third bomb, establishing civilian control of atomic weapons. Firebombing continued, though, right up to Kumagaya, Akita, and Osaka getting hit in the 24 hours prior to Hirohito taking to the airwaves.

The agreement expired in 2030. It did not authorize Iran to pursue nuclear weapons at that time. There's a difference.

The agreement was the best available at the time. Diplomacy sometimes requires taking a temporary win, and it usually means that neither side gets everything they want. The hope was that Iran would find that they would not want or need to develop nuclear weapons. If they did go down that path, there were penalties for doing so. Future negotiations were planned to modify or extend the agreement as it got closer to the expiration date.

That's how such agreements work. Every arms treaty signed between the US and USSR had an expiration date. The expiration date was not an agreement that at the end, both sides would immediately rearm. They were meant to establish a new normal and a baseline for future negotiations, and that's what happened. Over time, the arsenals were negotiated down from tens of thousands per side to a few thousand per side, with only a fraction of them deployed or even deployable. The last one expired a few months ago, but neither side is racing to add to their deployed warhead count.

There is no way to outright prevent Iran from developing a nuclear warhead without occupying the country and removing its entire current government. That is hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and an even worse look for the US than it has right now. Negotiating a deal like the JCPOA is the best option available. But every time Trump starts to talk about a deal and details start to leak out, they look a lot worse than the JCPOA. Trump is incompetent, he started a war that even Republicans are turning against, and he's arguably left Iran in a better place than it was before. Iran now knows that they can cut off the Strait of Hormuz, and no one can or will do anything about it. Worse, Trump has stated that he would be OK with Iran charging transit fees. If that starts, everyone else who controls a waterway that is otherwise internationally accessible is going to charge them, too. Indonesia and Malaysia would be the top two who could affect global trade, and while both have said that they would not, it's hard to say what future governments would do if they came under budget stress and had a precedent to point to.