The funny thing was that I knew him for like six months online before I realized he was fully paralyzed. He's been covered in the Finnish press a number of times. Amazing guy. Up until recently he was living in a house he built himself before ALS struck, but the medical service decided he was too far away and he had to move closer. You lose a lot of control over your life with ALS.

He wrote a book about nuclear safety engineering recently, which is a fascinating read, and which I strongly recommend.

Not very persuasive but you have me speculating if you were one of those overclockers. I suspect the main philosophical difference is that you think hardware is more important than software and I'm in the other camp. We seem to be in an abnormal condition because the computer hardware has been changing so rapidly for a few decades now...

Anyway, at the rate things are changing these months, I am actually worried that I may live long enough to see how it all comes out in the wash.

NAK

So the vacuous Subject apparently spans about a third of the large discussion? Thanks to the vacuous propagation? There should be a kind of meta-moderation of the discussions. Dare I say correlated to the kinds of FPs? But looking at your [nomadic's] post, your concern is escaping me and a Subject change might have helped.

Anyway, my too-obvious-to-be-insightful reaction and the obligatory joke I am l looking for in response to this topic involves some sort of categorical search constraint. There are ALWAYS some kinds of labor that are in short supply, but that doesn't do much to help the ALWAYS much larger number of people who are unable to supply those specific categories of labor that are in short supply.

Again with the speculations on "If I were a betting..." but good luck in convincing me that Bezos is too stupid to understand what he has done, though I'm pretty sure he would use some flavor of the "making money is an ethically pure motivation" excuse. Again with the "I bet to differ" stuff?

Personal disclaimer needed? Or some kind of rat race exemption? For most of my motley career I was able to go where the labor was in short supply, and it worked well for me. But looking at the current situation, I am unable to spot any of the jobs that I did that can't be done with AI now, and the AIs are continuing to improve rapidly. Rather too rapidly to be worrying much about the unintended consequences. For example, did you even notice that the mass market paperback business went extinct?

Thanks for saving me a long and tedious search, though I'm still going to try to root around the discussion a bit. (Main reason to reply is to try to figure what key terms I should look for, since the moderation has become so useless these years.) And you told it well, too. Even used some of the examples that I came to mind. I'm hoping the discussion will expand into broader considerations of stock-market madness as the new balloons are madly inflating all over the world.

So... "stock" and "balloon" seem to be the key words? And of course there will be the obligatory search check of the moderators' collective opinions about Funny...

Don't take this is criticism, shilly, because I am grateful, but I'm also unsure if "insightful" was the best mod. It appears you have 3 insight votes, 1 vote for informative, and 1 for overrated, presumably by a typical wannabe censor. In this case of the too obvious? My problem remains with the moderation system, which apparently needs the help of Nomad the Changeling... But on reflection, I'm beginning to agree with the "insightful" though I also want to check some of the details... For example, I think that nine years depends on some unconventional accounting. (This week I had a couple of meetings with a former internal auditor at Enron, though one of the principled ones who looked around and left quickly... I should have asked him about "creative accounting". But that's another term to search for in the discussion?)

BTW, AI is a godsend for ALS patients. Even with an eye tracker, your writing throughput is low / tiring compared to typing, and of course you can't do anything that requires physical activity (painting, playing an instrument, speaking, etc). AI tools help fill the gaps.

Did *she* want to die? Did *she* want to be "released"?

Did she have an eye tracker, to allow her to communicate naturally?

Motor neurons dying != brain control of motor neurons dies.

Anyway, you don't need a brain-computer interface for an ALS patient to work. I have a friend in Finland with ALS who works as a consultant on safety for a nuclear reactor startup (he was a nuclear safety engineer before becoming paralyzed). All it takes is an eye tracker.

The biggest problem is the typically short and unpredictable lives of ALS patients. He has lived abnormally long (I think something like 13 years now), but a large part of that is due to him thinking like a nuclear safety engineer (backup on backup on backup, training his nurses to have zero tolerance for error, etc), and still has a close call like once per year or so, and I regularly worry when I don't see him online in a while that something happened that killed him. A tube comes off a life support system. A nurse forgetting to reconnect something. A mucus plug in his airways. Etc. ALS patients' lives are fragile. He does CAD design for parts on his computer (it's too hard to do it with the mouse using the eye tracker, so he designs the shapes programmatically) and orders them 3d printed to correct any deficiencies he finds in his support systems.

ALS patients also have to constantly fight the medical system. Even in a place like Finland that will actually do long-term care for ALS patients (which is very expensive), it shows that it would be much more convenient for them if those danged ALS patients would choose to die (and there's often pressure put on them to do so). One of my friend's goals is to outlive a doctor who told him he would only live a year or two put a lot of effort into getting him to choose death. It was a battle to get long-term ventilator care. It was an even bigger battle to get to use a cough machine and to be able to control the settings on it; without regular, meaningful cough support, your lungs fill with mucus, and you'll probably eventually die of a mucus plug, pneumonia, or whatnot.

By contrast, ALS patients today can actually live a decent life using eye trackers. It's not like before when you had to tediously spell out things one character at a time to a helper holding an E-tran frame. Given that 1 in 500 people will get ALS at some point in their life, we really should be allocating a lot more money toward researching cures, even if purely from a cost-saving perspective.

(One final note: if anyone here starts getting peripheral weakness and worries its ALS: your instinct will be to exercise more. Do just the opposite. If your peripheral neurons are dying, the last thing they need is more work. ALS overwhelmingly strikes active people - one researcher I was reading noted that in her entire career, she's never met a couch potato who got ALS. Take it easy, see a doctor immediately, and if it is ALS, start preparing early, but know that you do not have to be forced to choose to die, so long as you can get care. You can live a decent, productive life if you choose to).

Trying to educate AC? But isn't being ineducable the entire point of being an AC?

But I'm mostly disappointed (as usual) that the promising story produced no funny.

Yes, but... The hardware costs could be regarded as marginal if the value of the "intelligence" "produced" is high enough. There's also the fact that the reprogramming for improvements can include increasing the robustness against deteriorating hardware.

If I was a betting man, I'd still be more inclined to bet on the Chinese (or Indian) approach over the YOB's. Which makes me wonder if there are any other players to consider. Any chance the Germans might blindside everyone (again)? And is it too early to count the Russians out or the Brazilians in for the race?

If I am understanding what you are saying, then, no, you are wrong to the point where I doubt you understand what freedom means. Choosing to be a slave is not an exercise of real freedom. I could include a mnemonic to clarify my position, but Slashdot rejects the not-equal symbol...

However the research indicates that about 30% of the people do hate freedom and do prefer to be told what to do and think. This appears to apply across national borders and for many identifiable groups. From a political science perspective, they are sometimes called authoritarian followers.

(Two of my fixations (bugaboos?) are against authoritarian leaders in particular and against liars in general.)

Basically the ACK and I don't see any real area of disagreement. Also willing to complement you on the empty-minded cowardice of your adversaries. Not thanking you for your role in making me look at the vacuums, but I was curious if I was involved this time.

Not clear about your point, but I acknowledge that I was thinking about the Chinese as possible adversaries who might try to disguise an attack as an accident. I was also thinking in terms of Murphy's Law in the sense that if you have a network of communications satellites that could be destroyed in a certain way, then it isn't necessary sufficient to hope it never happens, irrespective of whether that happening is a true accident or an attack.

In the end, chaos always wins? And geologic trim is always incompatible with geometric growth. Evolution cannot be exponential?

(I'm becoming too fond of alliterative jokes? Makes me wish I could speak an African language with drum-speak jokes.)

Some aspects of this comment I really like to the point where I think it might have been a better and more productive FP than the actual winner of that silly contest. But in particular I think it deserve a Funny mod for the closing paragraph.

However, I disagree on the main point. If the objective is to sincerely block them (as with a whitelist approach), then it is not going to work with a "substandard" approach. The defenses will need to be stronger and even smarter than the offenses, and there as SOOOO many offenses here. In particular, you mentioned the vast cesspool formerly known as Twitter. Another joke that it is possible to search for Twitter in a meaningful way (but another joke if you seek meaning in the cesspool), but rather difficult to search for the newly rebranded one-letter version. (And this kind of thinking is supposed to worth a TRILLION dollars?)

(I want to diverge into the productive FP topic, but... I always diverge. Even more than usual, something seems to have shaken my brain loose? Too many interactions with the Claude AI? Or my new superpower of bus/subway riding? Time and space? Bah, what concepts!)

Blocks innovation. Dare I say anti-freedom? And the motivations of the "evildoers" will drive them past the safeguards.

But I do have a funny smartphone anecdote to report. Trying to find an old picture yesterday in response to a human query. The google's Photos app was not being cooperative. We could both remember this as a relatively trivial task on the webbrowser version of the app, but it seems like a case of "no can do" on the smartphone. Finally gave up and stuffed the phone back into my pocket.

A few minutes later, the phone jumps into our conversation. I had apparently triggered the Gemini monster and it had started listening in and was figuring out what we were talking about. But what added insult to the injury was the sycophantic "helpful advice" the monster contributed. None of the google's fscking business, thank you.

Happy ending? Trying to make sure the monster had been lulled back to sleep I did manage to stumble over the search place and was able to get to the photos in question. I thought they might have been deleted in my latest random memory purges. (I refuse to pay the ransom and the google doesn't see fit to offer any compromise, such as training some of my data for the recursive (but sad and probably evil) benefit of the Gemini monster. As part of the training I could even rate which data is PII safe allowing my training results to be mutually compared with other humans' work. On the declining theory that human work or intelligence still has any value.)