Well, that does tend to produce about one baby per month on average.

The point is that the best way to eliminate abortion is to make contraception easy, effective and cheap.

That quote was in the article, but the article title was about a four-day work week. Kamelia Aryafar, the author, clearly thought (correctly) that AI would allow engineers to get a week's worth of work done in less than a week and then thought (incorrectly) that this would mean developers would respond by ending their week as soon as they had done that.

What actually happens, of course, is that if you can get done in one day what used to take five, you now do five weeks' worth of work every week.

Fundamentally, productivity isn't the constraint on working hours. If that were true, Keynes' expectation that we'd be working 15-hour weeks would be true. What constrains working hours is the limits of human ability to remain attentive and focused and the demands of human life, and those constraints turn out to be roughly 40 hours per week. A little more or less than that depending on the person and on the nature of the work.

Increasing productivity has never really changed working hours, it just increases productivity, which makes us all wealthier. Yes, all of us, including the workers -- if you believe all of the gains accrue only to the bosses or owners of capital you really need to learn more about what life was like in past decades and centuries.

The things AleRunner mentioned are plausible outcomes of misaligned artificial superintelligence, and the research in question is trying to prevent those outcomes. If you have good arguments as to why those outcomes are implausible, a lot of people would like to hear them -- including the AI companies and their safety researchers.

You misunderstand the purpose of this research, and the reason for publishing it. The research is not about "flexing", it's about safety, trying to understand the risks that we may be facing as the agent capabilities increase. AGI or not AGI is actually irrelevant here. What the researchers are trying to understand is what the agents will do when they face apparent opposition.

The cooperative results are great, because we think that's what we'd like highly-capable agents to do, to look for reasoned, peaceful resolutions. What we don't want them to do is to become aggressive, or to fail to step back and look at the larger situation.

And the reason for publishing it is to enable other researchers to see it and build on it, quickly, because everyone working on this stuff understands that it could pose an existential risk to humans. Find and talk to some people who work on AI research; they all worry about this. Many of them actually believe that we'd be better off if everyone stopped the research, or at least slowed it down significantly, but everyone knows that's never going to happen. So, their best option is to create the most capable and best-aligned AI, as quickly as possible. It needs to be well-aligned so it doesn't pose a threat to human existence. It needs to be capable so it can protect us from badly-aligned AI.

The IPOs won't stop the research, nor the publication. If you're not interested in it, just don't read it.

If students are being subjected to 4 GPa of pressure (40,000 bar), that's a real problem. I mean, that would crush their bodies beyond the limits of molecular cohesion, rupturing all cell membranes and turning all of their bodies' water into high-density ice. If the university is regularly murdering students this way, they should be stopped.

I'm not sure how pass/fail grades help, though.

The other problem is that while its revenue is high, its expenses are higher. The more it earns, the more it loses.

Thats not a trillion dollar company, thats an economy crashing Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

It's a good question, but I think framing it as what humans need to do to be able to live alongside ASI is the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it is "What do humans need to learn how to do to have fulfilling lives?".

Of course that question also depends on what makes sense for humans in a world run by benevolent ASI. We don't need to bother thinking about humans' role in a world run by malevolent or even disinterested ASI because there will be no role.

Sort of. When my kids were in public school in the 2000s and 2010s, book encyclopedias were sometimes grudgingly accepted as source. Not always, and it was often made clear that they weren't proper sources (because they're not!). The solution was to use Wikipedia but to follow the reference links to the primary sources it cites and use those.

I thought that wasn't just a good answer, but a strict improvement over accepting hardcover encyclopedias, both pedagogically and as a matter of scholarly principle.

In the spirit of modern /., you should probably call me a liar and a moron and make some political argument.

Sigh.

CA is #6 in homeless per capita among states. #1 is NY. I can't find any good nationwide numbers on homeless spending; it doesn't seem like anyone collects that data. However, I did find numbers from CA and NY, and NY spends nearly three times as much per capita as CA, so CA is definitely not #1.

Per the official poverty measure, CA is #22. That's arguably not a great measure, though, since it assumes the value of a dollar is the same everywhere. Using the supplemental poverty measure, CA is #2, behind Louisiana (#3 if you include DC, which falls between LA and CA). LA is high because people are actually very poor. CA's poverty rate is high even because though incomes are relatively high, housing is very expensive. Anyway, not #1.

CA is #11 in percentage of income collected, though it does have the highest marginal rate. It's important to keep in mind that CA's tax burden is more progressively allocated than most other states. If you're middle-class, your tax burden in CA is about the same as someone in TX or FL. If you're poor, CA is cheaper. If you're rich, CA is more.

#6, not #1. LA, NM, MI, TX and NV are numbers 1-5. Well, that's "average literacy score". If you want to look at percent with literacy skills at or below PIAAC level 1, then CA is in a three-way tie for #2. #1 is NM, #2-4 are CA, TX and MI. Either way not, #1.

Personally, I wouldn't want to live in CA, mostly because of their ridiculous gun laws, but it's a pretty decent place to live by most measures. It's best if you're highly-educated and highly-skilled, because while it costs a lot to live there, you can also make a lot of money.

$424 USD.

You're thinking of Nexus. Even by the end of the Nexus era, Google had shifted towards the flagship device market. Pixels have always been aimed at the flagship market.

If you want a cheaper option, look at the Pixel "A" series devices. They launch in the spring and generally have the prior year's CPU, less RAM, cheaper cameras and more plasticky build quality, but the prices are quite a bit lower. They still offer the same seven years of OS updates, though.

Yes. Always have. If you buy on a payment plan from someone other than Google they may keep it locked until you pay it off.

I live in a "high desert" region, in the mountains in northern Utah. Years ago I built a really nifty semi-passive cooling system for my house, which relies on the fact that even though the days get quite hot in the summer (~100F), as soon as the sun goes down the temperature drops, generally down to the low 60s, sometimes the low 50s or even 40s. Or at least it used to.

When I had to replace my HVAC system 10 years ago, I had the installers add an extra 8-inch vent pipe to the roof that comes down into the HVAC room and connects into the air return. Into this pipe I inserted an inline electrically-controlled baffle. I also installed a high-volume fan, the type used in greenhouses for plant ventilation, in the ceiling of my laundry room. It pushes air from the house into the attic, creating negative pressure in the house. When I open the baffle on the roof vent and turn on the HVAC fan and the attic fan, the effect is to draw air from the roof (from outside) and to push it through the HVAC system to my entire house, and to draw hot air near the ceiling and push it up into the attic (which is well-ventilated to the outdoors).

I then designed and built a set of ESP32-based microcontrollers, one each to control the vent baffle, the attic fan and a thermocouple that is installed in the roof vent, near the top, and I wrote some software that runs on an RPi and talks to the microcontrollers (via Wifi) and my smart thermostat (via its API). During summer nights, whenever the exterior temperature falls below the interior temperature and the weather forecast says the next day will be over 70F, the RPi turns on the fans and opens the baffle, drawing cool air into the house all night long.

In past years, most mornings I woke up to a house temperature in the mid-60s, and not just the air temperature; most of the house's thermal mass, especially that large amount of ceramic tile on the floors, had cooled to that level. Outside temperatures typically reach 80F by 10 AM, 90F by noon and 100F by midafternoon, but when the house starts at 65F in the morning, it typically takes until 4PM to reach 75F, at which point the AC has to begin working to maintain that temperature. The AC has to work a bit (not much) until maybe 9 PM when the exterior temperature falls. So vast majority of my summer cooling is done by running a couple of fans at night. If we were willing to accept 80F in the house, the AC might often not be needed at all.

Not this year.

This year, nighttime temperatures rarely fall below 70F. My system rarely kicks the fans on until about 4 AM, and even then there isn't much cooling going on because the temperature differential isn't large enough... and even when the house does cool a bit, it only cools the air. It's not cold enough long enough to significantly cool the tile and other thermal mass components. My AC sometimes runs during the night, consistently starts running by 10 AM and runs off and on all day, every day. I've adjusted the thermostat to 78F and I'm considering going to 80F, though I probably won't because my wife would complain.

Also, half of my state is on fire. Last night I disabled the system because there's a 15,000-acre wildfire 10 miles from my house, and if the system ran it would have pumped smoke into the house.

Of course, all of this is ultimately only an inconvenience to me. I can afford to run the AC all day every day if I have to. Not cooling down at night is a real problem for those who don't have the resources I do.