very insightful. mod up.

Do you actually, seriously, think that? You don't think that judges are playing around with using AI?

The government is already using AI to make decisions that affect huge numbers of people (I know this for a fact in my field). Surgeons use the internet right in the middle of surgeries. Teachers are using it to grade things. All sorts of businesses are dabbling with agentic AI to speed things up and be more competitive.

Yet, the super-overworked judges aren't touching it? I'm pretty sure you're wrong.

Personally, I lean a bit toward the law-and-order side of things. BUT. One, the law is fundamentally an adversarial process. Two, there are plenty of cases where the law is basically used to maliciously hack human affairs. Three, nowadays AI usage is frequently sloppy and the models are still sketchy. Four, when someone’s in court, a huge chunk of their life can be on the line.

What this guy tried, is perfectly acceptable. It’s also acceptable for the court to catch it and require the guy to submit hardcopy. If this forces a judge to think twice about feeding court cases into claude and then basing their judgement on the analysis, so much the better.

I happen to think this is a great idea. The law is frequently used to basically hack human affairs. People are perfectly justified in hacking back.

That’s a joke. They own the data, and they’ll bloody well use it as they please. This’ll get downmodded instantly, because some people here believe that a TOS has the same authority as the bible, the constitution, and the 10 commandments all rolled together into a holy document of absolute authority, immutable until the end of the universe. Sure, when you click that TOS box on your computer, suddenly the entire world will bend the knee and comply. Hashtag eyeroll.

None of the AI companies have complied with their TOSs. They’re basically unenforceable for individuals. “Opting out” is privacy-theatre. The AI companies are in a brutal war to build and train their models. The’ve hacked their competitors and flagrantly violated every copyright law on the planet. They’re not gonna let some vaporous pinky promise TOS get in the way.

First, incineration occurs at a much hotter temperature than the "don't throw plastic on your campfire it'll make bad gases" temperature that you're used to. Second, the gas scrubbing happens to remove the Cl and F and unwanted stuff like that. Flue gas scrubbing is a very old, well-understood technology. IIRC, it's basically amounts to running the gas through a large sponge that gets a continuous trickle of water with something like lime or baking soda dissolved in it. I might have some of those details wrong, but it's not advanced tech. Probably a lot cheaper and safer than dealing with an uncontrolled low-temperature trash fire that's buried inside of a mountain-sized junk heap, basically impossible to put out. That'll *definitely* put a bunch of nasty chemicals into the air and water.

Most of the trash is too mixed and low quality to recycle in any economical way. The metal has been removed because its valuable and the rest is simply not worth recycling. The answer is to incinerate it. People have this idea that incinerators are like that smoky bonfire that Jim Bob sets up in his backyard to burn his yard waste and that old couch he wants to get rid of. Modern incineration is super hot and the gas is scrubbed. Clean as can get. Nothing but CO2 and water vapor, and the ash is super compact and stable to bury. Some other countries do this (Japan) but US people think of it as dirty. Know what I think is dirtier? A massive mountain of trash that could catch on fire and spew a river of runny trash if a crack appears in the containment.

You are so wrong. Our entire system is purpose built to be robust, damage tolerant, and function even when humans behave like humans ie imperfect, egotistical, capricious, self centered and self serving. Separation of powers. Checks and balances. The federalist system. The multiple levels of democracy. The separation between federal and state militaries. The free press. And thats just the start of the list. Our system is probably the MOST resistant to would-be dictators and the people who want to have a one-man rule government.

Where the heck do you live? Where I am, even the greeter at the supermarket makes a solid 15 per hour. And I live in a spot that is most definitely not a high cost area.

I think youre outlook is too doomy. Youre forgetting about engineers, teachers, first responders, maintenance workers, therapists, social workers, most retail workers, and probably dozens of other worker groups if I wanted to think about it a bit longer. None of these jobs can easily be done by AI, in the short term, in any plausible scenario. Once we get true AGI and our robotics tech advances by several technological generations, it might be a different story. Thats the narrative the AI companies want us all to buy into since it justifies their in-the-stratosphere company valuations. My suspicion is that this will be a concernâ¦. In 2200. Although even then I suspect that our species will adapt.

I agree that Europe is anomalously peaceful, as long as you’re nowhere near Russia. Japan is also super peaceful. Regarding Liberia, I straight-up don’t believe the numbers. Collecting accurate statistics like that requires a government that is a) fully functioning, b) effective, c) honest and d) actually controls all the territory in the country. Between all those requirements, it rules out most of Africa, most of South America, and large chunks of Asia and the middle east.

Crime in the US is down quite a bit. It’s also down in a lot of other places. However, there’s a larger point here. If you choose your place to live based on a murder rate of 0.0005 vs 0.0003, and ignore things like freedoms, history, laws, economics, culture, diversity, larger societal trends and war, you definitely deserve the suboptimal outcome you will almost certainly get.

Free speech will result in that sort of stuff. The US is a weird, freewheeling place. Its definitely not for everyone. For what its worth, people TALk a lot of sh$t here but our murder and crime rates are actuallly pretty low. I can see why Trump would make foreign-born scientists think twice about being here. However, China is NOT friendly to outsiders that arent ethnic Han Chinese. And, historically, China has a history of treating their scientists and engineers really well, right up to the moment that the emperor has the whole lot of them beaten to death by the revolutionary guards or straight up buried alive. Check your history. As a Nobel prize winner, I would have expected this guy to do his geography research a bit better. I hope he keeps a go-bag packed, although movement is so controlled over there that it probably wont do him any good.

an academic can put forward an utterly unoriginal, obvious, no-brainer idea like this, and get a fu&*in paper in NATURE out of it. It probably helps to be at MIT, but thanks for absolutely nothing captain obvious.

nuclear bombs in space. detectors. Basic radiation theory. small satellites. I see nothing new here that wasn't thought about at least 50 years ago, perhaps with the exception of using a cubesat. Detecting possible nukes from a satelite? No possible chance that any modern governments quietly thought about or implemented THAT idea. hashtag eyeroll . I mean, designing such a thing would require a team of at least 2 physicists and a few engineers with undergraduate degrees. So, so utterly cutting edge.

I looked at the actual article. Modeling the satellite as a homogeneous cube, and modeling the detector as two homogeneous rectangular planes. This is a f*&ing NATURE paper? My eyes rolled so far back into my head that I convulsed a little.

If I sound a bit annoyed, yes, I am. Those scientific journals are supposed to be the best of the best, and they only publish a limited number of articles per month. Every article like this displaces a hundred other strong scientific studies that better deserve the credit.

that sitting for 30 minutes shortens your life by, wait for it, 30 minutes.

Someone with mod points and a hatred of AC attacked this thread. This poster is spot-on. The world is getting hotter. Above a certain temp/humidity threshold, heat is deadly.

And Europe is way behind on this metric, for a variety of reasons.

Consider this. I just looked the numbers up. Heat deaths in Europe are around 50,000 per year. Gun deaths in the US are around, wait for it, 50,000 per year. Europeans that shake their heads at America’s fetish with gun violence are killing just as many people through their resistance to AC. Reality is weird.