Voting doesn't matter - it never did

Bullshit. By repeating this you're among the worst offenders. You're encouraging other people not to participate in their democracy. You guys have steeped yourselves in propaganda for your entire history and an active corruption and anti-education campaign for at least the last fifty years but you're not that far gone. Yet.

Plus my votes potentially won't count in the next election.

Yeah, voter suppression is bad hey? Stop doing it. Encourage people to think about their vote, cast it, and protect it, because it does matter.

hey will deliberately put their military forces in or near schools and hospitals.

Like these ones? The US department of defence operates more than a hundred schools, many of them on military bases. They pretty much all have hospitals too.

Are you American and eligible to vote? If so, then you are. That's what the very first line of your constitution, "We the people" means. It's a declaration of popular sovereignty, the idea that political power originates with the citizens.

If you voted for the president or representatives who placed Hegseth in power then you're extra responsible. Ditto if you didn't try to recall for those representatives or if you don't vote in the next election for the candidate most likely to ship off anyone involved to be tried for war crimes.

I remember looking it up at the time and I'm pretty sure Google Maps had it listed as an elementary school. It certainly is now:

https://www.google.com/maps/pl...

basic incompetence and a complete disregard for human life.

The first bit of this sentence is absolutely wrong.

I don't know, that sentence seems to describe Hegseth pretty well, along with the people who put him in his current job. Unless you're arguing that his incompetence is more advanced than "basic."

To be fair, you went to war with Iraq due to faked and purposely misinterpreted intel. Not even that well faked either: much of the rest of the world called bullshit.

You did almost nuke various countries, including your own, because Strategic Air Command couldn't tell the difference between jamming and a solar storm, a jumpy guard saw a bear climbing a fence, somebody thought swans were Soviet aircraft, Nixon was a mean drunk, the moon, bombers kept dropping nukes by accident, an AT&T switch failed in Colorado, bomb detectors couldn't tell the difference between a nuclear attack and a power outage, someone accidentally loaded a training scenario onto a NORAD computer, a couple of those NORAD computers had bad chips, etc.

The best irony is unintentional self deprecating irony.

HAL 9000 was given a starship.

AI can only start a nuclear war if someone gives it launch control over nuclear missiles. A coin flipping device could also start a nuclear war if someone gave it launch control over nuclear missiles.* If a coin flipping device can trigger the doom scenario just as well as AI is AI really the problem?

It's about what university you go to. Liberal arts schools may have a perfectly respectable physics program, but their whole science program may be housed under the College of X, which gives out BAs rather than BSs. The reverse also happens; had I wanted to, I could have gotten a BS in Latin from Caltech, because they only give out BS degrees, regardless of the field.

That is a pretty bizarre stance. Are you really suggesting that no one employed by an AI company actually does research? I rather wonder how new models keep improving, then. It's also odd to suggest that none of those researchers would ever talk to the press, especially "ex-"researchers who don't have to worry about getting fired.

There's some SERIOUS survivor bias in there, literally. Just because those previous "scary" technologies did not break the world does not mean that no technology ever will. This generation of AI won't, and I sincerely doubt any future evolution of AI along the current LLM model ever can. But burning hydrocarbons is and will have severe effects on the world's economy and resource politics. Massive buildup of nuclear weapons damn well could have destroyed society.

AI doesn't "understand the concept of a reward", nor does it need to. It's not functionally different than a classical nonlinear likelihood maximization. An arbitrary function is evaluated at different points in some parameter space, and the answer is the point that yields the minimum. If you want to train an AI that prioritizes correct answers over acceptable methods, you simply change how much each of those criteria is weighted in your objective function. AIs can effectively work in much higher parameter spaces than you can evaluate with classical minimizers, but that's about the only real difference.

Think about navigation. The objective function is minimum travel time between two points. Usually you can set options to avoid highways or tolls entirely. But you could just as easily have an option like "Avoid tolls limited by adding no more than 10 minutes per $1 saved". Then the objective function is just (total time + 10m*$1) and you get a different route.

All of the US states I cared to check had y=mx+b in the curriculum by grade 8 at the latest. Even the shitty ones where you learn it's god's will.

Uh huh.

You're long on claiming special knowledge and awfully short on demonstrating it. If you disagree then you don't know how it works.

You don't lose your PhD for getting scooped. You also don't lose it for scooping someone, even if you were "inspired" by their unpublished work. Ideas aren't protected. If you send them off to some corporation without an NDA, or a sufficiently unethical colleague, they'll get swiped with no repercussions except maybe distaste from the community. If it's a normal corp they might even tell you you can't publish your own work.

PhDs are revoked very seldomly and you generally have to do something bad relating to your own thesis to lose one.