Use them?! First: why would I want to be locked into Meta's proprietary APIs? And second: it doesn't even include a near-infrared swimsuits mode. I can't believe they omitted such a basic feature. (Zuck, you call these perv glasses!?!)

Besides, from a style perspective, they just aren't nearly gargoylie enough. Whatever perv glasses I buy will have erect antenna(s) (not integrated into the frame), much larger aperture cameras for astronomy, and lots of blinkenlights (including a cool-looking Locutus-style laser). It doesn't surprise me at all, that the more style-conscious sex isn't buying them.

Meta's specific product is ridiculous. But I nevertheless defend the overall tech.

For any particular one, yes. For the claim for an entire category... that needs proof.

its advocates have already gotten so much of what they could have possibly hoped for

Except the one thing that actually matters: being able to really use it. I still (in 2026!) can't use Bitcoin to pay for things at my local grocery store, car mechanic, or even Amazon.

Bitcoin didn't take off. Unless it suddenly gets more popular by a few orders of magnitude, it remains a useless dead end.

It's not super intelligence because it currently has tremendous blind spots. But so do people, just different ones. I *think* that blind spots are a necessary feature of the compression used to take a huge volume of signal and compress it into something that will fit into storage.

OTOH, note that the "blind spots" are only "relatively blind". And can be worked around. Actual human 6D geometricians exist, but they approach it via symbolization. (Actually, they are really n-dimensional geometricians, but some specialize on problems in 6 dimensions.) But an AI could presumably be designed to work natively in 6 dimensions (or any specified number), however for most problems this would not be an advantage, but rather the contrary.

Note that human thinking is basically either planar or linear. To handle 3-space we use various short-cuts than enable dimensional reduction. (Unless you are counting time as one of the dimensions...then it get more complex.) Compare the way you play 3-d tic-tac-toe toe the way you play 2-d tic-tac-toe. That's not really fair as the 3-d one is inherently more complex, but it give you an idea.)

The electoral college was necessary to get the states to agree to join under a single government. It wasn't, exactly, corruption. And it wasn't argued that it was "for democracy". States were where the power was at the time. Even in the 1860's many people were more loyal to their state than to the federal government.

And I think the direct election of Senators was a mistake. Democracy when actually practiced routinely tramples on the rights of minorities.

Blaming Wharton School of Business for what Trump tried to do with the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario is absurd. By all accounts, he didn't learn anything in his time there and his professors didn't think highly of him. There's no way his university had anything to do with that.

Besides, lots of people graduated from Wharton. Which others, who graduated from there, suffer from Trump's derangement syndrome and a need to rename geography?

Unless you give sources, I'm going to assume you are stating your opinions rather than facts. ISTM that I've heard of a few "vibe coded" successes, though I'll admit I wasn't interested enough to either document or remember them. And lack of marketing is a sufficient explanation.

No. But I'm sure they expect there not to be many jobs in computer programming when an AI can do it cheaper than they can. And that's what's being advertised. And entry level jobs are already down.

To be fair, the Roadrunner cartoons were pretty much all the same, with differing details. Retreads aren't necessarily bad. Formulas exist because they work.

I just don't like the things I've seen in the last 40 years. (OTOH, I didn't like the movie version of "The Wizard of Oz" when I was a kid...I much preferred the book version.)

What applicable US law would any of those responsible face? Misfeasance is the only one that comes to mind, and I think that's a state level law.

If you mean the laws SHOULD criminalize and punish this kind of behavior, I agree. They don't for high military or executive branch officials. Not even after they leave office.

If they would reprocess it, much of that 3.6 million pounds would become either valuable nuclear fuel or totally inert scrap.

The rest would only last 200-500 years before becoming totally inert.

AI isn't a one trick pony. It's also not one thing, it's a bunch of things. Some are good in some areas, others are good in others. LLMs are good at predicting text...but that's only one piece of AI.

There are lots of reasons to be unhappy with AI. The weavers had good reason to fear the automated looms. But that doesn't mean it's not already more powerful than people have accepted, and it's not evidence that it isn't getting more powerful.

AGI is poorly defined hoopla, but ... slowing down and being more careful about safety seems like an EXCELLENT idea, and "prisoner's dilemma" means that in the absence of communication and agreement it won't happen.

Well, in this case several companies haven't agreed. Of course, the one's I'm thinking of aren't US companies, and aren't currently frontier models, but they sure exist and are available.

That seems to be a different definition than the one they're talking about. It sounds like they're talking about evolutionary origins, and the "reptilian brain" metaphor is talking about function...
They probably aren't exactly all the same cells of the body.

There's also the sympathetic and parasympathetic division. Again it's separation along a *different* dimension.