Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to say about printing small rocket parts, such as for the engines. But they were printing basically sheet metal cylinders, which is such an immensely slow and inefficient way to go about it, and it left them with parts that were heavier and less aerodynamic (rougher surface). Crazy that idea ever got any funding.

The one seen over Moscow might have been, with a bit more thrust...

"SapceX has got to be a huge scam too" - SpaceX launches the vast majority of the world's commercial cargo to orbit. The Falcon 9 FT has the highest success rate of any rocket with a statistically significant number of launches under its belt, and is dirt cheap. SpaceX's core operations are roughly breakeven, but that's including subsidizing the development of Starship. Starlink is a money printer.

There are lots of things sketchy about the SpaceX IPO, to say the least, but SpaceX, as a company, has been extremely successful with rocketry.

MidJourney was the first sizable AI company to become profitable, having done so back in 2022.

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.

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).

And if you dont want to be forced to, perhaps dont make it your marketing strategy to yell about how unsafe it is and how it shouldnt be allowed by the government :DDD

Yes!! though it only really make sense for presidential elections. For elections of a house, just implement some kind of propertional representation.

I think you are reading the document wrong. The European Commission is not a legislator, it just proposes laws.

First for all there will the Digital Fairness Act presented and MEPs are free to put into it whatever they feel is suitable to protect consumers including stopping kill-games language.

Also, the MEPs could use the Cloud and Development Act to strengthen reverse engineering and interoperability rights for game servers.

The interesting aspect is here:
"Rightsholders remain in principle free to determine whether and how their protected works may
be used, including by imposing temporal limits or other conditions on the uses authorised under
licences to third parties in accordance with Union copyright law."
While that is true the limit was not announced upfront.

The European Software Directive states in Recital 13:

"(13) The exclusive rights of the author to prevent the unauthorised reproduction of his work should be subject to a limited exception in the case of a computer program to allow the reproduction technically necessary for the use of that program by the lawful acquirer. This means that the acts of loading and running necessary for the use of a copy of a program which has been lawfully acquired, and the act of correction of its errors, may not be prohibited by contract. In the absence of specific contractual provisions, including when a copy of the program has been sold, any other act necessary for the use of the copy of a program may be performed in accordance with its intended purpose by a lawful acquirer of that copy."

The EC itself will proceed with a CoC style approach:
"While a legislative initiative to establish an obligation for publishers that sell or license video
games to consumers in the European Union to keep them in a playable state, as requested by the
ECI, is not envisaged, the Commission intends to initiate stakeholder exchanges by the end of
2026 to explore the possibility of elaborating a self-regulatory/industry-led code of conduct to
improve the management of video games’ end-of-life and strengthen transparency to consumers.
In addition, the Commission plans to present its report on the application of Directive (EU)
2019/770 by the end of 2026, covering also its application to the discontinuation of digital content
and services. "

This is not the end of the road.

Whether Anthropic was trying to hype about Mythos / Fable or not (and FYI, it is a pretty big leap forward), they absolutely did not want to get public access shut down. The US government very much seems to want to have exclusive access to it for now.

Also, to clarify the "jailbreak": They took open source projects that had known vulnerabilities, as well as deliberately introducing vulnerabilities into some other projects, then asked Fable to fix them, and then asked for test scripts to demonstrate that the exploits could no longer be exploited - the implication being that they could then use those exploits against unpatched systems. But what's the logic here? The challenge isn't "how to write exploits against known bugs", any model can do that. The challenge is finding the bugs - something Mythos / Fable has proven better than previous models at. Even if Fable refused to write said test scripts, it would automatically downgrade to Opus 4.8, and then *Opus* would have written those test scripts. Or any other model out there could do it, including free open source ones that can be safety-abliterated at will.

Is only half of women being able to read at all really the counterargument you were trying to make here?

And we're just talking the most basic aspect of an educational system. Kids today learn to read early in grade school.

ED: EEG, not fMRI.

And again, that's not to imply that they have any particular "mastery" in this specific case. Obviously, if they just typed "write the essay for me" into ChatGPT and submitted it without reading it, then they're not going to have learned much of anything from that. The question is, however, what did they do with their time instead? Because their brain was learning that instead.