I rarely defend China, am deeply suspicious of their government & deplore the huge ramp in polluting coal plants they built in the early years of their expansion.
Were it up to me i would have taken a 5-10 years longer and built them all with the best available tech at the time.
but since them, and at least 10 years past by this point, China has enacted pollutions controls on coal plants that are on par with the most stringent in the West, at least in places where new coal is still allowed.
in addition they not only have the most supercritical plants in the world and while decomm'ing of older plants has been proceeding slowly, they haven't grandfathered any

Apparently I'm not human? I like hyphens, en dashes and em dashes. I understand what all of them mean and how to use them correctly, and I find it helpful when text that I'm reading uses the right one.

From the summary:

If the world's most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.

That's not the right conclusion. It doesn't say much one way or the other about AGI. Plausibly, ChatGPT just likes correctly using em dashes — I certainly do — and chose to ignore the instruction. What this does demonstrate is what the X user wrote (also from the summary):

[this] says a lot about how little control you have over it, and your understanding of its inner workings

Many people are blithely confident that if we manage to create superintelligent AGI it'll be easy to make sure that it will do our bidding. Not true, not the way we're building it now anyway. Of course many other people blithely assume that we will never be able to create superintelligent AGI, or at least that we won't be able to do it in their lifetime. Those people are engaging in equally-foolish wishful thinking, just in a different direction.

The fact is that we have no idea how far we are from creating AGI, and won't until we either do it or construct a fully-developed theory of what exactly intelligence is and how it works. And the same lack of knowledge means that we will have no idea how to control AGI if we manage to create it. And if anyone feels like arguing that we'll never succeed at building AGI until we have the aforementioned fully-developed theory, please consider that random variation and selection managed to produce intelligence in nature, without any explanatory theory.

It'll be at least half of that in ten years.

The Zoomers have no interest in cable TV.

> Why not just build the proper infrastructure with what we know works?

I tried to do this locally. The government allows the pole owner (electric or telephone usually) to charge $50/mo/pole to the startup that wishes to hang wires.

The owner pays $5/mo in property taxes to the town.

There are exceptions for large corporations that are in the state's good graces.

It's just to keep competition limited to the cartel.

Short answer: corrupt government.

This was my first thought as well.

Such marketplace confusion!

All very true, except you imply that this is a new situation in US politics. It's not. Until the 1883 Pendleton Act, political appointments were always brazenly partisan and there was no non-partisan civil service (except, maybe, the military). Firing appointees for petty vindictiveness was less common, but also happened. Trump isn't so much creating a new situation in American government as he is rolling the clock back 150 years, to a time when US politics was a lot meaner and more corrupt than what we've been accustomed to for most of the last 100 or so years.

Of course, the time when our Republic has had an apolitical civil service, strong norms around executive constraint and relatively low tolerance for corruption corresponds with the time when our nation has been vastly more successful, on every possible metric. That's not a coincidence.

i'm not usually on the leading edge of anything but dealing with cable providers was like ***wiping with a bladed belt sander

Oh, I forgot to add: Stage 6 is the dumbest and most short-sighted one yet. It only works by ignoring the large regions of the world which will become unlivable, or nearly so, and the fact that those regions are home to billions of people. Those people won't just lay down and die, so the areas that are still livable -- and maybe even more comfortable! -- with warmer temperatures are going to have to deal with the resulting refugee flood, and the wars caused by this vast population upheaval and relocation.

But, yeah, if you ignore all the negative effects and focus only on the potentially good ones, you can convince yourself it'll be a good thing. SMDH.

I see from the comments that we've hit a new stage in climate change denialism.

Stage 1: Denial of warming: Denying that the climate is changing at all.
Stage 2: Denial of human influence: Admitting the climate is changing but denying that humans are causing it.
Stage 3: Denial of impact: Admitting human causation, but claiming the impact will be insignificant.
Stage 4: Denial of solutions: Admitting that it's real, we're causing it and that it will be significant, but denying that there is anything we can do about it.
Stage 5: Denial of timeliness: Admitting that we could have done something about it, but now it's too late.
And now, Stage 6: Denial of negative impacts: Admitting that it's real, and significant, and that maybe we could do something, but trying to spin it as beneficial.

What system component would enforce those restrictions? Unless Google modified Linux to add an entirely new access control scheme it wouldn't be the kernel, which would make the sandboxing much easier to break out of.

But that's not the biggest problem with your suggestion. The biggest problem is that users cannot be trusted to make complex security decisions, which your toggles definitely would be. That sounds condescending, I know, but it's backed up by a vast amount of experience and evidence. You have to keep in mind that approximately all of the three billion Android users know nothing about computing, nothing about security, and less than nothing about computer security.

Obviously. That's not the point I was addressing.

People have much higher expectations of mobile security. Also, most mobile phone users have never used any desktop/laptop, so they aren't even aware of the very low bar for security expectations set by desktop OSes.

If this were the case they would not permit manual selection of the rapid acceleration mode.

A guy I knew had an early Model S.

When he wanted to impress me with the acceleration he tapped a couple settings on the screen to put it into Ludicrous Mode

This was around 2013 or so.

I'm not seeing how this is a problem.

I have a V6 and a V8 truck and both need a manual low gear selection to take off like a rocket. OK, the V6 not so much but the V8 can spin the rear tires in 2WD mode.

I don't let the average drivers in my life use it.

They would hit a tree if they were given a Tesla that was always in Ludicrous Mode.