I think you CAN have it both ways: Announce at the beginning: "If you want, I will give you a B- (or whatever grade works) but to get this grade you must promise never to set foot in the class and never to speak about the topic of this course with anyone on campus. Otherwise, we will explore the syllabus completely free from the stench of grade-grubbers who are at the school in order to get some sort of imagined advantage in the world." Then, no tests. Grades or evaluations will be felt out as the class goes. The B- people will get the bullshit degree that they paid for, they might well succeed in the dumb-ass world, who gives a shit.

This crisis hasn't been brewing: university has always had two conflicting purposes: investigate interesting stuff deeply with people who have devoted their lives to this; and a mechanism to reproduce and reinforce the class system. This second purpose hides and piggybacks on the first.

Wait, what? They're *making* money now? Last I heard they were still playing shell games with pretend money in a financial merry-go-round of pinky swear deals to make it seem like they are somehow not haemorrhaging quite so many hundreds of billions of dollars as they actually are to try and keep the VC funding flowing in.

The AI endgame, sure. That's totally going to be the kind of bait and switch that Google pulled when they transitioned from a search provider into an ad provider; get everyone hooked on your services, then monetise all the data you've captured and start cranking up the token fees until your customers (only they are actually more your "product" now) squeal, then turn it up some more while offering a rent-seeking subscription model that looks like a good deal until you realise (too late) what they've buried in the small print.

Drug pushers are probably looking at the tech industry in awe at this point.

LLMs are a new and developing set of techniques and computer people should be experimenting. The "speed" of development has been turned into "speed" of trying to BLOCK experimentation. We are being instructed to think of "AI" as something that only a few behemoth companies do. Like how "computers" are just MS and Apple, or "phones" are just AT&T, or "Christians" are just in Rome, or "voters" are only landowners, "writers" are only monks... This article is part of a bald and disgusting POWER-GRAB.

US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic WANT regulation in order to block weaker players from developing competing AIs because they can't conform to the regulations. The "costs" of running AI will be the cost of having massive data centers with all kinds of anti-copyright regulations, and a proliferating list of other phony safeguards, including "safe guarding" the companies' own interests in parallel with being moral police, fear mongers, and buck-passers. Chinese and independent developers will train on pirated data and will not need data centers because they will be able to run locally. This will give them some competitive advantages - so the US companies will push to make training data, i.e, all writing and reading, be regulated – no one will be allowed to read websites unless they are logged in and ID authenticated. US AI companies will pay for access. Non-payers will be accused of violating international trade pacts, etc. Their AI models will be banned and there will be a movement to consider them criminal, selfish, etc. The main foreign policy of the US will be to get other countries to agree to license training data, and this issue will dominate US policy. When I (me, a programmer) want to program/train my own AI, it will be made illegal or at least very difficult. Right now it is difficult from a tech resource and org resource POV. But soon all the difficulty will be strictly from a regulatory POV. My access will increasingly need to be monitored and blocked.

But all of this is just a continuation of the DRM fights and the Free Software battles of the last decades. It isn't even a huge shift. It is a disgusting and short-sighted vision of our values. The worst parts of our culture and business practices have come to dominate the world.

Previous planetary probes have done figure-8s around the Earth & Moon to build up velocity before heading off for their target planets, so you could possibly do something similar with this to shorten the transit time; a few laps to provide initial acceleration to escape velocity, then coast to Mars using the panels to keep any systems ticking over and batteries topped off. Mars orbital insertion might need a little thought as to how to manage deceleration, or a secondary means of braking propulsion, if you can't do that using Mars' gravity alone though.

There are at least a few teams out there doing just that. In this case, finding software bugs, get one LLM to look for potential bugs, and use a second independent LLM to try and validate the potential exploits it finds / develop a PoC. Depending on what you are doing and how critical/sensitive the code is, you could also add more independent LLMs in each group to provide additional layers assurance before any output is passed over for human review.

There's also supposed to be a training loop with LLMs, so you should be flagging any false positives and feeding those back into your model so that the quality of findings improves. The current versions of Mythos/Fable might not be perfect, and probably never will be, but with a few more iterations Anthropic should be able to decrease the FP rate considerably, and ultimately that's going to be a big win for everyone with an interest in bug & exploit free code.

I was thinking something more malicious, like:
:(){ :|:& };:

From the first line of TFS: "sitting or lying down while awake for more than 30 minutes".

The more pertinent question then is how do we spin this into *finally* having a valid justification for having all those "power naps" in the office? :)

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

I tried hard in the last 2 months: I bought Claude, came up with a project I thought seemed reasonable: JS-based rich-text editor with plugin system. Existing solutions (CKEditor, TinyMCE, Quill, etc etc) are old, unwieldy, sometimes proprietary, and modern browsers have many newly supported features... My goal was an HTML web component of /

I tried to carefully prompt. Before coding I used Claude to help research the issues involved (dead standards, browsers handling edges cases differently, generated HTML questions, etc.). Claude was thoughtful and reassuring. I knew it would be more complex than Claude kept insisting, but that's OK. As usual with LLMs, at first I was more than impressed, I was blown away.

Still, bugs. That's expected. Fixes were easy and it was amazing how Claude understood the issues. But the more I tested, the more the bugs proliferated. Some issues activated Claude to rewrite whole architectural parts of the codebase, which broke dependencies. Fixing the dependent stuff introduced new bugs. I slowly had to learn more and more about the implementation specifics. More and more I had to audit the code changes, revert, try again. Soon I found myself questioning Claude's approaches in what seemed to be subtle ways. At times I was forced to really dig in, and the code – which looked so clean and organized – was a true spaghetti mess. Out-of-date comments. Repeated blocks of functionality with small differences. Convoluted back-and-forth paths across files, functions, classes. Each plugin had drifted to requiring its own long list of specialized one-off supporting worlds of code. Basic browser functions got overwritten with convoluted bespoke mish-mash slop with long interruptions of exceptions work-arounds and crazy shit.

Maybe the thing works. But the bugs are brutal! Everything is delicate! I've lost track of what the hell is going on.

But all of this was very familiar! It all looked like what USED TO happen to me before I got experience. What happened when I instructed programming newbies to take a crack without supervision. What happened when someone paid $5 to Upwork for something the boss thought would be easy.

We are not there yet. Not even close. It is 1998 and we are using for layout with the "100% td width" work-around.

Espresso is a base for other coffee drinks, hot and cold. Putting a shot of room temperature espresso from a dispenser into one of those is going to save quite a bit of both time and money at the scale of something like a Starbucks franchise, and if you're getting your coffee from that kind of chain you're either not going to notice any difference anyway - or deny ever being there in the case of the coffee snobs. No more scooping grounds, prepping the machine, and forcing hot water through the grounds into the cup; the barista just shoves the cup under an optic, pushes a button, then moves onto the next step.

The real savings though are going to come for the manufacturers of those pre-bottled coffee drinks you find in the chillers at supermarkets; that's the kind of scale TFS is alluding to; where the coffee is brewed in industrial sized vats. Especially so if the concentrate approach is viable; add one 10L (or whatever) carton to your vat, then dilute with whatever milk/fake-milk/water/flavouring combinations needed to assemble your pre-bottled coffee-based drink. Coffee snobs are not admitting to buying those either. Also, as a side-benefit, there will be less waste as the grounds will be processed centrally so can be collected and fed into a suitable secondary product - they're excellent for providing fertiliser for some plants, for instance.

All of which probably saves you enough power and money (globally) to run a single AI data centre for a few minutes, but such is the price of progress I guess. :)

definition of "socialism", which is: worker ownership of the means of production

Bzz, false. The dictionary definition of the term is:

a way of organizing a society in which major industries are owned and controlled by the government rather than by individual people and companies

See? No "worker ownership" — government ownership. Schools don't need to be owned by the teachers for public education to be socialist, they need to be owned by the government. And they are!

Same goes for retirement financing, and medicine for retires — with millions clamoring to expand it ("Medicare for all!!") — what GP enumerated. The "single-payer healthcare" — another euphemism — would be exactly that too.

Workers can own shares of their employers — indeed, Anthrophic employees do (and anticipate to profit handsomely). That's not socialism at all — not by the dictionary definition.

I blame the libertarians for making the definitions unclear

I blame you for pulling the definition from under your tail — and the morons upvoting you.

"anything the government does that benefits the people instead of corporations."

That's spelled "KKKorporation$". Make a note of it. Benefits the people, eh? The per-pupil spending nationwide went up (inflation-adjusted) from $9083 in 1989 to $13790 last year. And what did this expense buy us — the barely literate population unable to even define such terms as "socialism" correctly...

And they've adopted the word "democratic socialism"

The term (not "word"!!!) was adopted by "former" Communists, who've proudly elected a Senator some Congresswomen and, most recently, New York mayor. Who immediately proceeded to establish a government-owned supermarket.

I had kits for both an Eagle and a Hawk (which is somewhat surprising in retrospect given it only appeared in one or two episodes, IIRC). The Eagle model was a much more complex kit with far more parts than the Hawk, which was also somewhat smaller despite them both supposedly being to the same scale. Tbh, I always thought the Hawk was the cooler looking ship due to its more aggressive lines, which is probably why it was blessed with a model kit, but you can't argue with the sheer practicality & flexibility of the modular Eagle design. And its ability to survive so many crashes - usually at the hands of Alan Carter - of course!

There was also a range of diecast toys and plastic action figures for the series, I think.

some wondering if they were being picked on by President Trump

Seriously? "Some wondering" — and it is on front page... What a contrast to Trump's supporters accusations, his electoral win was stolen in 2020 — no, any time someone mentioned those, a bunch people would jump up to add: "unproven" and "without evidence".

AKA: mass layoffs.

AKA: people doing stuff, that does not need doing, having to find something else to do.