Without getting into the question of good or bad, chatbot prose is quite distinct from most professional prose. There are lots of common patterns in AI prose that are fairly rare to nonexistent in human-written prose.

Definitely not. Once you've read enough of it, AI prose isn't just easy to distinguish, it's impossible to miss. It's a very definite and unique style.

I just tried it, doesn't work. Alt-numbers just jump to different browser tabs.

Word? Really?

I'm an EMACS user. Complex key combinations are fine.

Fascism doesn't necessarily try to burn down science; Hitler did eject (and murder) a lot of Jewish scientists for being Jewish, but his regime was generally quite pro-science otherwise. Other autocratic regimes were also quite pro-science, once established. The USSR poured a lot of money into science. Not as much as the US but that was mostly because the USSR didn't have as much money to pour.

The regimes that reject science are populists and autocrats who are just establishing their power. Populism is fundamentally about rejection of influential and powerful elites, and the intelligentsia is both elite, because by definition it's a tiny and hard-to-enter group, and influential, because it's full of smart people who can give good policy advice within their areas of expertise. Populists don't necessarily need to eject the scientists and other academics, but they need to be seen bringing them under control. Trump doesn't want to shut Harvard down, he wants Harvard to bend to his will and, more importantly, be seen bending to his will.

Of course, to the extent that a government succeeds in disempowering and controlling the intelligentsia, it also drives them away and deprives itself of the benefits of their work.

Autocratic regimes in the making, whether populist or not, also seek to disempower the intelligentsia because they need to destroy the previous centers of power to solidify their own power. This is why most of the Communist revolutions imprisoned or killed all of the university professors right off. Some went a lot further; the Khmer Rouge basically murdered anyone with any post-secondary education, including all of their schoolteachers which, uh, didn't bode well for the future.

In the modern day, populism and autocracy tend to coincide because democracy has basically won as the default way any regime holds legitimacy. Most of the autocratic regimes today are at least notionally democratic, even if the elections are somewhat rigged and even if the autocrat uses their control of the media to control public opinion in their favor. Anti-elitism is basically necessary to retain autocratic power in a democracy because it's impossible to do without lying a lot, and that means you have to suppress people who seek truth. That means academics and journalists must be discredited and disempowered.

So, it's definitely something that autocratic populists do, because it's essential to their ability to gain and retain power. The long-term effects countries who go this way are predictable.

I suspect you were just asked to be nice, and through a combination of spectrum OCD and insufficient cognitive therapy, you decided somehow you were being asked to do something wrong.

So you helped elect an ignorant sociopath. Congrats on that. Maybe you should have attended more of those cognitive therapy sessions.

Neither does Google, and for the same reason: It would be selling the goose that lays the golden egg.

That program was shut down in 2024, so it's no longer running. It's an interesting point, though. The reason LE was buying that data was because they couldn't easily get subpoenas or warrants for it, which makes it far worse.

The amount of money AT&T was making was trivial, a few tens of millions per year at the high end. For a company that has annual revenues exceeding $100B it's hard to see why they even bothered. My theory is that they were more interested in the goodwill it earned them with the DoJ. Anyway, I bring this up because at least for Google (who I worked for for 15 years, so I have a pretty good understanding of the internal views), such trivial potential revenue would be seen as absolutely not worth the PR risk. It's much better for Google (and other tech companies) to be seen fighting warrants and subpoenas.

Also, I'll mention that the strategy I described -- treat user data as a liability, encrypt it all, burn the keys as soon as the data isn't needed any more -- is exactly what Google does. I'm not saying that could never change, but it would require the business environment to change, and if anything the environment is getting more sensitive to user privacy, not less.

Then if Ring is smart they should make it easy for users to provide the data to the police, and ensure that Ring can't, making themselves useless as a subpoena target and encouraging police to go ask the homeowners directly.

Companies should, in general, avoid keeping any user data one second longer than they legitimately need it. Data should be viewed as a liability more than an asset, and every company that achieves significant scale with user data soon realizes this, though some take longer than others to learn the lesson.

The reason it's a liability is because it exposes the company to an endless stream of warrants and subpoenas, and contrary to popular belief, the government does not pay for that data. In some cases the government might pay a portion of the expenses the company incurs in responding, but it's always still a net loss, and most of the time the government just shows up with a court order and says "Hand it over or be held in contempt of court". What makes it even worse is if companies actually want to be good stewards of the data and not hand over more than they should, they'll often get overly-broad requests and then have to go to court to fight to narrow or quash the requests.

This all gets very expensive. It's just a cost of doing business... but it's a cost that can be avoided if you don't have and can't get the data.

Encrypt everything, and arrange to destroy the keys when you no longer need the data is the best way to do it, too. Scrubbing large databases quickly and effectively is hard. Deleting a set of AES keys is a lot easier. This also means that you can focus your internal access controls on controlling which systems and employees can get the keys.

I'd encourage Ring to find ways to close the window of access even more.

It wasn't 7 years to find the right spot. It was 7 years to realize Texas isn't as accommodating as he hoped, and he can buy off a broke state cheaper than a rich state. Of course, finding enough people to move to the Texan Everglades was easy compared to finding enough who will live in the bayous to run his steel penis rocket facilities.

The quote was from the Bavarian government guy, so it seems unlikely that he's concerned about Waymo's competitive worries.

Also, German regulators are very cautious, so I expect Tesla's camera-only and less-mature robotaxi service will have a harder time getting approved.

Well, given that Waymo has been testing for nearly 20 years and been operating commercially for six years, currently operating nearly 4000 vehicles in 11 cities doing 500k rides per week... there's not a lot of risk.

Roads in Munich aren't terribly different from roads in US cities. Stoplights work a little differently. Munich does get a little snow, but rarely very much and it almost never lasts long. If Waymo's vehicles can't deal with it they may just suspend service... though I expect they'll probably handle it fine. They're supposed to go live in Detroit and Minneapolis this year, and if they can handle the weather there (where just shutting down for snow is not an option), Munich will be no problem at all.

So, not much like OceanGate.

The recording engineer only records (and maybe mixes) the audio that is generated, which is part of what I meant by "mechanical process", along with generating the audio. Dre could use AI to transform his ideas into digital audio tracks, obviating the recording engineer and the performers, and to then select and mold the results. This would still require talent and creativity, which was my point.

Caldera didn't buy SCO.

I didn't bother getting into the Novell situation or the fact that TSG didn't actually acquire the assets they'd have needed to do what they tried to do, since my goal was just to distinguish between SCO and TSG, but, yes, the details get pretty intricate.

If you were worried about being chased by kill bots, go and watch some videos from drone operators in Ukraine. Robots don't need feet for that job.