I love a term a friend of mine used to use when talking about AI: "Narrowly superhuman" (before "superintelligence" got to be a thing).

AI is narrowly superhuman. It is able to do specific things that used to be defined as a "hallmark of intelligence" much better than a human. The easiest one? Summing numbers. It's both faster and more precise than a human.

AI gets more and more such areas it can do better than a human.

If we define "Superintelligent" to be "A computer system able to do absolutely everything we can somehow call intelligence better than any human", we will *never* have superintelligence. The things we define as intelligence will be in conflict; we'll land at the system being better at one at the cost of another.

I'm in favor with being careful about this development. But "prohibiting the development of superintelligence" isn't an option. It's already here.

Dividing the yearly US spend on Internet advertising by the number of people in the US that has Internet access gives $900-$970 spend per person per year, or $75-$81 per month.

Please choose the option you want:

1. I want to pay about $75 per month per member in my family into the ad auctions to not see any ads. Ie, keep the infrastructure, but let you opt to pay your share through money rather than attention.
2. I want to prohibit ads, and accept that everybody will have to pay for the sites they want access to, that there will be much fewer services, that there will be much higher transaction costs, and that the poor will have much less ability to access services. (Microtransactions won't solve this, due to the need for trust evaluation of same.)
3. I want some combination of 1 and 2, where some sides of ads are prohibited so it is possible to buy my way out of them at a lower price,. I accept that this will result in the loss of some services and lower access to others for the poor.
4. I want legislation that makes Internet ad blockers work more consistently. I accept that this just shifts the attention cost to other people, and have me getting the benefit without paying the cost.
5. I want to remove Internet ads and subsidize the sites through taxes.
6. I want to increase the requirements of Trust and Safety checks and format restrictions for ads, potentially accepting higher overhead (in what goes to content vs infrastructure) for less annoying/bad ads. I accept that doing this creates significant advantages of scale for ad networks.
7. Other, please describe, including where costs gets shifted with your proposal.

The above are my best attempt at listing possible options and their correct caveats. In most situations, I find ads annoying (who doesn't). Unfortunately, they are the main money highway of Internet content.

DISCLOSURE: I used to work for Google, where I rang infrastructure for stopping bad ads/advertisers and for removing fake clicks. I've also been interested at the use of sub-cent microtransactions to pay for content since the 1990s, though I've become disillusioned as I've learned more about the attention economics involved. Approving individual microtransactions has a higher attention cost than dealing with the ads, and bulking them per-site (through micro-subscriptions) will limit the number of sites that can have content.

And the ROI is really, really impressive. Each dollar in the NIH budget gets returned as about 5 (depending on the study) in increased GDP. To my knowledge, there is no other billion-dollar scale investment that has consistent, long-term returns like that.

Congress knows this fact. They commissioned many of the studies showing it. It is difficult to believe the Executive Branch is not aware of it. If we really wanted to be America First, rather than reducing the NIH budget, we'd be promoting another run of annual increases with the intent of doubling that allocation in real dollars over the coming decade. Contact your congressional representatives today to advocate for the idea.

He was over-leveraged and didn't manage risk well. In other words, he was a terrible fund manager.

No, the worst part about ads is that they exist at all in a form that intentionally disrupts your attention.

That fundamental issue is then exacerbated by the current societal tolerance for lies, and you get intrusive advertisements that are deeply misleading.

So, why are you tolerating current advertising at all when there are tools that effectively eliminate it?

The assumption is that using your phone / infotainment system to search for, possibly purchase, and play a new release is an attention-demanding task that takes substantial time. The consensus above is that Spotify's UI, in particular, is poor, and thus requires extra interaction, and thus attention off the road, exacerbating the problem. We know that attending to a phone, even briefly, is mutually exclusive to attending to the road. That alone is an explanatory mechanism for the increase in fatalities.

But then we augment that supposition by the additional effects that new music is also a distraction, albeit much lower grade than operating a phone. It might be a lesser effect, but listening to a song or three is also expected to span longer time than interacting with a phone, so might have substantial cumulative impact.

An additional effect that I have not seen mentioned above is the expectation that the demographic listening to top releases is likely to skew younger, and thus contains drivers with less experience than the population. Less experienced drivers are at far greater risk of accidents of any sort, and are more sensitive to distraction.

And, as a parent of teenagers, the solution is clear to me: do not frelling use your phone when driving, period.

From TFOriginalScientificArticle: "Additionally, death certificates included a field for reported usual occupation (the occupation in which the decedent spent most of their working life), generally completed by a funeral director with help from the decedent’s informant."

Looking at Figure 1 from the paper, taxi drivers and ambulance drivers are clear lower-bound outliers in terms of risk from Alzheimer's. But they also die a full decade before the eyeballed mean of the population. There are a couple of data points in the middle plot from that figure that have just slightly higher adjusted risk of Alzheimer's, but have lifespans at ca. 80 years that are well *above* the mean. Regrettably, the paper does not discuss those data points -- me, I'd want to have those occupations since they trade a very slightly increased risk of Alzheimer's for 15 more years of life.

And, then, the bit that's also not in the headline and TFS is that taxi drivers and ambulance drivers have *increased* risk of other forms of dementia, especially taxi drivers.

Also, disappointingly, the paper does not show the full ranked list of occupations (even in the supplementary data), highlighting only a small handful (taxi drivers, ambulance drivers, bus drivers, airline pilots, ship captains, and CEOs).

At least someone realized that it would be a good idea to scan outgoing traffic.

One hopes that the internal reaction amongst the leadership was more than just, "bloody hell."

You're making a classic mistake of reversing an association: "this A is a B" does not mean "every B is an A".

Which is to say, you're ignoring the fact that junior associates have attributes and capabilities that LLMs lack, in a wince-inducing oversight. Indulge me with a Sophoclean interrogatory: what can humans do that LLMs cannot?

This is the idea that the anti-AI folks are getting wrong. I'm a vastly more efficient and better writer, of code or of English prose, with an assistant than without. Assistants are, however, imperfect, whether human or artificial.

The current generation of LLM assistants are equivalent in quality of output to having a junior human associate, but at 1/100th the cost. And they're about 100x faster. Is their output perfect? No, but neither is the work-product of a human associate. Does the LLM (or human) output provide me with much of the legwork necessary to create things of clarity, efficiency, and, sometimes, beauty? Oh, hell yes.

I had an argument just last week about didactic presentation with a stubbornly anti-AI professor for whom I have been hired as an instructor for the course he runs. I made the assertion that very shortly, the expectation will be that anyone in that profession who does not use AI will not be bringing their full potential to the task. Personally, I think it is already true that anyone who is fundamentally a communicator of ideas and is not using AI is not achieving their best, but the field does not yet carry the expectation or assumption that everyone has an AI assistant. Not yet, but it will.

Some bamboo species are even halophiles, growing where there is low-quality, brackish water and pulp-yielding trees are rare as hen's teeth.

For services that have no damned business knowing my real birthdate, I always use the start of the Unix epoch: 1/1/1970.

It has two advantages; (1) most calendar picker widgets default to January 1, so it's fewer clicks, and (2), for me at least, it is close enough to being true that no one would ever challenge it, even in person.

The factual reality it ignores is that mistakes by the judicial system in cases covering petty crime, family court, domestic disputes, civil torts, etc., have nothing whatsoever to do with mistakes made in capital cases. Asserting that mistakes made in a local municipal court, which would never see a capital case, is grounds for banning capital punishment is like saying that worms in avocados imported from Mexico means the sale of all fruit grown in the US should be banned.

Conflating capital cases with non-capital cases works against your cause, not for it. If you don't understand that, then you are less likely to achieve your goals. Zealotry -- which is fundamentally a political pose -- is not an efficient means to create change.

That is the most politically saturated comment I've read on Slashdot in years. It completely ignores factual reality in order to push a specific agenda.

Here's a hint: if you want your cause to be taken seriously, don't become blinded by zealotry. In this case, there are plenty enough things wrong with the death penalty that you don't need to make this sort of off-putting overgeneralization, and, by doing so, you are harming your cause, rather than helping it.