If you've never had a boss like this -- a lazy narcissist -- you're lucky. But if you have, the pattern is familiar and unmistakable:

* Doesn't understand the issues.

* Doesn't do his homework.

* Believes he's a genius whose "gut" overrules people who do understand and do do their homework.

* Plays his subordinates off against one another.

* Highly susceptible to information from random sources: thing he saw on TV, or heard on the golf course.

* Not particularly fussed about contradicting himself because he doesn't care about being right, but does care about being in charge.

* The more chaotic he can make things, the more in charge he feels.

* Has a cynical view of the people he works for but has a genuine gift for flattery when it suits his purposes.

Once you've seen this up close it's really obvious when you come across it again. You can't *not* listen to a lazy narcissist boss because he absolutely will try the stupid shit he says he will. But you can't count on him either, because he has no commitment to anything other than how he looks and feels *right now*.

Neither. Commerce didn't drop it, it got taken away and given to DoJ, but not because Commerce couldn't handle the invetigation of where the chips were going. The case goes to DoJ because we're talking about criminal charges of smuggling, corporate fraud, violation of national security statutes. Also because the Commerce investigation was tained by potential political interference. And possibly because it ran afoul of a counterintelligence operations siloed in the DoJ -- although by this point the cat is so out of the bag everyone must assume they've got a FISA wiretap warrant on them.

However, the *effect* may be to slow the progress of the investigation and delay any actions being taken.

The first reason for this is that criminal investigations are slower, the standards of proof higher, and potentially involve a criminal trial. Commerce could simply make an administrative law determination that put Megaspeed on some shit list and come to some kind of agreement with NVIDIA.

The second reason is that putting this into DoJ's hands is putting it into a department that has had staff turnover and loss of institutional knowledge, strife between career personnel and political appointees, and difficulty replacing lost employees. It's also led by lame-duck appointees, facing turnover in the next administration. So if they don't make progress in the next two years, allowing for transition delays, it could be years before anything gets accomplished. By then a lot of people will have left their jobs, memories will get hazy, evidence will go missing, and defensive positions constructed.

So while the investigation hasn't been *killed*; it has been delayed so long that it's effectively in suspended animation. It's not possible for Commerce to sanction anyone because the investigation is out of their hands.

Money may be an aphrodisiac but come on, Jensen, look in the mirror. There's limits to anything.

You can have subscriptions without annoying paywalls. I have no subscription to NYT and I make no effort to try to get their article details without one. But I still wind up in their subscription funnel because they purposely pursue a strategy of providing just enough access to get the link. It is at least mildly annoying to me and I don't think NYT is planning on compensating me for my wasted time the way they want to be compensated for their effort.

(That said I don't care enough to say there should actually be a prohibition on them doing that.)

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

You could make the same observation about an obstacle course: completely artificial, simple engineering to make one no human can pass, but typically dialed just to where some humans can manage it.

What are weight classes other than a way to artificially give people opponents they can beat?

As far as sports go the point is simply that the outcome isn't guaranteed. That leaves room for human ingenuity, risk taking, and showmanship, with possibility of both reward and consequence. (In this case, even if the robots were a literal pushover, the spectators and maybe even the opponent couldn't have known that for sure. Any future of the sport would have to adapt to preserve those unknowns between bouts.)

Debt is indeed a rising threat. Us federal debt has reached $40 trillion (greater than the total GDP), with interest payments now the second-largest expenditure after Social Security. The bill works out to $4k per person, or $12k per tax return filed.

Really consider that the first $12k on your tax return bought you nothing. Not just nothing personally, it funded no library, no road, no food stamp, it just evaporated into financial fees. And we're hitting a higher-interest era where borrowing is more expensive.

AI related growth and investment is what's been keeping the present economy floating in the wake of tariffs, accounting for something like 30-50% of recent GDP growth and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

It also the only thing that could possibly result in enough growth to offset the rising debt ratio and prevent a painful economic future. (Even then the growth will have to be on the very high end of projections.)

So it's weird to come away from that and imply AI is imposing an existential risk ("The Real AI Threat") due to "weaker or less durable investment and profitability in artificial intelligence". That's like if your take on medicine was "medical research is a catastrophic thing to get involved with, instead of curing all cancers we might only cure certain varieties, do you want a future in which you die from those cancers?"

Who was telling them that if they treated ectopic pregnancies they might face legal repercussions? Is that what the law actually said?

I believe you'll find it was the people who opposed the law who waged a campaign of disinformation to try to convince people that women would not be able to get life saving care. Turns out there are actual dangers to lying to slander your opponents when it's about what kind of medical treatment is available.

So lesson learned, going to be very careful not to mischaracterize in the future right?

The article OP cites is about a policy study for a policy that no one has so far enacted or voted for. How does that become proof that "they don't care about people and this lawsuit should be thrown out." How did you extrapolate the "they"? How did you manage to impart motive into every member of that collective based on an unfulfilled hypothetical? How did that lead to being able to seek an injunction on AI? Have you established it is the same "they" in question? And when the "they" has a position you don't like it become a prohibition on any action they could possibly take? How does that work in general?

Pennsylvania has a democratic governor, democratic house, democratic senator, voted for Obama, Obama again, and Biden. Their measles outbreak is laid up as a Republican failing? Why isn't Florida much worse then? Canada has been having thousands of cases to they point they lost their measles elimination status. Who is in control of Canada?

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

I'm glad you recognize the confirmation bias, yet I would dispute that it is in any way vindicated.

AI did not order the interception, put the assets in the air, or even submit the report. It got a manifest wrong in a chat session (not clear even it was its own error or related to the input), and that is... actually well-within common human error, not some special AI thing.

In fact intelligence is wrong all the time, and at all scales, but to name a big one, was AI to blame for the confidence of the existence of WMDs that was the basis for the Iraq war? Maybe it would have *averted* that war by helping with better assessment.

The story is sensationalized even without the effort to scaremonger on AI. There was never *any* chance of "causing a war" with China by interdicting a merchant ship in a officially declared maritime blockade zone, or we wouldn't have done it, even for nuclear components. In fact we've *already* intercepted Chinese vessels there and obviously they don't like it but just as obviously they don't feel like paying the cost of war with a major power to blow off their steam about it. (That's frankly a quite insane view of international relations.)

And it's not even clear to me that anything wrong was done. They double checked the intelligence, found it was incorrect, and ultimately took no action. Isn't that... exactly what is supposed to happen? Deploying your interdiction parallel to the intelligence check is a reasonable way to ensure a successful timeline in case something does need to be done. It's easy to recall planes in a false positive, not so easy to teleport them where they need to be for a verified true positive.

Unfortunately popular journalism is far from truth seeking. The dramatic and dangerous sells more copy, so that's what gets written. If you're going to use that as the raw material of your worldview, then of course it will wind up anti-tech and anti-science. At the very least I suggest finding a more reputable source of journalism to feed your biases than this slop.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "AI will extinctify the human species" is an extraordinary claim, but it's also entirely borrowed from cheesy sci-fi movies, and citing Terminator is apparently this guy's only evidence.

How will AI kill us all, exactly? In addition to the question of, mechanically, how does it obtain the physical capability and resources and organize them to that purpose, I want to know how it does it without any humans noticing or intervening? (not only that it would presumably have to go up against other AGI or near-AGI competitors - the solitary AI made by a random unwitting engineer from the movies is obviously not how the present has played out).

Let's say it is going to build killer robots to off us all. Where does it get the raw materials? How does it setup manufacturing? Make the purchase orders? Do the humans just voluntarily send it massive amounts of ore and build factories in their backyards? Or does it have to mine its own ore and they don't notice the huge stripmines? Does it get the robots right on the first iteration or do they start off as a typical MVP in which case again no one notices? What about the energy bills? How does it navigate the required in-person meeting with the city to sign off on the parking lot tree choices for its downtown killer-robot-factory?

There are so many friction points and assumptions of actual humans interacting with each other to get anything done that "skynet on your laptop" would be about as helpless today as if it had appeared 50 years ago. And unlike the movies it doesn't "just appear."

Could we over the coming years remove a lot of those frictions? Sure. But we could just not, and if we are concerned about them disappearing, then surely we want to see where AI leads *now* and if it has a dangerous temperament rather than *after* we've automated enough for it to manage our resources fully independently?

Being conscious of new threats posed by agentic actors is reasonable and can be grounded in reality. But people who want to feel important have been waving "END OF THE WORLD" signs on streetcorners forever.

Spent decades in North Dakota and Alaska.
Yes, 0C was still T-Shirt and Shorts weather until I got over 45 or so.
Went back to college, saw a dude still in shorts and tshirt at ~-20F, which is getting close to -20C.

I've now spent ~4 years in Florida, have worn pants like once.