Yep.

Unions like SEIU pull this carp all the time. And the politicians they contribute to help them do it.

In Michigan, for example, they "organized" home care "workers" ... who are overwhelmingly just relatives of disabled people. (The state saves a bundle by providing some funds to pay family members for taking care of their own disabled family members.)

How did SEIU do that, you ask, when state law says that the "employer" in this program is the disabled person himself? Why, they got the state Dems to change the law, so that solely for the purpose of collective bargaining, the "employer" is the state! Easy peasy.

For no other purpose though - they "cared" so deeply for these "workers" that they sure as heck were not going to make them true state employees, lol.

Most of the relatives of disabled people were like "WTH is this?" and threw the "organizing" ballots in the trash. So SEIU "won" the "election" to "organize" the "workers". (creating a worldwide shortage of scare quotes in the process)

Utter bottom feeding scum.

What exactly defines a “gig” amount of hours worked to define the “gig driver”, and is there a reason this bill doesn’t define the gig worker instead of just those with a job behind a steering wheel?

Pretend your answers are being defending in a courtroom. Because that’s where the next gig might be.

Side note: I hope those arguing for more protections do not price themselves right out of the market. It’s going to be a PPV amount of irony to hear about THAT phone call..

(Gavin Newsom) ”Yo, Elon my man! Hey listen..I know we’ve had a couple of creative differences over the years, but I’m gonna need 374,000 of those cybercabs of yours here by December..Yes. That many. Yeah, the meatsack-free version..All of them..Yeah, I KNOW we just did that but our budget is going vegan next year..”

Around 2029 we'll see that a ride is available for $16 or $31 with a driver.

Rider's choice. I'll guess it goes about 80/20.

What is "it" in this sentence?

Are you talking about the minuscule Google RAG model whose weights are probably measured in megabytes to lower-gigabytes and which you could run on a cell phone with capacity to spare, and comparing it to the multi-terabyte frontier models in question?

He seems like a real scumbag but it's worth keeping in mind that the people who told us that have a massive incentive to pin their crimes on a scapegoat.

Since we pretty much know that FTX was the #1 donor to a party's political action committee with money laundered through Ukraine, he would have been smarter to wait for that conflict to conclude.

The people who benefited from the crime also prosecuted him which is never reliable.

It might not be FedSlop but unless it is proven that both parties didn't benefit we shouldn't trust this government either.

We do know that Ladybug Graham got $18M straight into his bank account from Ukraine so there is certainly smoke.

It's only since a dead man can't sue for libel that people are willing to print that nugget now.

Not in a Corporate Democracy.

The people who would prosecute OpenAI want to use OpenAI to maximize their power and wealth at your financial and legal expense.

Remember when they tried to extradite Gary McKinnon for twenty years for looking at a spreadsheet when he accidentally got RDP access to an unsecured NASA desktop with a simple Perl script? Intent is not relevant for prosecutors (mens rea should be an element in a Constitutional case).

The legal basis is there but the will to power is not.

Two systems of courts for different classes of people (yet again). It would be an error to call that a Justice System.

n.b. the Culture War psyop is there to try to convince you that the classes are something else.

But ... but ... I've been told here on /. that police showing up at your door because of a social media post that you've made, say, is perfectly fine, is evidence of the system working, and has no chilling effect at all?

There are layers and layers of irony, I guess ...

I'm saddened that you would allow these researchers to get away with misgendering people.

at least the person downloading such a component is responsible for "looking over it" before using it.

I'm sorry, but since when? You absolutely should not be tasking every single user of major projects with the responsibility of doing a code review on the whole thing before installing it. There needs to be a clear distinction between "fly-by-night thing that some rando uploaded" and "library that a million people depend on". In the traditional approach, the latter was something tat you installed with a package manner, while the former was something you went and fetch off e.g. Github or whatnot - and if you did the latter, then you were accepting that it was untrusted software. But now we have both (including the potential for "soundalikes") installed by the same means with no distinctions made by the install method. That is not good.

I"ll just note here that people, and companies such as WP Engine, already use "WP" instead of "WordPress" for precisely this reason. And everyone in this space knows that. There isn't any confusion.

(And I don't want to hear about "confusion" from the guy who's company only exists because of the confusion between wordpress.org and wordpress.com ...)

The funny thing about all this is that their only goal appears to have been to download publicly-available data off of UK government websites. I'm betting that they were (A) being tested on a knowledge-related task, and (B) not given direct access to the internet, but their tool capabilities involved access to the "gem" command (so that they could install Ruby packages for their work), and so decided to abuse (B) to cheat on (A).

Once again: training a model with the reward being "does it solve the task?" without looking at how it solves the task is very, very dangerous. This is basically the plot of Universal Paperclips.

I know a LOT of software that could use that as a pull request...

Of course the third bomb probably wouldn't have gotten used regardless of the order, as the next bomb (made from the infamous Demon Core) was scheduled to be ready to drop on the 17th, whereas Hirohito announced the surrender on the 15th (wasn't signed until 2 September, but it's hard to imagine that the US would have dropped the bomb after the announced surrender).

One of the amazing things is that the atomic bombings didn't shift the vote in the 3:3 deadlocked Japanese war council at all; the hawks (Anami, Umezu, Toyoda) remained focused on adaptation, not surrender. But it did make the doves (Suzuki, Togo, Yonai) more desperate, and Suzuki met with Hirohito. Hirohito had already been looking for an opportunity to surrender, having had plans to send Prince Konoe to Moscow to ask Stalin to function as a neutral broker to end the war (with secret instructions to accept "peace at any price"), but the trip was delayed by the Russian side, ostensibly by the Potsdam Conference (but in reality, to prepare for the invasion of Manchuria). When the terms of the Potsdam conference came out, Togo told Hirohito that they "were the most reasonable to be expected in the circumstances", to which Hirohito replied, "I agree. In principle they are acceptable." But the urgency to accept that in July wasn't present. Everything started collapsing in August, with the loss of their mainland and Pacific territories, the Soviet invasion, and the atomic bombings. What the bombings achieved was to help stir Hirohito to imminent action (which risked failing, as there was a coup attempt against him (the Kyujo Incident) to stop Japan from surrendering). The hawks saw unconditional surrender not as agreement to the loss of their sovereignty, but as agreement to enslavement.

But this is getting rather off topic. :) Main topic: if you think your AI is as much of a risk to the fate of humanity as the atomic bomb, which many of these people truly believe, then you can expect similar hesitancy as with the developers of the atomic bomb. They felt an urgent need - ending a brutal war - but at the same time had deep apprehension about what they were doing and how the fruits of their labour would be used.

And if you want a past example of scientists who feared their creation wanting to slow down, stop, or even undo it, BTW, let us consider the atomic bomb. Farrington Daniels took a poll of the Chicago nuclear scientists in 1945 asking what they wanted to happen with the atomic bomb. Remember that these were the people whose literal job was to make a weapon. Only 15% - 1 in ~7 - wanted the US to use it as it actually did, e.g. just start bombing cities just a couple days apart. Only a small majority wanted it even used in Japan, even against military targets without the Japanese first being invited to a demonstration in the US and being given ample opportunity to surrender. 13% - nearly as many as those who wanted the US to use it as it actually did - didn't want it used at all under any circumstance, in a war that had already caused a million American casualties.

The problem that they faced was that people like Groves** really wanted to bomb cities, and they, as the rank and file, didn't get a vote.

** - It seems dubious that Truman really understood what he was signing onto. While he never shirked from responsibility for authorizing it, the paper trail shows that he didn't seem to understand what he was approving at the time. In his diary before the attacks, he writes about the weapon, but about how he insisted it not be used against civilians, killing women and children, because he didn't want to sink to what he saw as the barbarism of the Japanese. In his first speech after the bombing, he refers to Hiroshima as "a military base", not a city, and says it was chosen to, insofar as possible, avoid the killing of civilians - but that if Japan did not surrender, then the US would bomb Japan's war industry, and then thousands of civilian lives would then be lost. Earlier drafts showed that it didn't contain the "insofar as possible" caveat. He genuinely didn't seem to realize what he was authorizing at the time. But Groves absolutely knew what he was doing, and deliberately selected sites for maximum civilian casualties. Truman seems to have come to understand what was going on by shortly after Nagasaki, where he gave the order to cease use of atomic weaponry, saying that the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible and that he couldn't stomach the thought of "killing all those kids".