One thing I noticed is Google's AI Overview is really good at answering things you would expect a search engine to know. If I ask Claude something it will hypothesize and maybe make things up, or do a web search maybe, but Google's AI Overview (Gemini?) seems to have faster access to information and knows about recent events. For example I just typed into the chrome search bar "can you tell me about the earthquake in venezuela? I think they found two boys this morning" and it picks up BBC news which is actually where I heard the story and provides a link. I think that is how it should work. I don't know how Open AI works and tldr, but if they are crawling NYT and spouting part of their articles, or adding mistakes while making it seem like it is NYT, then yeah that is a problem. While progress etc. is important, journalism in general has been disproportionately hit by Google and others slurping up say a reuters feed and becoming the de facto news source. So yeah, a model has info baked in but adding new events and how they are presented is a different story.

These can be published or accessed, but never both at the same time.

It has been my experience, sad to say, that online stores aren't above selling consumer credit card information either, and I've grounds to think Amazon is one that does this.

I have an industrial air conditioner for my home. (It's a small home, but summers are increasingly severe.)

I don't recall being asked a damn thing.

My suspicion is that this is scaremongering.

I have been stress-testing AIs with increasingly complex projects for some time. The Chinese AIs struggle, but actually do a FAR better job of handling massively complex tasks than Grok, and Gemini just rolls over and whimpers at anything above a very low level of complexity.

What I've found is that the Chinese AIs tend to be sycophant but do "understand" complex projects properly in that you can ask specific technical questions and the answers will be generally very accurate. Any sort of critical analysis is beyond them, though. (Ether that, or I'm a mega-genius. Which....doesn't sound terribly likely.)

Of the "Top AIs", ChatGPT is good on basics but is incapable of any kind of detailed generation. Claude is brilliant at detailed generation, but overloads with anything but a tiny data set.

I've been putting up the projects on Gitlab for a while, so anyone who wants to see an AI break down and cry in despair is able to do so.

The secret tools don't bother me - they'll have long understood how to use Big Data and Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. AI isn't going to find out any more than combinations of those tools will, because that's basically all AI is - a Big Data classification system.

So you're telling Claude something vague and washy, then Claude invents a prompt that might vaguely possibly be somehow related to what you want along with a drink that is almost but not entirely quite unlike tea. Claude then recurses through this until it has a Celtic knot so intricate that it has its own Hausdorff dimension. What burps out is a product that is completely useless and patented to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

They won't be OceanGate-grade. They used PRCF that had already been rejected by quality control. That's a non-starter in aircraft.

As production has ended, if the A380 is genuinely necessary, then the economics shift somewhat. That doesn't mean they CAN be replaced, from the sounds of it they can't* (at least in many cases), but the inability to replace the aircraft would mean that options that aren't rational become necessary.

*I have to be careful here. If the wing is designed to be the absolute minimum weight possible, then I don't see how they could be without fully disassembling the entire wing and then reconstructing it from the ground up. And adhesives/welding might mean that just can't be done. At all. On the other hand, there's no obvious reason why you couldn't design a wing to have far more structural support than actually needed AND make spars deliberately maintainable and replaceable. I don't have an A380 handbook in front of me, so can't say how Airbus approached this. But it seems improbable that they're built to be swapped.

The Trash 80s? Had a Commodore PET 3032. A whole 1 megahertz. On the other hand, the IEEE 488 meant that I could send a command to one disk drive to transfer to a second disk drive, whilst printing, with the computer then totally free to actually do other stuff. SCSI it wasn't, but for the time, it was an ingenious solution to a lot of problems.

Sheer luxury, lad! Sheer luxury!

We had to make our own bits and push them uphill! Both ways! In the snow!

Pah, youngsters.

However, some of you might be old enough to remember the April 1st when the front page turned pink and a link to Cute Overload caused absolute chaos. Did CmdrTaco ever get a pony, btw?

And the number of false convictions (roughly 25% of those convicted in the US) doesn't cause a problem for you?

Then you're part of the problem.

US: 66% (Wall Street's numbers aren't those found in official statistics)
UK: 28.9%
Holland: 23%
Norway: 16%
China: 6%

US' conclusion: The rate is a complete mystery, we've no idea how to decrease it, let's do more of what we're currently doing differently to everyone else.

There is a slight possibility this may be flawed.

I think part of it is that TikTok is short format, and current AI video generators fit that. Also it is probably easier to monetize slop on TikTok. And a lot of people doomscrolling, the algorithm is feeding you. All of that leads to it probably being the biggest experimentation ground for AI video, if I took a guess (and I am not really that into social media tbh, just slashdot, reddit and tiktok). Funnily enough if you are interested in AI, current events and video art tiktok is pretty good, they have some interesting science videos by physicists, open source projects you should know, etc. Though reddit is better for AI news.

There are I think some actually valid uses that might also be called AI slop, for example partly or completely AI generated video or slideshows over a human or AI narrated story, either something like reddit writer prompts like those sci-fi ones, video of a tiktokker illustrating something using AI driven presentation, or manhwa recaps where they seem to show you just the first few minutes of a two hour series made in china, etc.

What is really infuriating and needs to be turbo-banned is deepfake or just faked news stories, I don't care if they are left or right, where I could not tell if some were actually vidcasters I knew or faking them until I fact checked them. There are also a series of animal stories and I cannot tell if all are AI or not, like the baby wolf / duck / goat that comes to your door for help to rescue their trapped mom, night vision showing dog playing with wolf, hugging super-sized animals, etc. which maybe ONE of those was real but I wouldn't mind so much if it is flagged as AI-generated entertainment. I wouldn't want someone to become heartbroken because they thought cuddly animals actually get that big (though okay maine coons and those popcorn smelling batarang? things are apparently a thing).

On the other end of the spectrum I came across a small number of super talented artists presumably using AI plus traditional talent to create amazing fantasy landscapes, sci-fi world walkthroughs, etc. even those short "hi fans" 20 second stargate videos are all-around pretty impressive. I am thinking a lot of creatives getting really good at the tools are posting things on their own threads as a portfolio.

So yeah there is a lot of slop but it is an entertainment platform and maybe 40% of what I see is not that objectionable, the rest is doomscrolled past. Anyway my 2 cents.