There's probably also an attempt at low level grooming for obedience. This specific one isn't particularly bright, but just like he managed to completely normalize lying to the point where fact-checkers just gave up, he's probably making a general attempt to throw out so many absurd decrees that eventually people get tired of fighting every single one.

When someone pees in the pool, you either get out or you swim in piss. There's no neutral position.

The OSS exception prevents something being taken away. That is a win, even if we did not win something.

And what is that something?

That "something" is the difference between getting KO'd by a hook to the jaw and taking it on the shoulder. They took a shot, the defensive tactic worked and the fight is still on. Good time to start thinking of counter-punches, maybe come up with a strategy to win instead of going on about how we should have just thrown the fight.

Once, many years ago, I fell off a balance ball and hit my head. No concussion, but there was a 3 - 5 second period where I was so disoriented that I did not realize I was lying on my back, staring at the ceiling. For that brief period, I was certain, and happy, that the aliens (or whomever is in charge) had finally decided to call the stupid experiment off and tell me what the heck is actually going on.

Once my head cleared I figured out that I'd simply taken a fall, but the lesson for me is that my subconscious literally does not believe that a planet this dumb could actually exist, and on some level I'm just waiting for the prank to be over.

If the math professor had written the article without AI assistance, would the students' math skills have improved?

Nice timing. Yesterday I was looking at de-googled variations of the plain 6 from Murena but the old version didn't support my carrier. This one will.

Maybe the important detail is that for folks who want to dump google, you can also go that route at https://murena.com/america/sho... : I guess that makes me a shill but I'm just in it out of a general sense that google went traitor back in the day.

You did the math to remind us what that percentage actually means to real people. Thanks for reminding us to do that.

I'd almost forgotten about that, but yeah - the audio of the call got posted and it was a very impressive example of human connection and intuition working incredibly well in a high-stakes situation. I dug up a link to the audio, it's very instructive.

Using a machine to sort a list in priority order (triage) might be very handy after all the facts are in, but being able to accurately determine what's going on in a real-world emergency when the person reporting it might be panicked, incoherent, or under duress doesn't strike me as something we can just hand over to an LLM.

For practical purposes this is accurate. Ostensibly, however, the US government is supposed to exist only for the purposes of securing our rights. If logical or moral consistency were relevant, as soon as they claim to be "outside the bounds" of the constitution, there is no longer any justification for them to exercise power at all.

Which leads to the real life outcome that if they can get away with it, then they can get away with it.

Where's the boat?

Not sure if it's an age thing or what, but you're not supposed to take it as a given that the police can set up a sting based on automated output from an unaccountable machine; even if the police themselves were perfectly professional about it.

The issue is not whether the cops acted professionally. The issue is that, even if the surface level outcomes seem similar, there is a huge difference in your actual level of freedom in a world where a someone has to convince a judge that your behavior is suspicious verses one in which a bunch of automated and bureaucratic systems can flag you as a problem with no means for you to make them account for their reasoning.

Yeah. This seems like the real objection.

Could we solve satisfactorily the engineering risks? Sure. But when someone says "it's still too risky," the underlying issue is not engineering. It's that the risk of takeover-by-idiot remains in place for the lifetime of any given plant.

"We're wasting too much time on paperwork, so let's find a way to do paperwork more quickly" sounds sensible on the surface, but when you recognize that time is just one resource, that translates "We're wasting too many resources on paperwork on resources, so let's spend more resources into spending resources on paperwork more quickly."

Assuming you live in a functioning democracy, and can get enough political clout to move the needle on the issue at all, the opening bid should be "our society does not owe you a living, therefore, the day you stop supporting a piece of software is the day copyright expires."

If your leadership is, like mine, so corrupt that there's nothing you can do, then I'm sorry, that's no fun. But it makes absolutely no sense to have video game companies dictating what peoples' rights are or what counts as property.

Discounting the Wilhoit observation, the entire left-right model is silly, and describing the OP as a "left wing extremist" obsuscates the truth of what was said without doing anything at all to address it. It's also the entire purpose served by the left/right model in the first place; you can't think about the underlying dynamic if you're trying to police everyone into playing a "moderate" voice along an imaginary left-right spectrum.

In the USA, the Epstien class (aka billionaires) have spent decades stoking anti-humanist, authoritarian fantasies of MAGA style conservatives in order to prevent the rest of us from building anything even remotely like equal representation or equal protection under the law. Nothing about that can possibly get better unless the Epstien class and their cronies are held to account. There is also no mechanism by which they can be held to account without severely reducing their political and economic power over the rest of us.

Plainly - we can have a representative government or we can have the billionaires, but we cannot have both. That's largely by their design. It's not a "left-wing extremist" thing. It's a straightforward observation about our current reality.