I'm pretty sure that Hegseth does, in fact, want Skynet.

One day it's "AI Bubble is Going To Burst", the next it's "AI Is Going To Eat The Economy".

It is the Microsoft way.

There's a difference between not using AI tools at all and not using code generated by AIs.

The latter involves a lot of risks that aren't well understood yet -- some technical, some legal, some ethical -- and it's entirely possibly that some of those risks are going to blow up in the face of the gung-ho adopters with existential consequences for their businesses.

I mostly work with clients in industries where quality matters. Think engineering applications where equipment going wrong destroys things or kills people and where security vulnerabilities are a proxy for equipment going wrong.

I know plenty of smart, capable people working in this part of the industry who are totally fine with blanket banning the use of AI-generated code on these jobs. A lot of that code simply isn't up to the required standards anyway, but even if it does produce something you could actually use, there are still all the same costs for review and certification that any other code incurs. That includes the need for at least one human reviewer to work out why the AI wrote what it did, which may or may not have any better answer than "statistically, it seemed like a good idea at the time".

The claims also seem a bit sus. "Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week." Is this the same statistic someone was debunking recently where anyone who had done something really basic (it might have been using the search facility?) was counted as "using Copilot"? A lot of organisations seem to be cautious about using code generated by AIs, or even imposing a blanket ban, so things must be very different in other parts of the industry if that 80% is also representative of professional developers using Copilot significantly for real work.

All headphones likely also contain "chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth anomalies, or other reproductive harm."

Maybe there's actually an issue here. But a group calling itself the "ToxFREE Project" strikes me as to be far more like the State of California and its Proposition 65 warnings than an objective observer.

Aren't those "Made in " labels Federally regulated by the Federal Trade Commission? If so this lawsuit is going to get dismissed on Federal supremacy grounds.

Waiting for the engine to start gives them time to put down their cellphone. (Theoretically, anyway, they don't actually put it down until after the honking starts)

The definition isn't particularly coherent. Cane and beet sugar are Group II, but "sugar, oils, and fats for domestic use" are Group IV? Which is it? Ice cream is Group IV despite being milk (Group), cream, sugar, and salt (all Group II)... are they complaining about the often-present emulsifier ,which as a vegetable extract should also be Group II? Certainly it should be Group III at worst. Sausage is Group IV despite the processing in sausage being pretty much purely physical; perhaps they don't know how the sausage is made.

(And of course that pre-Columbian Mexican staple, the tortilla, is clearly Group IV)

This is why pretty much every major 20th century technology was invented in the US (telephony, movies, semiconductors, aerospace, the internet etc.).

Telephony was invented in the 19th century by a Canadian born in Scotland who ultimately became a US citizen. The work was apparently split between the US and Canada. Scotland is also one of those places that had a disproportionate number of inventors -- if you look a little earlier to the Industrial Revolution, especially, you'll note a lot of Scots.

It does not annoy the rich and powerful. It annoys the (human) executive assistants of the rich and powerful, but that's what they get paid for.

Makes sense. According to leading environmentalists, coal use produces less CO2-equivalent than natural gas.

Though probably the best way to react to that isn't to replace natural gas with coal, but just to ignore the environmentalists.

My guess of why Ding uploaded to the Google Cloud: this was the only way to get the information out. That is, it couldn't be physically transported out of Google's office(s) otherwise.

If he could display it on his screen, he could exfiltrate it.

Thinking they will surely never go extinct, despite that having happened to the, what, 6 other alternatives?

Homo sapiens subsp. sapiens is probably the REASON those other alternatives didn't make it.

Tax software is one of the last places I'd expect AI to take over. Tax software is implementing a whole lot of very detailed rules and regulations to produce forms. Any sort of AI approximation, hallucination, or other slop is entirely unacceptable if you don't want to have the IRS auditing you and threatening to send you to pound-me-in-the-ass Federal prison. So no one in their right mind is going to say "ChatGPT, here's my W2s, 1099s, etc, produce a 1040 for me".