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Comment Re:Harm (Score 1) 107

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.

Comment Re:Be seeing you (Score 1) 46

I may be wrong, but I think the line was JMS. Koenig's addition was the hand gesture. In The Prisoner it was an "OK" gesture around the eye, hinting at the pervasive cameras and the fact that everyone was under constant surveillance. On B5, Koenig made the same gesture but at his forehead, since he's a telepath (and constantly breaks the privacy rules) so his surveillance doesn't need cameras...

Comment Re:Good (Score 3, Insightful) 146

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.

Comment Re:Unbelievable what people will publish (Score 2) 16

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.

Comment Re:How is the Ukraine war going? (Score 1) 64

I don't know if you're a russian bot or some deluded idiot, but it amuses me to do a breakdown of your post.

NATO turned what was originally intended to be a mostly peaceful show of force like the temporary invasion of Georgia into a war of attrition.

First of all the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Georgia involved a few hundred dead in the first two days, and another 5000+ civilians killed in the ethnic cleansing after that, all for a land-grab to seize control of territory covering half of Georgia's coastline that Putin wanted.

Secondly, the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Ukraine involved hundreds dead, ballistic and cruise missile attacks on all of Ukraine's largest cities, and Putin publicly admitting the goal of overthrowing the Ukrainian government... and that's just within the first 36 hours. Within two and a half months Russian officials began admitting the intent to permanently annex parts of Ukraine, proceeding with a constitutional amendment a few months later claiming to annex vast territories that Russian had not remotely taken control of, and which Russia is not remotely capable of capturing. Donetsk alone has a population of over a million, two million if you include the metro-area. Russia spent months and many thousand of lives to capture, and later lose, villages in the range of low tens of thousands.

Remember WWI when the lines were pretty much static for years and then suddenly it was all over?

Yes, I remember. As I recall it wasn't exactly "sudden". As I recall... Russian casualties were around five million killed, wounded, or captured, the Russian economy was collapsing, Russia was running out of food, and Russian literally lost it's own capital to civilian rebellion. A few months later the Russian government collapsed and surrendered vast territories including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Poland and Ukraine to Germany and its allies (known as the Central Powers). Right about that point the U.S. joined the war reinvigorating the Allied Powers. Germany&friends knew they couldn't win a protracted war. They attempted a quick win, and, in short, they failed. The Allied powers steadily beat them down, with the allies eventually breaking through the lines and progressively liberating territory. With the Allies steadily advancing and the war obviously lost, German forces began rebelling and Germany surrendered.

That's what's happening here. Russia has most of Donbas plus a buffer zone in some other regions that directly border Russia. Ukraine is throwing men at the front lines for Russia to kill but is running out. Territory held is largely irrelevant compared to the number of men killed and weapons destroyed.

So much to unpack there, but it's amusing how you cite "territory held is largely irrelevant" given that the tide has turned and Ukrainians are now the ones breaking through lines and liberating territory from Russian occupation. It's not much yet, but all the map trackers show the reversal. Russia is now officially loosing more territory than they gain. Russia WAS slowly gaining small bits of land, largely through sending meat waves of untrained ill equipped soldiers at Ukrainian lines until the Ukrainians ran out of ammo and had to fall back. However now 7 out of 10 Russians killed are killed by drones. The "no man's land" between the two sides is now many kilometers wide. Any Russian trying to advance gets hit by a drone. Russia has also losing on average 1 air defense system every day, and rapidly depleting. Russian supply lines are getting pummeled by drones. Russian refineries are getting pummeled by drones, with progressively worsening fuel shortages for both the military and for the increasingly rebellious population. Cheap advanced Ukrainian drones are taking out expensive crappy Russian drones, including Russian's new jet-drones. Practically every country on earth is asking Ukraine for their military drone tech, the Russians can't remotely match it. Russian's economy is also fucked, but that topic pretty needs a separate book to cover.

Interesting side notes on weapons destroyed. Russia is destroying it's aircraft almost as fast as Ukraine is, between incompetence and maintenance failures and friendly fire shooting down their own aircraft. Also the nation that is the biggest donor of tanks to Ukraine is... Russia. Ukraine captured countless Russian tanks intact because the Russian military is so abysmal incompetent and corrupt. And as I mentioned, Russian air defense units are depleting. The war is now approaching 5 years, longer than the entirety of WW1. Ukraine is a small fraction of Russia's size, and Russian is literally losing and headed towards another soviet-union-style collapse. The biggest shock to the world of this entire war is just how worthless Putin has made Russian military, through systemic corruption and systemic incompetence.

Polls show the Ukrainian population isn't interested in surrendering. They are defending their homes. It's simple, the war will end when all the soldiers go home. When Russian soldiers go back to their homes in Russia, and when Ukrainian soldiers go back to their homes in the currently occupied parts of Ukraine. Although that's not likely to happen until Putin either expires or is overthrown. Not only is he fanatical enough to drive his country to collapse in the attempt, he knows if he did end the war in failure he'd get killed or overthrown for it.

Anyway, pointless reply to a bot or a useful idiot. But maybe some random passer-by will find some bits interesting. I don't know about the rest of the world, but mainstream US news rarely mentions the Ukraine war anymore, and certainly not in any detail.

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Comment Re:We switched to secret ballots for a reason (Score 2) 222

Looking at history is indeed illuminating.

Every single time someone is asked a question of the form "if voting fraud is so prevalent, show me some examples", the most honest answer I hear is "it happened during the time of the Political Machines in certain large cities many decades ago". And when the best and most recent example you can find is 70+ years ago, before anyone having this discussion was even conceived, when politics and tech and discourse looked very different than today, well, that's a loud answer and it's not an answer which says "OMG THE SKY IS FALLING". It's an answer which says "I have exactly zero evidence so I'll pick an ancient example as proof that we must do obviously unethical things right now TO SAVE DEMOCRACY".

It's an answer which says nothing about the issues we are facing, but a lot about your determination to find evidence for your predetermined conclusion, rather than deducing a conclusion from the evidence.

Comment Re:Misleading way to phrase this much? (Score 4, Insightful) 222

Wow, you are really really desperate to de-legitimize elections. Why?

If you had read the post you were responding to: The "paper trail" my county uses is paper ballots which people fill in with pens (fill in the ovals, what fun!) and are then scanned. Those paper ballots are turned in to the county, as are the memory cards containing the scanned data. If there is any question, the county will hand-count the paper ballots, filled out by the voters NOT THE MACHINE.

You should probably ask yourself why you typed a comment that made a vague assertion contradicting a post with precise verifiable details. You may find out something about your opinions and decisions which will be unpleasant (but very important) to face.

Comment Re:Misleading way to phrase this much? (Score 1) 222

I actually think you are wrong; you are assuming too much competence. The White House has few competent people, so hacking an election is well beyond them, but screaming out bullshit "facts" is right in their skillset. The goal (I suspect) is that when they lose, they'll use weaknesses in this one type of machine to claim that all elections are fraudulent. Are any "insecurities" they find useful for affecting election results? They won't care, and neither will their gullible followers. They don't need to convince anyone rational, they just need to reassure their already-convinced followers with something that sounds plausible.

Comment Re:Misleading way to phrase this much? (Score 4, Informative) 222

Weird. In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, our voting machines scan paper (marked by the voter) so we have a fully auditable paper trail. Have you considered voting for competent politicians? I won't say that the liberals in charge of Allegheny County are perfect; nobody is. But they run a solid verifiable election.

Every voting system is insecure, because every system is insecure, because nothing is perfect, it's all tradeoffs. If you think election fraud occurred, prove it; elections involve thousands of people so finding one whistleblower should be easy. If you cannot find one reliable whistleblower and no proof, then you are just another weak-ass gullible grandpa yelling at the clouds and everyone knows it.

Comment Holy Shit! Really???? (Score 1) 89

This just in, a report published by a group of people who would be materially harmed by losing business to the EU building its own technical capacity declared it would be costly and unfeasible to ever abandon them.

Up next after the commercial break, we report on how water is wet and grass grows.

Comment 'Doesn't need to be that specific to be an attack. (Score 2) 25

Aside from a few specific cases that became prominent, do you think he was personally sitting down with a list of borown people to send his ICE brownshits out to attack? On course not. It was a general directive to scapegoat them and make their lives hell... ALL their lives, even citizens and green card holders. Given maga's modus operandi, this is almost certianly just more of the same; and Dubrovsky was not arrested because he's the ringleader of some ransomeware gang but just because he's Canadian, is a prominent figure, and made the mistake of travelling somewhere the magat minions could get their filthy mits on him.

Comment Re:We're seeing a pattern here (Score 4, Informative) 54

In addition, it fosters sloppy police work. Even *if* Flock surveillance was infallible, proper analysis would still be required.

Yes; most of these false arrests would have been avoided with a small amount of policework. Sadly, police face few consequences for poor actions (even fewer now that the administration has stopped federal oversight of questionable police forces; hope everyone is having the day they voted for!)

This doesn't limit the liability for flock and similar surveillance systems, but it should (but obviously will not) add liability for law enforcement which relies on these surveillance systems.

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