Who was telling them that if they treated ectopic pregnancies they might face legal repercussions? Is that what the law actually said?

I believe you'll find it was the people who opposed the law who waged a campaign of disinformation to try to convince people that women would not be able to get life saving care. Turns out there are actual dangers to lying to slander your opponents when it's about what kind of medical treatment is available.

So lesson learned, going to be very careful not to mischaracterize in the future right?

The article OP cites is about a policy study for a policy that no one has so far enacted or voted for. How does that become proof that "they don't care about people and this lawsuit should be thrown out." How did you extrapolate the "they"? How did you manage to impart motive into every member of that collective based on an unfulfilled hypothetical? How did that lead to being able to seek an injunction on AI? Have you established it is the same "they" in question? And when the "they" has a position you don't like it become a prohibition on any action they could possibly take? How does that work in general?

Pennsylvania has a democratic governor, democratic house, democratic senator, voted for Obama, Obama again, and Biden. Their measles outbreak is laid up as a Republican failing? Why isn't Florida much worse then? Canada has been having thousands of cases to they point they lost their measles elimination status. Who is in control of Canada?

I'm glad you recognize the confirmation bias, yet I would dispute that it is in any way vindicated.

AI did not order the interception, put the assets in the air, or even submit the report. It got a manifest wrong in a chat session (not clear even it was its own error or related to the input), and that is... actually well-within common human error, not some special AI thing.

In fact intelligence is wrong all the time, and at all scales, but to name a big one, was AI to blame for the confidence of the existence of WMDs that was the basis for the Iraq war? Maybe it would have *averted* that war by helping with better assessment.

The story is sensationalized even without the effort to scaremonger on AI. There was never *any* chance of "causing a war" with China by interdicting a merchant ship in a officially declared maritime blockade zone, or we wouldn't have done it, even for nuclear components. In fact we've *already* intercepted Chinese vessels there and obviously they don't like it but just as obviously they don't feel like paying the cost of war with a major power to blow off their steam about it. (That's frankly a quite insane view of international relations.)

And it's not even clear to me that anything wrong was done. They double checked the intelligence, found it was incorrect, and ultimately took no action. Isn't that... exactly what is supposed to happen? Deploying your interdiction parallel to the intelligence check is a reasonable way to ensure a successful timeline in case something does need to be done. It's easy to recall planes in a false positive, not so easy to teleport them where they need to be for a verified true positive.

Unfortunately popular journalism is far from truth seeking. The dramatic and dangerous sells more copy, so that's what gets written. If you're going to use that as the raw material of your worldview, then of course it will wind up anti-tech and anti-science. At the very least I suggest finding a more reputable source of journalism to feed your biases than this slop.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "AI will extinctify the human species" is an extraordinary claim, but it's also entirely borrowed from cheesy sci-fi movies, and citing Terminator is apparently this guy's only evidence.

How will AI kill us all, exactly? In addition to the question of, mechanically, how does it obtain the physical capability and resources and organize them to that purpose, I want to know how it does it without any humans noticing or intervening? (not only that it would presumably have to go up against other AGI or near-AGI competitors - the solitary AI made by a random unwitting engineer from the movies is obviously not how the present has played out).

Let's say it is going to build killer robots to off us all. Where does it get the raw materials? How does it setup manufacturing? Make the purchase orders? Do the humans just voluntarily send it massive amounts of ore and build factories in their backyards? Or does it have to mine its own ore and they don't notice the huge stripmines? Does it get the robots right on the first iteration or do they start off as a typical MVP in which case again no one notices? What about the energy bills? How does it navigate the required in-person meeting with the city to sign off on the parking lot tree choices for its downtown killer-robot-factory?

There are so many friction points and assumptions of actual humans interacting with each other to get anything done that "skynet on your laptop" would be about as helpless today as if it had appeared 50 years ago. And unlike the movies it doesn't "just appear."

Could we over the coming years remove a lot of those frictions? Sure. But we could just not, and if we are concerned about them disappearing, then surely we want to see where AI leads *now* and if it has a dangerous temperament rather than *after* we've automated enough for it to manage our resources fully independently?

Being conscious of new threats posed by agentic actors is reasonable and can be grounded in reality. But people who want to feel important have been waving "END OF THE WORLD" signs on streetcorners forever.

I know nothing about this guy or this project. But the author of the summary apparently feels that, in the spirit of deep investigation and journalistic corroboration, the evidence we *really* need to evaluate is an unnamed blogger:

and not the actual quote from the guy apparently supporting the ethnic cleansing of Europe?

Either that quote exists, and is infinitely more significant evidence for us to see and evaluate, or it doesn't exist, and the author is just helping to propagate slander.

Given the author's choice I'll take a guess which.

Gemini's new discounted Flash pricing is still ~3x the price of GPT Luna, and that was released a week or two ago.

Everyone's hemorrhaging money here, but Google feeling they can't match or undercut isn't a great sign for them. And Gemini is flagging in intelligence too, which would be a strong reason to underprice if they could. Gemini Flash used to be your cheapest option. I'd say structural advantage still puts the odds in Google's favor in the long run, but has to be a worse situation than they ever expected to be in.

Huggingface has disclosed a security incident in which AI driven infiltrant (17k actions over a couple days) chained vulnerabilities to move through the infrastructure.

The responded with AI-driven analysis, but Anthropic and OpenAI models refused to perform that analysis because their "safety" features didn't distinguish it as a defensive measure.

So they had to fall back to an open model (GLM 5.2).

In short, attackers have unshackled AI at their disposal and if you don't have your own open models running you are ceding that to them as purely their advantage.

No one can possibly think that a one-time tax like this is a good idea. Even if you want higher taxes on the wealthy surely (a) you want recurring revenue not a one-off (b) you want to actually collect the taxes not just scare the tax base out of state.

But this is the key part:

The way the ballot process in California works is you can propose terrible legislation, pay for signatures, then get what you want in return for withdrawing it (which you can do even after submitting signatures, which is ridiculous).

It's become a very broken system.

Well I am sure they are not wrong in that they have legal cover to refuse the bounty.

I think they probably are wrong in excluding all config related bugs from their bounty program. Chained exploits are becoming increasing attack vectors so "you need elevated privileges" is not the moat it used to be. And GCP takeover is a big cost to bear. "We can prove it was your fault for not reading our docs carefully enough" will probably not be the salve their customers want in case of exploit. Security is hard and protecting customers from footguns is often worth doing.

But if Google doesn't want to know about these kinds of issues that's up to them. Keep it in mind before purchasing their services, however.

This is tantamount to misinformation. The regime cut the Internet on January 8th. It was *never* turned back on for the general public. Iran started allowing some country-wide intranet only, with heavy censorship and *no* outbound communication (except for regime figures). There has been no way to communicate with people in Iran anytime since except (a) Starlink (illegal, extremely risky, and subject to jamming) (b) outbound telephone calls (monitored).

Because it started January 8th, it is clear the initial purpose is very different than this states. The protests themselves started in late December. The internet blackout corresponds with nothing else but the regime crackdown in which they murdered tens of thousands of Iranian civilians. The obvious main purpose has been to keep Iranians from sharing about the atrocities.

Is the war related? Of course. It has become only more important as Iran has sought to seize a diplomatic high-ground (or at least equivalency) to maintain full narrative control. And it is true there is an intelligence aspect as well, but more than cyber attacks (how is downing your *own* Internet a win there?) the concern is likely that the Iranian people have been happy to share information to help target the regime, as they did during the previous 12 Day War.

It is malpractice to quote "officials" - if those are indeed "Iranian officials" - and then offer their uncontested view, when they are the ones who blacked out the Internet specifically to be able to offer an uncontested view.

The myth that AI data centers are using up all the water comes from some incorrect citations that have then swept through sensationalist and poorly fact-checked (looking at you Washington Post) news stories. One major contributor was Karen Hat's "Empire of AI" which overstated the usage by three orders of magnitude. (She did publicly correct that, but you can guess how many people are interested in the non-sensational numbers).

For proportion, California almond growers use 90x the fresh water of all US data centers combined.

Which is not to say that a data center can't still be a strain for some communities, but not in a more extraordinary way than e.g. the local university wanting to maintain a golf course.

But "AI IS SUCKING UP ALL THE WATER PEOPLE NEED TO SURVIVE!!!" is a wonderfully concrete - if completely false - complaint for people uneasy about the recent advances in technology to latch onto

So this has nothing to do with the building being a "data center" at all. The water used if for construction and it could just as well be a stadium or an apartment complex. But since people are talking about data centers using water we'll take any opportunity to jump in on that even if it's amplifying a misconception by mentioning it in adjacency to unrelated events.

Can you answer the question of why he would lie about either exactly? What is his sourced motivation? How does that stack against his incentive to not blithely throw away his career as an accomplished academic?

The actual explanation is much simpler. He is a world-reknown biologist, not a computer scientist or philosopher. He sounds dumb talking about what he is not an expert in.

You (I assume) have some developed expertise in the AI tooling. You (quite obviously) do not have any expertise in biology, or even the context of Dawkins statements you are alluding to, so you sound at least as dumb characterizing what he has said as "anti-trans crap."

The same IEA has warned repeatedly of the precarious position Europe has put themselves in with regard to fuel dependence. The Russian war on Ukraine and subsequent sanctions should have made that tangible but Europe just switched over to Gulf suppliers, exacerbating the present problem. In fact instead of reacting to increase domestic refining and reserves just last year Europe shut down 4 refineries (~400000 barrels per day) of capacity. It lets politicians pretend they are being green while actually just paying someone else to do the dirty work.

The US does all of its own refining and is able to send both crude and jet fuel to Europe to offset at least some of the deficit. The markets are rerouting and many of the global tankers (especially from Asia) are headed to the US to resupply, with the US set to almost double its exports. Unfortunately extra-crude doesn't help Europe's jet fuel problem much since they can't refine it.

- hosting child sexual abuse material and taking a year to remove it
- creating a means for sex traffickers to turn their victims into $$$
- providing a means to sell sexual content of others (e.g revenge porn) without consent

I've seen a lot of comments here in discussion to gig work where it's considered exploitive for Uber/Lyft to not provide health coverage and other benefits, minimum pay accounting for externalities like vehicle wear, etc. Does OF provide any of that?

They can certainly be "better" than other porn sites in ways (although the lack of any physically present third party seems like a major exploitation risk, per links above) but that isn't itself some moral achievement. The guy who peddles crack is doing less harm than the guy who peddles heroin but I don't think he's due for any citizenship awards.

And OF is absurdly profitable so if they really wanted to engage in a humanitarian mission to make porn "ethical" they have lots of financial buffer to combat exploitation. It's clearly not their objective.

Allow me to rephrase with exactly the same meaning, "The problem is customers could receive a $2 discount for coming in on the low-demand day." Are you sure that is... bad?

Stuff like this effectively winds up very economically progressive because people for whom that discount matters will go to the extra effort to get it and people with high-incomes won't care and will effectively subsidize the low price. What do you think that $2 coupon from the newspaper is doing? Setting up exactly the same $16.99 vs $14.99 price differential.

Conversely, consider on Saturday the person who absolutely needs the tomatoes to finish a dinner already in progress can pay the high-demand price and the person who was just thinking about things nice to keep stocked in the pantry can wait, vs pricing low so that the item is already out-of-stock from indifferent shoppers when that person who really needs it walks in.

It's easy to sell people a story in which price differentiation is a means of screwing them over but it is just as often to their direct benefit. People implicitly accept the good of this for things they already experience like coupons, but anything new sounds scary.

Here is the actual story, transcription repeated from here:

So, no, contrary to your unsourced claim, it was based on (a) a specific incident (b) material concern about the implications of the specific incident (c) escalation through the chain of involved parties (d) without apparent direction by the "convicted felon president and war criminal in chief".

Also pretty clear from the anecdote how it is that DoD has sincere concerns with actual grounding. Debate over the legitimacy of those concerns, the ethicality of what they want the software to do, etc. would all be reasonable to discuss. But it really does help if you want to argue against something to start by properly understanding what you are debating.