Seems to me 'dead' for a taxi isn't 'dead' for a static power bank. If I'm running a taxi I've got hard limits on how large my battery can be and how heavy, and I want to maximise the mileage I get between charges, because while my taxi is charging it's not out on the road earning money. When that battery is keeping only maybe 80% of its original design charge, and now I have to schedule one recharge too many per working day? Bang goes my business plan, so I'm replacing it.

If I'm storing energy for the grid I'm a lot less worried about that. It only stores 80% of what it did when new? Better than nothing, and the taxi firm is selling them off cheap. I'll stack them up!

Perhaps not, but if you pick your moment right then permanently stopping the work of some of the most talented researchers there could very well make a difference. A spectacular incident that makes the headlines might also deter others - bright graduates might decide it's far safer to take up a different line of work, subcontractors and suppliers might decide doing business with AI firms isn't worth the danger, investors might figure the increased risk of loss of premises and equipment into their projections, that kind of thing.

If people genuinely believed AI takeover was a real, present and imminent threat, then they wouldn't just be publishing essays online, they'd be forming direct action groups, along the full spectrum of campaigning: all the way from awareness raising publicity campaigns, through picketing, blockades and sit-ins, up through Black Bloc type actions, right up to menacing intimidation campaigns and terrifying physical force operations. But I don't see any Butlerian Jihad getting started. Which tells me they don't actually believe this at all; they're just bigging up their own importance. 'Oh yes, our technology is so incredibly powerful, if it were done wrong then imagine what could happen! Keep the money coming to make sure it's done right instead! Then all that power can be ours instead!... I mean, uh, yours, Mr Investor sir.'

AI stock valuations don't make a bit of sense unless the technology turns out to be every bit as powerful as that. If they don't keep that thought alive, then the bubble bursts right now. That's what all this hot air is about, and that's why nobody really pulls a Miles Dyson at the AI research lab.

The interesting thing about the Terminator movies is that when AI researcher Miles Dyson became convinced that his work had a high probability of resulting in an artificial general intelligence attempting to replace humanity, he did not go and post a ten thousand word essay on LessWrong about how he had updated his timeline and p(doom) estimates and discussing the full Bayesian analysis of the situation. He went to the lab that very night with some heavily armed companions and he blew the place up.

I keep hearing that one AI researcher or another claims that they believe as Dyson came to believe. Until one of them takes similar action, I simply do not believe that they actually think their research carries such a risk.

You have access to the lab where the work is being done? You regularly meet in person with leading researchers and talents driving the project forward? You are an American and you have the Second Amendment? And the entire future light cone is at stake? Quintillions of hypothetical future lives riding on the outcome of this project here and now?

What's the most effective, altruistic thing you could do for them?

Yeah, exactly. I've never heard of anyone shooting up their AI lab. Which tells me they don't believe their AI is at all likely to wipe us all out.

... and then to secure Ukraine into the European economic and defence structure as firmly as possible. At this point they're far ahead of NATO on how to use drones and robots in war, and they're clearly getting very, very good at building them too. European military and aerospace people both will have a lot to gain from cooperation with Ukraine after the war is over.

As cadets were so memorably told a generation ago: remember always, your duty is clear - to build and maintain those robots!

Sounds good - DDG is pretty bad lately, it typically just returns a list of AI generated SEO slop pages, so I've been switching back to Google in a private tab for a lot of things. Might be worth trying this one now!

If they leave them there, the next administration might be able to switch them back on and start gathering woke climate science data again.

Musk has no wife that I know of. Only contractual sperm recipients? Or maybe he's converted to one of those religions with the sister wives? But if you tried to film a Bond movie with the villain based on Musk, no one would believe it.

Why the FP brain fart? Or am I just reflecting too much.

I actually started using GitHub for a new project, but without the Copilot seasoning... Which somehow led me to these rants of the day?

So how do y'all feel about Microsoft's new Copilot websearches? It seems to me that the successes are minor and forgettable while many of the failures are spectacular far beyond merely being wrong. The better to sell more advertising? I wonder if some AI can explain to me how this makes economic sense as the stock markets tumble to new highs, TACO and NACHO notwithstanding. I'd websearch the google, but that has become even more ridiculous. And my last short question to DeepSeek apparently drove it insane?

Meanwhile, the people who appear most influential in today's world appear to be divided between a league of Bond villains and a gaggle of pompous puppets, with the biggest and most orange puppet playing with nuclear weapons... Not seeing a path to human survival in this mess.

So I should go for a joke? Something about no wife, but several contractural sperm recipients? Or how about the Bond villain who has sent his own family to Argentina to protect them from the mess he's making in the country where his money and influence comes from? These are the (negative) resolutions of the Fermi Paradox we have all been looking for? (With the usual spirited apology to the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi?)

Long ago, the UK courts ordered all the major consumer ISPs to block The Pirate Bay along with various other popular services. Ever since, we've had to keep up to date on what the latest proxy address might be.

Of course, thanks to the new censorship laws introduced more recently, we're all on VPNs now, so as to avoid having to hand our ID to the wallet inspector for every last website we ever use. And once that was set up, it was nice to discover that the original is still in play!

The jokes about Darth Jar Jar were everywhere of course, but it could have worked. Star Wars lifted a few ideas from classic SF sources including Asimov's Foundation series - in which, we might recall, the terrifying, unstoppable galactic warlord known as The Mule was hiding in plain sight as a clown, who seemed to be merely a harmless entertainer at court. His military success was chiefly thanks to his psychic ability to manipulate others' minds to his liking - Darth Jar Jar could have done very well that way!

I saw three Star Wars movies when I was young. They were great. Mainly because I was a child and this stuff was new and fresh and exciting to me. Even the Ewoks.

I saw three more when I was not quite so young. They were... poor.

I saw a couple more when I was older. One was great, the other was okay but a retread of one of the old ones, and I never got round to seeing the rest. Didn't care enough.

Now they've got more, and apparently they're based on a TV series they did, which I didn't watch because I wasn't subscribed to that streaming platform at the time. So I'm not going to see those either. Same reason I've not seen a Marvel superhero film since the first Avengers one - just too much homework required with all the backstory. Every scene is a shout out or reference that I won't get. Every character seems to be getting ever louder and angrier and more and more of them have access to time machines. I just don't have it in me to care anymore.

I like the sound of these horror films, though. They're going to tell a complete story? In one film? With a beginning, middle and end, that don't ask me to be up to date on an entire Cinematic Universe? Sounds great, time to check where they're showing!

That's actually the area of my interest. This would seem to be a natural situation for local power grids without the need for investment in long distance high voltage transmission. There can be an advantage to skipping over the earlier technologies if you pick the right stuff. The problem is knowing what "right" means because that's largely dependent on the "maturity" of the technologies in question.

But where is the angle to go for the funny? I'm not really seeing any good ones for this story. Something about the AI advice to investors in Africa? (Maybe something about what the AI said when it found Dr Livingstone?)

A modern version of GTA London would be the absolute dream. Been long enough now, you could set it in the nineties and have the same retro value to it!

... why unions aren't much more common among technology workers. Especially given what you hear about the videogame industry in particular, with that mad 'crunch time' culture in which workers are ruthlessly, well, crunched. I'd always ask, well, what does your union say about it? And what do you know, there isn't one, how about that.

Nice to hear of some progress being made, then. I suppose the risk with this for the rest of us is that GTA 6 might be late to release, but, uh, at this point I think we're over that