And you also don't understand consciousness. None of us do. Maybe it's deterministic or maybe it's not. We feel like we have free will, but so what? Dawkins feels he's talking to a conscious being because the faux-social interaction triggers neutral circuitry for interacting with others. Agency over-attribution ain't exactly rare: most humans believe in god despite not interacting with him in person.

Dawkins is most likely wrong, but without a fundamental understanding of what consciousness is, I don't know how you outrule the possibility.

Climate change *denial* is the tool of the oligarchs... if you're a rich old man it's better to ignore the problem so your taxes stay low and your portfolio increases in value faster. Actually fighting it means having to invest in infrastructure and new technologies which has the unfortunate effect of creating jobs and distributing wealth more broadly.

Given that AI will kill us all if it gets too smart, this seems like a good first step towards regulation. Really, a much more comprehensive worldwide response from governments is needed to prevent an intelligence from overrunning humanity.

Don't you also have to have a smartphone and a relationship with either Apple or Google? At least that's true for the reference implementation.

The would-be Trump shooter was not a school teacher, he was a mech eng/comp sci graduate with a tutoring gig.

And just generally dude, chill... most teachers are just trying to teach and take care of their kids while navigating a tangled mesh of rules, methodologies, and liabilities in an environment where technology is disrupting everything and parents either don't care or are hyper-defensive.

You didn't pay "marginally" more attention, you paid a lot more attention because you weren't trained to favor continual short dophamine hits from short-form media. You see, it's not just the classroom environment that has changed: the entire cognitive ecology that young people live in (inside and outside school) has been re-shaped.

The impression I get is that many districts have difficulties implementing such policies because helicopter parents panic at the thought of not being able to immediately communicate with their children.

Too, as kids get older, they get cleverer about concealing phones or providing decoys.

"So just don't..." arguments about technology always seem so naive, and this one is no exception. Smart TV manufacturers don't care about edge cases, they care about making sales, developing annual recurring revenue (ARR), and avoiding liability. Acting as a dumb terminal only marginally helps the first item while hindering the latter two. Likely, most manufacturers will probably require you to use an app or their website to setup/register your TV (and to manage it thereafter). Plenty of other consumer products are already following the same path, but the incentives are especially strong for smart TV manufacturers because they load down your TV experience with spyware and injected ads. Want a dumb terminal? You'll be paying a lot more. Perhaps that works for you but the masses will be left behind, which sets the stage for the next wave of corporate overreach/enshittification.

Yeah, I suspect this is just a statistical cluster that's unsurprising for the given population size and their base rate of risk for suicide, murder, and disappearance. Too, the numbers are somewhat inflated by the inclusion of administrators and even a secretary. Still kind of weird and worth investigating (because enemy action does exist), but ultimately it's probably going to be a nothingburger.

Guns are simple and can be built or smuggled by motivated individuals. Huge facial datasets, on the other hand, can probably be regulated fairly easy without vicious/unmanageable black markets popping up.

Yeah, I counted 6 small boats plus at least 3 helicopters (and a fourth one idle on the deck). The "porch" took forever to assemble. Was it over-engineering, political theatre, or sensible design?

Yeah, I was unimpressed. I expected more of Carreyrou. While some of the spelling similarities and timing coincidences are interesting, I'm unimpressed about the share ideological and technical backgrounds... I feel like most people participating in the early cryptocurrency scene (e.g. on the cyberpunk and cryptography mailing lists) would know what PGP is, embrace libertarianism, and use some common technical lingo.

Or, less drastically, prosecute him for creating a competitor to the dollar, similar to the Liberty Reserve guy.

The annoying thing about the "it was a group of people" theory is that it ignores the crypto/cyberpunk community that was bouncing ideas and implementations around for years in public mailing lists. The "group" and their work is in plain sight... no shadowy government black ops required.

Depends on how far you look back... censoring music, comic books, and contraceptive info seems like a bigger imposition than policing pronouns and racial epithets.

But whatever way you weigh the balance, we definitely need a new political ascendency that values freedom and human rights, including especially free speech.