"Guarantee" isn't what matters here. Likelihood is what matters. They provide predictions better than random chance. That's the central point.

Let's modify your analogy a bit. If someone has a recording a person starting to eat spaghetti, is it more or less likely that the recording will show them then having a drink of water? And if we instead had a series of comics of a person, and the first one says "I'm hungry," and the second shows the person ordering spaghetti., is it likely that they will then eat the spaghetti? Yes, even though they are fictional. Because apparently using fictional being's mental states is useful for modeling what they will do. In the same way, if the AI is modeling based on human emotional states, then recognizing that those are useful predictors for what will happen helps us predict more, whether or not they genuinely have those emotions.

If the chain of thought resembles a human emotion, it is trained on human emotions, and it acts like a human would when they have those emotions, how is that not a useful framework? But also putting aside, whether or not one wants to insist on describing the AI as "frustrated," there's a worrying trend that this is part of, which is when the AI is given a specific set of goals, they will engage in behavior which is clearly unwanted in order to achieve those goals. That's the classic sort of alignment failure that was predicted by those concerned about AI safety years before any LLMs even existed. Some of these events are minor things like this Starcraft situation, or an LLM slipping a "sorry" command into Lean code that won't compile, and others is more serious like the HuggingFace attack. But reward-hacking and alignment failure are now very real.

Yes, but the authorized version of Pluto had extremely high performance without those elements.

The headline makes it sounds like the AI has just managed to play the game. But that's not what TFS and TFA are talking about. This is about the system beating the best human player at the game. In the meantime, in a very different game direction, there's a new Starcraft AI which learned the game playing against itself (similar to how AlphaZero self-trained) and is apparently beating almost all the humans even as it does some really weird stuff, some of which looks decidedly suboptimal https://relog.gg/razno/vesti/AI-Bot-Pluto-Invades-StarCraft-Ladder-and-Defeats-Professional-Players/1695?lang=2 .

The fact that this approach is catalytic rather than requiring a binding agent seems positive in terms of longevity and not being directly depleted by repeat exposure; but I'd be curious how durable the material is under real-world conditions(clothing that gets hard wear tends to get hard washes) and also how specific it is. 'Organophosphate' means something moderately specific in the context of chemical warfare; but a lot of fairly prosaic compounds are, technically, 'organophosphates'(like DNA and RNA when held together by phosphodiester bonds); and this would be considerably less helpful in practice if it is busy chewing up the genomes of random soil bacteria; and markedly less helpful in practice if there's a "do not perturb the nanites in your clothing if you want them to not migrate into your cells and start mitigating the harmful effects of your DNA" user notice on the treated article.

Completely and utterly missing the point. That those people are being awful should be called out. That many of them are people who can dish it out but can't take it is worth calling out. Creating norms where "weirdo" is now a negative is a problem. Classically, the left was the group that was most willing to embrace people for being weird and recognizing that bullying people for being weird wasn't justified. Call out Musk for being a fascist asshole, sure. Don't help create a norm that undermines exactly the sort of tolerance we should support.

Yes, but life evolved pretty early on in Earth's history. That is evidence (albeit weak evidence) that life can arise somewhat easily.

Well, mostly. I'm not in favor of sexist insults either. But white supremacist lying sociopath, sure.

Sure. If you had said bigoted shit piece instead of weirdo in the first comment I would have agreed with you 100%.

99% Agreement. This absolutely is not a reason to dismiss anything. And the reason I'm not going to agree is just one word "weirdo." There's been this move on the left the last few years to use "weird" as a derogatory term, and it really isn't helpful or productive. But your essential point (without that issue) is correct.

This doesn't seem like a lie, a NIC is in a pretty good position to knock something off the network if it feels like it and the 'bluefield' devices have enough punch onboard to run some rules regarding whether or not to do that; but it seems like a wild exaggeration of how helpful it actually is.

If you actually have a set of rules that detect your bot being wicked it will presumably save you some CPU time to run them on the NIC rather than having the host CPU watching the traffic; but the hard part is the set of rules that detect your bot being wicked.

This is basically the equivalent of adding a firewall and claiming that you've solved network security. Yeah, the firewall is pretty well placed to block malicious traffic; defining 'malicious traffic' is left as an exercise for the reader.

This is a genuinely major achievement, and Starship as a system if they can get everything to look looks like it will really help the world. It is a useful reminder that the world is complicated and bad people can do amazing things. Elon Musk is a terrible person. But dismissing what SpaceX has done is not productive either. And there are a lot of historical examples of this, even just in rocketry. If one dismissed von Braun's rocketry because he was a Nazi, it would be the same problem. Or if one dismissed the math done by Teichmuller because he was a Nazi. It would be nice if technological and other achievement could only be done by morally upstanding people. But that's not the world we live in, which is part of what makes morality so important. The laws of physics don't care about how moral you are. It is up to every one of us to do the right thing.

Support for Office 2016 and 2019 ends October 14th of this year; I assume that the feature is dropping now; rather than either 20 years ago as part of ECMA-376 and eventually in a live product for either Office 2010 or 2013, or never if they didn't want to do that, in order to draw a hard line under the utility of those?

It otherwise seems like a kind of weird time to do it. In principle what a 'cell' is has never really had an obvious mandatory scale: it has essentially always been relevant that a 'cell' existed in relation to other cells, so that something like an array could be a row; but it has also long been allowed and encouraged to do things like substring operations that acknowledge that cell contents are 'larger' objects that contain smaller ones; and are not automatically spilled out for that reason alone. Not clear that the pragmatic use case for spreadsheets would ever have supported some sort of 'any data type that implies it can be decomposed into elements shall be' rule, strings getting broken up into substrings and so on; but it's also not clear that the pragmatic use case is going to be much clarified by a single cell being n levels deep of lists and arrays of lists and arrays being a fully supported thing rather than something you hack on by shoving JSON into text cells or whatever.

It definitely seems like asking for confusion when some, but only some, "excel spreadsheets" have cells that are arrays, potentially of arrays, while others have rows of cells with contents that, at least formally, are not acknowledged as arrays.

That's the sort of curious thing about this announcement: at least in theory(I assume things are uglier in practice) the X1 parts that they shipped for windows-on-ARM/Copilot PCs already use UEFI/ACPI in line with what MS wants for booting Windows.

That obviously doesn't mean that there's a working GPU driver; or that naive power management doesn't cause the system to run at 90% of maximum power and hammer the battery flat; but the theory was that the last gen was already doing the "big kid ARM that has embraced PC standards" thing; very similar to the 'standards base' that ARM encourages ARM server part vendors to use.