I actually do think missile defense is worth developing and fielding. It has been very widely used in Israel against Palestine / Iran proxies lately and in Ukraine.

But would I ever push the button secure in the knowledge that I am invulnerable - can't imagine it. Imagine if missile defense worked really well and only 15% of the US population were wiped out and the radiation over the rest of the country were "usually" survivable. It's unimaginable.

Condolences in advance to the families of the developers who take that offer due to their unfortunate suicide in a month or two

This is "insightful"? Good lord. Maybe wait until there's some shadow of evidence to your conspiracy theory?

I thought you were going to say they would be offered stock options etc. that probably wouldn't actually amount to that much because AI is crap. I don't universally agree with that either, but it's not ridiculous.

What I do think is likely is that Sam Altman is exaggerating.

I just took the time to read most his 2022 post and it didnt hold up very well. He illustrates why gpt 3 is a dead end but I just tried the exact example on gpt 4o and it passed with flying colors.

The premise is that scaling wonâ(TM)t work and that the world is overly focused on the LLM approach.

He claims tagging images wont work well enough for radiology. Fine but companies like Surona medical seem to be still around years later.

He claims that image tagging wont work but an iPhone does an amazing job of identifying species of things in nature⦠absolutely amazing. And you can now generate captions for image locally on an old MacBook using hugging face models. Itâ(TM)s not perfect but I can be sure that itâ(TM)s made a ton of progress since 2022. So the world isnt just focused on llms these are computer vision models.

Suno is generating mediocre music, far better than it did last year when it was abysmal and some music AI didnt even have language two years ago. Now you can generate country music about retiring your toothbrush that sounds legit.

Finally computer coding is obviously working quite well.

He makes the old tripe of the probabilistic stochastic parrot not having comprehension. Sorry but I believe thats how the human brain works as well.

Is that guy a cat who needs to nap every 2 hours?

FWIW, I once participated in a coding contest at my university in the early 90's that lasted 72 hours (the first prize was a full scholarship, which I didn't get :)) I ran on coffee and speed for the full 72 hours, then collapsed on a couch and slept until someone woke me up to come get my third prize (a Solaris license).

10 hours non-stop coding sounds like a normal day at the office trying to wrap up a project.

No, it's quite real:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/c...

+1

What makes this one so funny is they respond SO guiltily. It's hilarious. But I don't need some over-reaching attempt to wordplay it into being a big new social issue.

You beat me to it. This guy is the modern John Henry!

\documentclass{slashdot}
\begin{document}

\LaTex is the one true format. All others are trash.

\end{document}

The problem is the man of MAGA himself has made so many pro-putin and pro-russia statements. People try to shame MAGA into remembering their Republican predecessors, to get them to support Ukraine, to stop trusting Putin over US intelligence, to stop brushing off Putin's murder of reporters, etc. etc.

It does seem like Trump is turning a corner now. But many lives have already been lost and it's confusing and threatening that Trump has acted this way.

This marketing technique is seriously long in the tooth...

There was a theory of a "cyclic universe" in which everything started at a point and then expanded outward in the big bang, until gravity draws it all back to a point in the "big crunch" and the cycle repeats perpetually. But that fell out of favor when it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating. It's a pity since intuitively it made sense. Now, we're thought to be part of a process that only happens once, ever, in the universe?

As for individual solar systems, according to what I just looked up, stars fizzle out and become either a white dwarf, or (for massive stars) a neutron star or black hole - but not again a star in any case.

So far I think Cyber Warfare has not been as important as many thought it would be. And these two countries are both good at it. Signal jamming is widespread, but "hacking" per se doesn't seem to have had a huge impact. I would guess this factory will be making drones within a couple weeks, or a small number even sooner for symbolic effect.

I think Russia started the Nazi talk and Ukraine is bouncing it back at them - because as you said it's the biggest insult they could hurl at each other. They are justly proud of the high price paid to defeat Hitler. But it also turns into propaganda.

It's a good post. Almost all analysis of this topic looks at resources "per student" instead of "per capita" (i.e. the whole population of the nation). These tell a different story, but it is very difficult to find per capita statistics, and per student statistics are warped by greatly increased enrollment over time.

Trump's proposed budget for FY26 does include slashing the national cancer institute by 37%, which is huge. But that hasn't passed yet.

In contrast the "big beautiful bill" that did pass didn't cut cancer funding. (It did include the Orphan Cures Act, which cuts regulation and eases reimbursement for some diseases including cancer, but doesn't directly increase funding for them).

So, it's premature to declare drastic cancer cuts as a done deal, although it's a big threat, although it's not "zeroing out" federal funding.

Also how much of cancer research is funding by the federal govt vs private industry I'm not sure - but private research certainly won't be discontinued, since it's profitable. One of the cancer medicines I'm on is $23,000 per little IV baggie. Not sure how much of that goes straight into dividends and buybacks vs research.