With the amount of whining I heard about how this version of the Odyssey was woke race treason engineered to poison western civilization I would have expected Elon to move faster than the copy cops when it showed up on his precious everything app. Is he developing a tolerance to the stimulants? Renting out datacenter space making grok sluggish?

Today I learned that 50k/year, in New York, is what Bloomberg considers "middle class".

Were they just hard up for anecdotes or is some sort of expectation management in effect?

The article makes no mention of the source. But everything about this sounds like it's just the CAM release from LuCY. Which has been available for around a week and a half now.

In which case, yeah, the only thing novel about it was that it was posted to a more publicly-visible website.

never enter the US. Works great

Works great for all of us indeed.

Do be sure to take your phone to China with you, though. It just might heal your delusions about "multipolar world" and all that.

So any interaction with the Brownshirts of Fatherland Security?

That was true even before Germany's surplus WWI uniforms were distributed to adherents of a certain party...

IT is extremely easy to just accuse these kids of being moral reprobates, recognize how they are harming themselves by cheating, and move on.

But this attitude fails to recognize that this is a perfectly predictable consequence of the education they have received up to this point. The standard to which they have been held has rewarded AI use and actively punished individual effort (not only is it a big sacrifice to put forth the effort, but the few mistakes one DOES make still count against them, whereas the next student over gets a higher grade for just using AI for the whole thing).

These students behave in this way because we taught them to. Our failboat of an education system produced that behavior. AND we can state with confidence that if we continue teaching students in the same way, we will continue seeing the same behavior. This is very simple cause-and-effect at work in a very visible and consequential domain.

The knee jerk response here is to scold them, embarrass them, tell them how terrible they are. All that will do is ruin them. It can't fix them.

The right response is to switch up our teaching methods and especially our assessment methods. They must be tested, repeatedly, in monitored environments where AI use is impossible. Testing is hard to do well. It is harder in some subjects than others. And there is a LOT to say about how to make good tests. Test-writing is not something people can do well when running on intuition alone. And at its best, it is an imperfect solution. But it is a whole heaping lot better than the results we are getting now.

Objective, monitored, testing. From a very early age. That is the emergency surgery we need. There will be more than this needed, but this is the core thing. We need to usher kids into adulthood understanding that they must independently deliver or they will not succeed.

Do we really have to reinvent the wheel every damn time?! It used to be that you just got Voight-Kampff tested, and the administrator of the test would sign your PGP key. WTF was wrong with that?!

"My first thought is that they're just MAGA Republicans who are happy to undermine health and safety for a pat on the head - and maybe financial rewards - from Washington and/or big tech. I'd be happy to hear other explanations though."

Virginia is Blue now, or at least the state government is. It's more a case of don't want to offend the source of all that tax revenue.

I don't know if it's plain volume or some more subtle characteristic of the noise; but I'd suspect that there's more to it than noise alone; given how rare(and often slightly disconcerting in practice) genuinely silent environments are and would have been in evolutionary history.

Even in totally undeveloped areas where you and your little teeny band of hunter-gatherer pals are the only thing going the wind is always up to something; some combination of birds and insects will be doing their thing depending on temperature, if there's a body of water of any size or moving water you'll hear some flow or wave action.

Could be pure intensity; a lot of modern noise is quite intense close to its source; could also be something about how it is interpreted and how readily it is or isn't discarded as background vs. forcing some amount of constant active attention.

I read that these streaming sticks only last for maybe 3 years or so, before the hardware is too weak to run the updated versions of popular streaming aps. And also that the construction makes user modification pretty much impossible.

Can anyone confirm or deny this from personal experience?

better to not have that data on you when you cross certain borders

How about any border? Even more generally, at any situation, when the ordinary rights do not obtain...

My first reaction is that if one company is selling at half the price, that company will go bankrupt at twice the speed since every transaction was already a money-loser. Customers are absolutely the worst thing for these "businesses."

But is revenue really significant? I can see how neither reducing the price to $0 or increasing their price to 10x what it was, might not really have much of a different impact on the bottom line, compared to all the debt.

This is mostly old news. The fact that blind people can echolocate has been known for centuries. This study reveals some interesting details about the neurological impact, though.

I wonder, what the long term consequences of obtaining — and using — this skill are, if any... Does it make one smarter? Or faster? Does it reduce — or increase — the risk of developing Altzheimer? Does it affect personality in any way?

Also, can the skill be lost — if not regularly used — or is it more like bicycle-riding?

"China is trying..." would refer to the Chinese government trying to harm America by weakening its economy and/or its primary technical companies.

The way I stated that is a common way of expressing such a meaning. You are trying to correct something that was not incorrect, and was stated as a hypothetical anyway.