There are methods to add noise patterns to audio that are imperceptible to humans but cause AI to go apeshit, such as misidentifying rock music as classical or transcribing speech as something completely different from what is said.

I wonder what the practicalities might be to deploy this form of attack in an area around you when having a conversation you with to keep private. Probably would not be inaudible when played through a speaker (unlike data implanted in audio recordings) but maybe masked? Listen to some music on your phone's loudspeaker at a modest volume and broadcast invisible noise that fills any eavesdropping AI's buffer with junk or even malicious payloads.
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There was a plan to put a solar farm + batteries on that site but they were scrapped for reasons I'm sure you could guess.

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> I mean, it cannot be that wind and solar plus a few batteries are actually more expensive, could it?

Nope. The TL;DR version: It would actually be cheaper to build wind/solar and batteries, if not for the fact that the cost of building the plant was covered fifty years ago and they're getting another $1.9B in free money for it.

But of course this was never about you "missing something" - this is about you having an agenda. At least I hope it's about having an agenda, because the economics of the situation are so plainly evident you'd have to be an incredible moron to genuinely be "missing something."

For one, the plant is not owned or operated by Google. It's owned by NextEra Energy - a multibillion dollar, multinational energy company. Google's name only appears on this story in so far as they want to build data centers and that gives NextEra Energy a reason to get the plant going again. NextEra also does wind and solar power and if they had local projects that were on hold instead of a mothballed nuclear plant the story would probably be about them resuming those projects instead.

For two, the lion's share of the capital costs for the plant have already been spent long ago. The Duane Arnold Energy Center started operating in 1975. It makes a lot more sense to revive the plant that is actively losing money every day it's not operating (because NextEra still has expenses to pay on it) than to keep paying the upkeep and spend even more money building new infrastructure elsewhere.

For three, there's a lot more federal money available for NON-wind/solar power under the current administration, which is openly hostile to those technologies. $1.9B worth in this case. For the equivalent ~615MW the existing nuclear plant is expected to produce, that would be about $700M in new wind construction even if you triple it to add 24 hours worth of battery storage at 615MW (an absurd amount) you're still comparable at about $2.1B. That versus, $1.9B in basically free taxpayer loans, is not a hard decision to make.

So basically the only time it financially makes sense to go with nuclear power is when you already have the nuclear power plant and you can get a bunch of free money to put a fresh coat of paint on it.
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The problem here is that when you turned on the TV for the first time and clicked the 'I accept' button, you agreed to the recording, and probably agreed that you'd be responsible for letting anybody else who might be in range of the TV know that they're subject to recording.

Is that going to hold up in court? Who knows, but can you afford to spend the money to find out? Somebody eventually will, and you'll get a coupon for twenty bucks off of a new TV as the settlement.

"For an assignment testing students' ability to make evidence-based arguments, they participate in a simulated school board meeting about banning books. It involves debating chatbots designed by Zeleny with names like the Confrontational Parent."

This a VERY thinly veiled parallel to a hotly divided political issue that teachers/unions [and chatbot trained bias] tend be on one side of and the majority of the public, parents, and truth on the opposite of. Given that adults of the highest levels of performance in our society, be it professional achievement, economic achievement, political achievement, IQ, and education disagree on the matter it sounds like what the teacher is likely testing is alignment with her own ideology and not evidence-based arguments.

I saw the same thing in many of my own courses, examples and material used in classes [especially logic classes like critical thinking] that taught and test concepts through distilled 'analogs' to popular political issues with an attempt to appear neutral and present both sides while actually presenting a weakened strawman of one side the argument and consistently that strawman was on the same side. Cleverly these were not the topics for essays where students spent effort on time and research and independent thought but the class examples that most would never look at additional material on... simply walk away believing they formed a valid independent judgement at the pinnacle of their own education.

The original 1st film. It was successful because of the people involved keeping Lucas in check, only has to look at the following trilogy of films as an example of hubris and unchecked ego.
An entire museum dedicated to his "thoughts" is just icing on the cake of his run amok self-inflated sense of importance.

You're missing the point.

Leaks of personal information like this are only possible because some company decided to collect and store it all in one place. It's never a matter of if, but only when, a database will be breached and data leaked.

The age verification laws will create even more vast databases of personal information; names, addresses, financial information, various service accounts, even deep information about each person's habits and preferences. All in the hands private businesses who were the lowest (or at least most corrupt) bid. It's never a matter of if, but only when, a database will be breached and data leaked. It will be a prize sweeter than any criminal organization or malicious state actor could possibly have dreamed of.

Let's stop putting everyone's eggs in the same basket against their will, hmm? Especially when it doesn't even solve the problem it's championed to solve.
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Yeah, my bad, I just automatically assumed this would involve a transfer switch to avoid backfeeding.

Ah, silly me, I thought this would require installation of a transfer switch to avoid backfeeding.

Sure? I've had PV on my roof for the past year. 430W nominal panels. Problem is most of them point east and some of them point west, because the orientation of my house, and the ones that point west are shaded the later half of the afternoon due to trees. Despite the sub optimal orientation, they average about 2kwh daily when the sun is shining.

I'm in lower NY where we have like... weather and stuff, y;know? I'm sure they'd do a lot better in California with better orientation. Full sun for 5 hours a day on average is not unreasonable.
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They will not work in a power outage, because that would mean it could feed power back into a downed electrical grid which is how people get killed. It's also extremely illegal for that reason.

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And even if all it's good for powering is your fridge, well, congrats, now your fridge's contents can survive a power outage.

The payback for these types of systems is like 3-6 years depending on circumstances.

A single 400W panel with microinverter should handily average 2kwh daily as pong as it's pointed in vaguely the right direction. In California that's reducing our electric bill by over 60 cents a day just for power costs, not including avoided taxes and fees. Doesn't sound like much, but at $400 "installed" it's paid for itself in well under 2 years. After that, basically free money as savings to the tune of like $20/mo.

And you can take it with you.

I'd say it's a no-brainer if you have a place to put it, but if you're actually opposed to the concept you might actually not have a brain.
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I get paid for my excess solar. Not a lot, mind you, and only once a year, but they still cut me a check if my net balance is negative.

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