Silicon Valley billionaires like Sam Altman have been joining Musk in his crusade for AI regulation repeatedly over the last years. All of them are invested in startups doing advanced AI research, by the way. It's a campaign to play on the ignorant populace's fear and misconceptions about AI, in an attempt to legislate smaller AI startups out of the business and also to more tightly control how private citizens can profit from advances in machine learning.

In a way this is a lesson learned from the early computing and internet histories, because now everybody and their dog is allowed to write programs, cobble together powerful devices, and send data all over the world - all of which is simply due to the fact that nobody in power saw this coming back then. Now "they" are working hard on reversing that, by locking devices down, making tampering with DRM illegal, and walling off the open network - but all of that wouldn't have been necessary if big corps at the time had the foresight to legally classify generic computing as a national security threat.

This is absolutely deplorable, and the fact that it seems to be working is beyond worrying. Everybody who is only slightly in favor of this would do well to take a minute and think through what such regulation would mean, not only for AI, but for computing in general. This is about who gets to control the pace, the price, and the magnitude of human progress moving forward.

Has any former President ever been so open in his abuse of power?

The President? It's CNN that is blackmailing people they disagree with.

This is a fallacy. Being (ethically) corrupt isn't a zero-sum pool. They can both be horrible at the same time. It's still an abuse of power even if you're doing it to someone reprehensible. Also: criticizing one for their actions is not an implicit endorsement of the other party.

German here. The National Socialists were considered right wing at the time, not afterwards, and they still are. This categorization is not based on whether they were fascists or not, although most Germans still associate fascism with the radical right (and where the radical right is active in Germany today, they usually also have a fascist agenda). The Nazis were a rightist worker party with an absolutist agenda that was almost entirely based on race and national identity. Even today, after the meaning of our terms has slipped somewhat, this fingerprint cannot be considered "left" by any standard.

If I were to hazard a guess, the US' public confusion and outright denial about the Nazi-rightist connection comes from several factors: First, the Nazi ideology was strongly collectivist, and collectivism is often associated with extremist left-wing regimes, plus the American right has a strong dislike for socialism and thereby is strongly anti-collectivist. Second, and I realize this may sound a little bit mean, but sympathizing even with extreme right-wing ideas is so mainstream in the US right now, that some redefinition of words was necessary in order to clean up the image of mass-supported rightist extremism, to purge it from harmful historical associations.

It's important to keep in mind that the Nazi party is not a blueprint for whatever is happening in the world right now, and it's neither fair nor accurate to brand the mainstream rightist movements currently sweeping many Western democracies in this light. In my opinion, people should also be aware that the currently leading rightist and leftist movements both are thoroughly authoritarian ideologies. In fact, authoritarianism is so popular that it even wins over centrists. I'm pointing this out, because people seem to be lost in escalating left vs. right debates leading nowhere, while their freedoms are taken away underneath them.

Words and ideas can absolutely form a violent ideology. There is some argument to be had whether extremists use that ideology as an excuse or whether the ideology itself breeds extremists - I'd say there's a bit of both - however, there is not a violent Jihadi on this planet who does not let this ideology dictate their actions. If a person's ideology features murder as one of its core concepts, it's just way more likely they will murder people at some point. It doesn't mean that anyone believing this stuff will turn into a murderer, it just boosts the chance of enabling someone who already had this in their personality.

In fairness, it is relatively peaceful once you have murdered all your detractors...

It's a hard case to make that outlawing religious practice would be worse than allowing some of the more egregious religions out there free rain, from a humanitarian perspective. Anyway, outlawing religions is not even required to stop these kinds of atrocities, a secular state and a secular society would be enough.

It's difficult to judge for me whether the secular basis of our Western society is eroding or not, but at times it certainly seems like it. If that perception is correct, outlawing religious influence on politics would certainly look like a prudent first step to me.

I understand that some form of religious thought control is probably required to keep society from collapsing in the near term, but it seems doable to me to make it an opt-in system while making sure non-participants are well protected from its reach.

It's a multi-faceted problem, isn't it? The STEM fields in general have done a relatively good job of attracting women, so software engineering is definitely an odd one out. Based on anecdotal evidence of my own interactions with young people, the reason may partly be that software development is seen as a low-value, low-skill, low-profile job. Most importantly, it's seen as boring grunt work which even "cool" people only do until they are finally promoted into an actual position. If this impression is correct, we're socializing young people in general, and young women in particular, away from a field they perceive as a waste of time. I challenge you to find a high school-age girl who when asked if she considered doing software development doesn't respond with absolute incredulity at the mere prospect.

From there on out, it probably gets worse. On the off chance a female software developer makes it through university without giving in to the myriad social cues on the way, the experience of working in the field is likely to be the final kick you need to start looking for better positions. It's rough enough to find a good job as a male, but when you're female you need to cope with the whole bro culture thing on top of that.

We've also been getting more conservative as a society. Women going to college, then briefly into a job, only to drop out forever and take care of family is a thing that's picking up steam again. The incentive to do that may be even stronger when you're working as an entry-level software developer, surrounded by wealthy hyper-available males.

Phrases like "the entrenched left-wing elite" really give you away. Your guys have a monopoly on the government now, at all levels, and yet you claim that the losing side is the elite.

It doesn't matter how much "cred" a company has with a political movement, the new brand of authoritarian leftists will turn on anyone without a moment's notice if the opportunity presents itself. There is absolutely no difference between left and right in this regard.

Sometimes a meteor strike takes out your data center, it happens. The answer is to design smaller, smarter systems that are more resilient.

BA carries about 50M passengers per year, less than 135k per day. Over a 8 business hour day, that's about 20k bookings per hour. Let's say one booking consists of 100 datasets written to the database, and maybe 10 times that in reads. This works out to abut 500 writes and 5000 reads (most of which can be cached) per second. Actual average loads are going to be even lower. I'm not talking about extended services or analytics, which can happen on machines of lesser importance, this is just about the core business of taking a reservation and issuing a ticket.

It's not a high transaction volume, and it's not a lot of data. You do not need an entire data center for this. One server with a stock DB can do that. The structure of this core is simple enough so you could replicate it to hot spares around the globe. Heck, you could even lower the load by caching reads at the airport and at the web server.

There is no unavoidable technical reason this power failure had to be that catastrophic.