Jellyfish that could concentrate heavy metals from the water they live in.
You would let them breed and clean up water in an area, then release a pheromone to get them to jump into your harvester ship, render them and get the contaminants.

They were released in an area with an old nuclear waste dump, so some of the stuff they were concentrating was potentially fissile.
Especially so when the pheromone told them to go up the water intakes at a power plant...

Right now, it is legal for third parties like Flock to collect surveillance data and offer it for sale to anyone.
The third party doctrine makes it presumed OK for third parties to give or sell their data to the Government.
This is rapidly eroding Fourth Amendment guarantees in the US.

One possible way out would be to specify in federal law that data that can enable mass surveillance must be protected - leaking it gets you fined, government doesn't get it without a warrant.

The HIPAA laws are a potential model here - they basically say data related to health care can only be shared between certain businesses, and only with the permission of the person the data is about.

My neighborhood (suburb of Washington DC, near NASA Goddard) has underground utilities.
We have lost power for maybe 12 hours total over the past 30 YEARS.
When there's a lot of wind and rain, we sometimes lose power for seconds, maybe tens of seconds. Outages of more than a minute are extremely rare.
That's why the FIOS box, the routers, and the most important desktop are on small UPS units - primarily to avoid losing work.

Nearby neighborhoods with above ground lines lose power approximately annually, sometimes for days.

They do work at the User Data Extraction Factory, after all...

Futures generations will look back at these times and how "simple" and "awesome" they were. You're part of something bigger and you have a front row seat.

They know exactly what I've bought from them and when, so computing the tariffs I've paid through them is a matter of database queries.

They know how to give the money back to me - they send me a credit based on my executive membership every year, and that would be an acceptable and minimally painful way to refund the tariff windfall. They could give Costco store credit cards to non-executive members.

The auctions are in the Futures and Options trading. Beans, gasoline, everything is in there.

Witness Houston Space Flight Center, which was LBJ's quid pro quo for getting the Apollo program through Congress, and is responsible for the handoff of manned launches from Florida to Texas just after the vehicle clears the tower.

It was about the principle of the thing when it was Apple and Google.

Except it wasn't when it was about Xbox and PlayStation.

This is just an extension of the $ituational ethics here.

and "We're not doing that anymore."

And nothing else will happen...

Offer everyone who has either of the old plans a subscription to the new merged service.
Which will cost more since it is "worth more" because both sides now have access to new content.
Anyone who doesn't want to pay more is free to quit.

This will create a bunch of new revenue for the merged service, or a mass exodus.

in the historical training data, so it's hard for an LLM to induce those "rules" from so little example text.

I bet they know a lot more about chemical weapons than they do about biological weapons, for similar reasons.

AI, that doesn't suck, running locally on your phone.

You know who's most likely to get to the doesn't suck stage first?

The phone maker who makes money off hardware, and not ads and surveillance, which inherently suck.

Now, all they have to do is get their software under control again... *sigh*...

He drew on chess as precedent: 15 to 20 years ago, a human checking AI's moves could beat a standalone AI or human, but machines have since surpassed that arrangement entirely.

Chess programs got better because the machines running chess programs got Moore's Law better and Denard-scaling faster, so the same costing machine could search deeper.

Machines running LLMs are not getting better at the same double-every-18-months rate that we had until about 2012. Moore's Law for storage and gates is not quite dead yet, but clock speeds are basically standing still.

Government dragnet searches used to be unconstitutional - Fourth Amendment and all that.

Then we got the third party doctrine which says it's OK for the Government to ask third parties to give it info on people without a warrant, and it's OK for those third parties to comply. Some of the biggies like Apple and Google usually won't comply without a warrant, others cooperate.

Today, there are third parties like Flock who basically sell dragnet searches to anyone who can pay - auto dealers who want to repossess cars, etc. Other third parties like Ring default to taking their users' data and making it available to the Government - you can tell them not to when you sign up, but the vast majority don't see the harm in contributing to mass surveillance.

Short of new overarching privacy laws like the GDPR, we're screwed.