ignirtoq

The result of all this may be catastrophic. Should a worst-case scenario ever occur — a cyberattack, a natural disaster, an internet outage — there may be no human workers left with the skills that once kept food on the shelves.

Very nerdy of me, but this reminds me of a Stargate SG-1 episode “the Sentinel.” The team travels to a planet whose civilization relies on fully automated technology. The people don’t have to operate or maintain it (normally), so their society has completely forgotten how. In the episode, one set of antagonists comes in and sabotages their defense system, and another set sees the opportunity and invades. The protagonists have to then figure out the defense system and fix it.

We don’t live in a TV series. There aren’t benevolent outsiders who will swoop down and save our systems in the nick of time when they break down. We’re headed in a bad direction.

That’s their “safety” category in his rankings. They talk about moderation tools and risks like bad actors posting illicit content quite a bit, actually.

I think she’s saying she could have allocated the GPUs to Azure to game the metrics, but Microsoft chose to allocate them to internal projects, which is a form of self-investment. She’s not saying they made the wrong decision, she’s saying their decision in this longer-term investment makes the short-term metrics worse.

Oh good, then the federal government can turn over any evidence the Minnesota state investigators ask for since they don’t need it, right? Right?

We prepared, portioned, and provided all meals and snacks for the study.

Great for the science, not great for the realistic recommendations. Sure, some people eat ultraprocessed foods because they are just easier, but many people eat ultraprocessed foods because they are unable to access healthier options. Either they are too expensive (either in monetary cost or the time commitment to prepare the food) or (I expect moreso the case for older people) they are physically unable to prepare it. If we’re going to recommend older Americans eat less ultraprocessed foods, we need realistic options for them to switch to.

There’s not really a “taking over” the FBI can (legally) do here. The murder happened in Minnesota, so the state of Minnesota can bring a state criminal case against the ICE agent for violating state law while acting within the state. If the FBI also wants to open a federal criminal case against the agent for violating a federal law while in the country, they can open a parallel investigation using the same evidence. But the FBI can’t (legally) “take over” a state criminal case. That’s not how our legal system works.

I keep putting “legally” parenthetically because this administration does whatever it wants and uses contorted readings of the law for creating after-the-fact justifications, but here there are few options available to them even to contort.

Personally I’m fine with them taking the noise levels from the aerospace industry, too. My primary concern is how’s the battery life?

“Pressuring” how? Any institution with teeth Trump has already neutered.

U.S. ‌antitrust agencies ⁠had cleared Nvidia’s investment in Intel, according to a notice ‍posted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission earlier in December.

Are they even giving reasons anymore? Or is the “antitrust agency” just a guy napping in a corner they periodically wake up just to give a thumbs up?

I don’t know. People keep talking about what to do when we “make it out of this” like the whole situation was thrust upon us by nature, and we just have to wait and tough it out until it passes, like a storm. People made this happen. The people with wealth and power in our society chose this reality for the rest of us. They aren’t just going to stop one day. And they aren’t acting like this is a storm that will pass. They are acting like this is the next step in a transition they want and intend. We have to figure out how to instigate a change from this path, and I don’t know how to do that.

We’re about to face a crisis nobody’s talking about. In 10 years, who’s going to mentor the next generation? The developers who’ve been using AI since day one won’t have the architectural understanding to teach. The product managers who’ve always relied on AI for decisions won’t have the judgment to pass on. The leaders who’ve abdicated to algorithms won’t have the wisdom to share.

Except we are talking about that, and the tech bro response is “in 10 years we’ll have AGI and it will do all these things all the time permanently.” In their roadmap, there won’t be a next generation of software developers, product managers, or mid-level leaders, because AGI will do all those things faster and better than humans. There will just be CEOs, the capital they control, and AI.

What’s most absurd is that, if that were all true, that would lead to a crisis much larger than just a generational knowledge problem in a specific industry. It would cut regular workers entirely out of the economy, and regular workers form the foundation of the economy, so the entire economy would collapse.

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

Eh, average is an ambiguous term. While in statistics it often means “mean,” it can also mean “median” or “mode,” and I would argue the layperson saying “average” intends it to mean “typical,” which is closer to median (or even mode). And in that case, those 85 percent would not be smarter than average.

Republicans drew the state’s new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats there.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.

How much you want to bet SCOTUS blocks California’s redistricting but greenlights Missouri and North Carolina maps, each through tortured logic?

TL;DR: While governments are putting out assurances AI won’t make the final decision to launch nuclear weapons, they are tight-lipped about whether they are putting AI in the information gathering and processing components that advise world leaders making the decision to launch nuclear weapons. In risk assessment, there’s little difference between wrong AI making the launch decision and a human informed by wrong AI making the launch decision.

One catch is that they are only forced to release “unclassified” files. Guess who decides what files are classified?

And they’re being redeployed to Charlotte, NC, and New Orleans, LA. They’re continuing the tactic of blitzing whatever they want to do somewhere, and when the courts start to catch up, they pull out and start to do something else somewhere else. They can do whatever they want, legality be damned, if they accomplish their goals before the courts wake up. This is guerrilla warfare applied to the legal checks and balances between the branches of government.

If this Supreme Court were considering the issue for the very first time today, it would almost certainly hold that the Constitution does not protect same-sex marriage by a 6–3 vote. But now that Obergefell is entrenched as precedent, and widely supported by Americans, they’ve shown no appetite for spending down their political capital to issue an unpopular ruling that could only hurt the Republican Party.

This seems like a really naive thing to say about this court. They have shown no qualms about striking down much older cases with a stronger history of precedent than Obergefell on the most specious of reasoning. They struck down Chevron Deference last year, which was in place since 1984 and had come to form the backbone of judicial handling about highly technical aspects of government regulation of virtually every industry.

And they have no hesitation about making unpopular rulings. Several justices have a habit of lecturing the public in a way that’s essentially talking down to the people they are supposed to serve and say they simply know what’s better for the people than… the people. Their egos couldn’t care less about their public image; Chief Justice John Roberts has spoken out multiple times that people need to basically shut up and respect the court’s decisions no matter if they like them or not.

It’s a higher level of infuriating that the court is so obviously corrupt, and then the most corrupt among them present themselves as fundamentally more deserving of respect and deference than the common rabble.

The problem is that some small but non-zero fraction of these bugs may be exploitable security flaws with the software, and these bug reports are on the open internet. So if they just ignore them all, they risk overlooking a genuine vulnerability that a bad actor can then more easily find and use. Then the FOSS project gets the blame, because the bug report was there, they should have fixed it!

If the court rules against the president, it will nullify a major tool in Mr. Trump’s trade agenda. He has used the law under question, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to impose tariffs on an estimated 29 percent of all U.S. imports, the Times analysis found. So far this year, these emergency tariffs have hit more than $300 billion in imported goods.

Not that I expect it to happen, but if they rule against him, what happens to the money the government has collected from illegal tariffs so far? Do they just keep it? Do they have to go through the books and return it to the importers? The costs were often absorbed by vendors at the start, but there’s no question a large fraction have already been passed on to consumers.