They’ve increased efficiency in some places
Where have they demonstrably increased efficiency at all? I can only find people talking in the abstract about how AI provides a net benefit. All of the studies I can find show that once actual scientific measurements of efficiency, productivity, or quality are made, at least one of those suffers more than any modest gains provided by AI, if there are any gains at all.
By “Americans” Mike Johnson means conservative white people. Anyone else is unAmerican, and thus not an American. And Republicans have “restored” their in-group’s freedom of speech: it’s never been safer for them to spew racist hate, bigotry, and lies without fear of legal or social consequences. He’s absolutely correct under all of the dog-whistle definitions the Republicans use for the important terms in his statements.
I’m American, not British, but every single item mentioned that public perception is wrong about sounds like it skews toward what would be rightwing propaganda here. If the British right is anything like the American right, then appealing to the politicians misrepresenting the numbers to do a better job stating the facts is a fool’s errand. The misinformation is on purpose.
crackdown on legal […] immigration
That’s just blatant manufacturing consent of persecution of immigrants. If they’re in the US legally, what exactly is Trump “cracking down” on?
While a TLS uses the same key throughout a session, keys within a Signal session constantly evolve.
What are we defining as a “session” for Signal? The vast majority of TLS sessions exist for the duration of pulling down a web page. Dynamically interact with that page? New HTTP request backed by a new TLS session. Sure, there are exceptions like WebSockets, but by and large TLS sessions are often short.
Is a Signal session the duration of sending a single message? An entire conversation? The entire time you have someone in your address book? It doesn’t seem like an apples-to-apples comparison.
It depends on your definition of “can”. Are his actions allowed by law? No. Will anyone stop Trump from doing them anyway? Probably not.
I also want to make clear, these aren’t “Democrat agencies.” There aren’t formally “Democrat” and “Republican” agencies in the federal government. National political parties are formally private organizations, and local political parties are affiliated with national parties with various levels of control able to be exerted on the local parties by the national parties depending on the specific organizations involved and their relationships. It’s all complicated, but the salient point is it’s all non-governmental. The agencies Trump is cutting funding from are governmental agencies that generally have greater approval/support from segments of the voting populace that generally lean more Democrat in their voting behavior. There are Democrats that don’t support these agencies, and there are Republicans that do. There are also likely people in both parties that support the general cause of the agencies but would prefer they would be run differently or have different policies or regulations. Again, in reality it’s complicated and nuanced.
Calling them “Democrat agencies” is Trump applying tribalistic language in his usual divisive way to drum up support from his base. The voting populations that broadly support these agencies generally lean Democrat, but that’s not catchy and won’t get people angry and vocally in support of Trump. So he calls them “Democrat agencies” to paint a picture that, despite the Republicans having control of literally all branches of the federal government, Democrats directly control these federal agencies (which is not true), and that therefore they are acting against the will of the public, who he represents by definition (which is also not true), and therefore they should be shutdown. It’s right out of the fascist playbook, and when the media even just quotes his language, they enable him to define the language of the discussion of his actions, and thus they further help Trump shape the narrative of the shutdown.
Nothing in the shutdown gives him the power to do these things. He was in fact doing all of these things before the shutdown, and he had no legal authority to do any of it then either. He’s able to do it because his regime is authoritarian and does whatever they want, and organizations that stand to benefit from this authoritarian regime have spent the last 50+ years systematically subverting the checks and balances that were built into the federal government to prevent this kind of authoritarianism. Complicit politicians in the legislative branch prevent impeachment and removal from office of anyone in the regime that breaks the law, and complicit Supreme Court judges prevent the judicial branch from delivering injunctions or other judicial relief or safeguards from these actions. There are coordinated (even if it’s just stochastic coordination) bad faith actors at all levels of power in all branches and offices of the US government. It didn’t happen over night, it in fact took decades, but no one stopped it, so here we are.
From the legal definition of “can”, Trump in fact cannot do most of what he’s doing. But in America laws don’t matter anymore, so in practical terms he can do literally anything now.
“Users accustomed to receiving confident answers to virtually any question would likely abandon such systems rapidly,” the researcher wrote.
While there are “established methods for quantifying uncertainty,” AI models could end up requiring “significantly more computation than today’s approach,” he argued, “as they must evaluate multiple possible responses and estimate confidence levels.”
“For a system processing millions of queries daily, this translates to dramatically higher operational costs,” Xing wrote.
If removing hallucinations means Joe Shmoe isn’t interested in asking it questions a search engine could already answer, but it brings even 1% of the capability promised by all the hype, they would finally actually have a product. The good long-term business move is absolutely to remove hallucinations and add uncertainty. Let’s see if any of then actually do it.
Can we be so sure such a stock market dip is due to the ongoing daytime TV drama that is AI?
There’s also the undercurrent of the Trump administration steamrolling over decades- or century-old precedents daily, putting our country, and thus the economy, in new territory. Basic assumptions about the foundations of our economy are crumbling, and the only thing keeping it from collapsing outright is inertia. But inertia will only last so long. This is affecting every aspect of the real economy, goods and services that are moving around right now, as opposed to the speculative facets like the AI bubble.
I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and for Wall Street to realize Trump has really screwed over vast swaths of supply chains all across the economy.
Granted. A joint team of seismologists and linguists announce they have discovered that recent earthquakes have patterns that seem to match complex language. They have translated it. Apparently the planet Earth itself has gained sentience, and it’s pissed at humanity.
Good discussion of the rationalization of a fascist play. Only one criticism:
But this investigation will become part of the pattern and practice of this administration filled with aspiring fascists.
They’re not aspiring. They’ve sent in the military to take over a city from civilian control under a completely fabricated pretext with an underlying entirely political true purpose. That’s not aspiring fascism, that is fascism.
Some argue that because VPNs exist, any age assurance system will fail. This leads to the mistaken belief that age-restricted sites are exempt from compliance if users connect through a VPN. As we have argued before, this is not true. Legislation we have reviewed globally, including the UK’s Online Safety Act (2023) and similar meaaures[sic] in Australia or US states, offers no such exemption.
This seems a bit disingenuous. This is conflating legal exemption (i.e. the law explicitly providing an out) with enforceability. Is anyone seriously arguing that because of the existence of VPNs that their use to circumvent the law therefore makes that act of circumvention legal?
The article goes on to explain technical mechanisms by which websites can determine whether someone is likely to be accessing the site from the UK despite using a VPN (all of which become statistical and not certain conclusions, as well as require gathering suspiciously identifying information the user has not consented to supplying), but that really sidesteps the crux of the conversation. Experts in cyber security have been railing against this law and others like it for a while, with solid evidence that they don’t have the effect proponents claim (that is, make the Internet safer for children), and in fact can make the Internet more dangerous for minors. So the question is then: is violating this law civically unethical?
“Generally, what happens to these wastes today is they go to a landfill, get dumped in a waterway, or they’re just spread on land,” said Vaulted Deep CEO Julia Reichelstein. “In all of those cases, they’re decomposing into CO2 and methane. That’s contributing to climate change.”
Waste decomposition is part of the natural carbon cycle. Burning fossil fuels isn’t. We should not be suppressing part of the natural cycle so we can supplant it with our own processes. This is Hollywood accounting applied to carbon emissions, and it’s not going to solve anything.
He explicitly argues that “Qatanani is not part of ‘the people’ the First Amendment protects” and that non-citizens cannot “claim its protection.”
His reasoning? A convoluted “originalist” argument claiming that because the First Amendment refers to “the people,” it only applies to those who are “part of a national community” with sufficient “allegiance” to the sovereign. Non-citizens, he argues, owe only “temporary allegiance” and therefore get only “temporary protection”—protection that can be withdrawn whenever the government decides they’ve become “dangerous.”
This sounds like the judge fell out of a parallel universe. Is it typical to make up so many new, complex semantic constructs in a single opinion? A “national community” and some notion of membership in it. “Allegiance” to “the sovereign”? Sovereign what? Like the head of state, or a platonic ideal of the USA? And once “allegiance” is defined, there’s now “temporary allegiance” that begets “temporary protection”?
My understanding of legal matters is that judges typically pour over not just the wording and meaning of law, but also the wording and meaning of other judges’ opinions and verdicts, and concepts like these are developed over many cases spanning decades or more. I’m really not usually one for conspiracy theories, but either this judge has the wrong job and should be writing tabletop RPG modules, or this has all been planned out, and he’s been fed a path his verdicts are supposed to slowly trod, and he skipped ahead a few chapters.
I would honestly like to see a cut of just about any TV show or movie that uses stunt doubles where the doubles do both the lines and the action. I would like to see how different a director would shoot a scene if they weren’t constrained to choosing angles and lighting to make it look like two different people were the same person.
Happening in my neighborhood, and today is trash pickup day for my street. Not sure what we’re going to do with our trash, but I 100% support the strike. Every job deserves a living wage, no exceptions.
I don’t follow Mexican politics closely, but this could be part of an effort to curb obesity. I’ve heard they introduced taxes on sugary drinks for this, so this might be another avenue.
If people are wanting cheap snacks, and private companies are only making unhealthy ones, you can introduce regulations to micromanage what they can produce, or you can introduce a complex taxation process to disincentivize sugar snacks. Or you can introduce your own product that meets a perceived unmet demand in an underserved market.
Part of the reason that this jailbreak worked is that the Windows keys, a mix of Home, Pro, and Enterprise keys, had been trained into the model, Figueroa told The Register.
Isn’t that the whole point? They’re using prompting tricks to tease out the training data. This has been done several times with copyrighted written works. That’s the only reasonable way ChatGPT could produce valid Windows keys. What would be the alternative? ChatGPT somehow reverse engineered the algorithm for generating valid Windows product keys?
I think the labels on the axes of the bonus panel are flipped?
I would love to see the werewolf play the pompous know-it-all: “Um, actually the idea that the moon causes the change is a superstition. It’s a body cycle that often coincidentally matches up with the full moon. People just remember the times during the full moon because of confirmation bias.”