In high school the computer drafting teacher glued all the mice closed because students kept stealing the mouse balls, and then of course all the mice got clogged with gunk and stopped working.

You can be good friends with someone without having the sort of connection that makes discussing some specific issue possible. That doesn’t mean the connection isn’t genuine, even if the scope of it is not as broad as you wish it was. Regarding venting in particular: in my experience, it’s fairly common that people don’t want to listen to heavy stuff that they can’t help you fix. I often have things that make me sad which I want to put into words even though there’s nothing anyone can do to help, and I find that for that sort of thing AI can actually be a good “listener” of a sort.

After I decided to divorce my ex-wife, I felt hollow. It seemed like the wind would be able to carry me away like an empty plastic bag. But, gradually, that feeling faded and today I can even smile about the fact that I did have the courage to leave a situation that was so clearly bad for me even though leaving felt frightening and shameful at the time. Your relationship lasted much longer than mine did and so this must be harder for you. You have my sympathy.

They got sentenced to about five years each, except for the guy who hurt a police officer and got two years more. That on its face does not seem unreasonable to me for causing over a million pounds in damage even without any sort of terrorist connection. How long are people in Britain responsible for hundreds of thousands of pounds in damage each usually sentenced for, given that this sentence is so outrageous to the author?

The moth flies for the German air force.

I don’t even know what the good outcome here would be, given the terms of America’s surrender. Maybe it would be better if Iran pushed too far and forced Trump to re-enter the war.

What you’re missing out on. (Not that I’ve gone myself.)

Talk about a flying saucer…

the coalition backing the measure has until 25 June to decide whether to move forward or potentially strike a deal

It’s a clever way for the unions to effectively hold the state hostage, but it comes at the price of the harm that even the possibility of this tax has already done to the state economy.

A blog post on the topic.

The SEIU is known in California political circles for pioneering and perfecting the art of extortion via ballot initiative. Their usual strategy goes:

1. Propose a ballot initiative that will sound nice to voters, but which is actually deliberately designed to ruin some industry.

2. Demand concessions from that industry in exchange for withdrawing the initiative.

I think the clear conclusion here is that why people say they aren’t having children (and perhaps why people sincerely believe they aren’t having children) is not actually the true explanation for why they aren’t having children. If financial security was really the missing piece then there would be data showing people with more money having more children. (There isn’t.)

I think the perspective of moral responsibility (“lie”, “held accountable”) is not a useful one here. Punishment is one way of discouraging humans from making mistakes but it can’t prevent mistakes entirely. My field is software development and in software development there is the expectation that everyone, even the best human developer, makes mistakes relatively often, and there are frameworks for managing those mistakes. (Frameworks not focused primarily on blame or punishment.) AI can fit into those frameworks.

I agree that AI is inhumanly good at presenting wrong information confidently and convincingly.

something they know isn’t correct ALL of the time

Neither are humans…

It’s changing the culture and whether that change is good or bad is a matter of opinion. I can see where people who think their culture is good the way it is now and don’t want it to change are coming from. I’m an immigrant myself (in the USA) and I think I’m as American as most native-born Americans in some ways but not others. I like to think that my net contribution has been a positive one by any reasonable metric, but I admit that I’m biased towards economic metrics. Someone who values cultural continuity very highly might disagree.

What’s the point of this article? It’s talking about the same thing that has always been true about Windows 11 since its release - there’s no new requirement or “creep”.

Would having experts capable of telling real videos from fake ones even solve the main problem, that being the problem of public perception? The experts would have an important role in, for example, intelligence agencies, but the public is still going to trust its eyes, and in the presence of multiple contradictory videos, its biases, especially since there’s always going to be someone claiming to be an expert to back them up.

We’re barely past the Wright brothers’ plane stage of AI right now, so predicting when the technology will level off is very difficult and just extrapolating forward from the limitations that the technology has today is unlikely to be reliable. I think you’re right regarding what we’ll see in the next few years but I have about thirty years until retirement. By then things will probably be very different and that’s something to keep in mind when choosing a career (or deciding to have a child).

I wouldn’t bet that physical robotics will lag behind for long if AI does get to the point where it takes most knowledge jobs. Automating software development has turned out to be both easier and more profitable than automating plumbing, but that doesn’t mean no one is ever going to automate plumbing. So as a software developer, I’m earning and investing money while I still can, and I’m doing the things on my bucket list in case we get the worst-case scenario. I think that in the long term, the outcome in which I still need money but have no way of earning it is less likely than either the “good end” or the “bad end” in which no one needs money anymore, so sometimes I feel silly saving up money I think I will probably never spend, but better safer than sorrier.

I’m not saying it does, but the evidence presented here isn’t showing that it doesn’t. Consider a toy model in which most children are “good” and never misbehave, but some children are “bad” and often misbehave. Parents physically punish misbehaving children, and physical punishment does reduce misbehavior. This model would show the same “physically punished children behave worse” outcome that the article describes.

The article doesn’t mention how they’re ruling out the standard “bad behavior causes physical punishment” interpretation.