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> We haven't even begun to address the potentially super-human capabilities of future models.

Yes. That's a good thing. It is always a bad idea to invest a ton of effort into things that "potentially might" happen "in the future". These are imaginary problems, and are therefore undeserving of real effort.

We have real problems right now in the software engineering field. Let's focus on those problems instead.

AI didn't do that. You're deflecting blame from the responsible party.

And yet, historically, the atomic bomb has been controlled.

But this is a terrible analogy. Atomic bombs are weapons of strategic mass destruction. AI is just a computer program. It's way easier to control--just hold the operator responsible for the consequences of running it. Those consequences are not large, they're very tightly bounded as compared with the destruction a rogue actor with an atomic weapon can wreak.

With software products you can pretty reliably tell they're dogshit when the sales team targets the C suite. The security industry is riddled with that. Deals done over steak dinners and yacht charters don't translate to working, reliable software.

It works out pretty well for the RAM, GPU, and SSD manufacturers

just put a "new" or "better" in front of whichever name you want ;)

Intelligence that is artificial, as opposed to the natural kind. Not something that can just string semantically relevant words together most of the time. A system that learns, adapts, improves. One that can generalize, and quickly make sense of situations outside the training set. LLMs alone will never do any of this.

What's with all this make believe delusional bullshit? The LLM is not gonna wake up and become AI. Get real guys.

[edit] to be clear, I believe regulation is necessary and urgently important for the software engineering field. The damage being done by the unregulated psychological experiments run by social media and adtech companies is awful and should be curtailed. Engineers should be held personally, professionally, and legally liable for what they produce. But we don't need to invent imaginary bogeymen to do it.

But it speaks in words, therefore it must be super duper extra smart!!11 /s

Sarcasm aside, I think this is an easy cognitive trap to fall into. It does sometimes feel like the LLM must have some world model because it converses somewhat coherently. Examples like this failure to understand chess, or to count the number of Rs in "strawberry", seem difficult to explain if the models are intelligent. But that doesn't stop people believing they are anyway. I think there must be something about the conversational interface that fools us easily. I wonder if people trained in interrogation techniques are also fooled?

I go through a couple pairs of carhartts per year, so like $10/mo for pants basically. Seems like a pretty good deal. I'd probably go through at least twice as many pairs of jeans. It's a good product. Darn Tough socks are another good one.

> Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence.

I deliberately ignored it, because it was all irrelevant.

> I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.

I have no idea at all how anything should matter as far as the law is concerned. Not my problem, unless I somehow get caught. But not getting caught is a problem grounded in reality, unlike legal ones. I think I can manage that.

That said, if laws about computers don't comport with how computers actually work, I'll take extra amounts of glee in violating them.

And, even more gleefully, nobody will be able to detect my violations. My internet traffic will look identically the same as someone "innocently copying" or whatever.

> no license to kill, and not much in the way of secrecy or gadgetry

Insofar as you know.. there could be plenty of killer secrecy and gadgetry that was surreptitiously injected by your build/deployment/distribution systems ;)

IIUC it's an open question whether they have the electricity to actually run all the "compute" they own on paper.

That aside, I'm not sure why it's particularly interesting they have all this "compute" (let's just assume for the sake of argument it's all "live"--that is they can actually run workloads on all of the "compute" they have on paper). So what if it's the biggest amount ever? Why would that be meaningful? Is there some economically viable problem you're aware of that is somehow dominant in that way?

Yeah I would prefer to run something with an actual tread wear rating, as I believe it would spew less microplastic crap into the environment, and I suspect I might pick up 1-2mpg (maybe 5-7% better?) fuel economy with a less aggressive tire. But the winter performance is really important for me, especially on this car which is my winter beater/mile maker--for now, until it dies and donates its engine to a greater cause. The winters here (northern New England, IECC climate zone 6A) are just about as extreme as it gets in the lower 48. The snow tires have the added benefit of being good in mud season. There are lots of dirt roads around here, it helps to be able to drive them without getting bogged in the spring.

I've got two sets of wheels, and I rotate my tires every oil change, so it's not laziness that's the motivation. Instead, it was that with 2 sets of tires after 7 years of driving both sets still had tons of tread left but were starting to dry rot. I put about 60k miles on the car during those 7 years. So if I can get ~30k miles out of a single set of snows, and use them up within 5 years, that would be a much better use of resources. The cost isn't really a factor either, I just hate wasting stuff.

I've currently got something like 15k mi on the tires and 2.5yr of year round use. They appear to be wearing evenly and normally.

> Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying?

Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.

Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).

So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.

All season tires are useless on snow and ice unless they're brand new. They're OK the first winter, after that it's bad news. On heavier vehicles I run BFGoodrich All Terrain T/A tires year round. They have good siped treads which grip on ice. For the car, studless Blizzaks have been holding up well year round. No abnormal wear so far, and they do fine in the wet, dry, heat, etc. I probably only drive 1-2 days/yr over 90°F though, in a hotter climate they might not be so great.

[edit] obviously this is a tradeoff--I'm trading slightly reduced hot/dry/wet performance for massively increased winter performance. The reduction in summer performance is small enough to not be noticeable, whereas the increase in winter performance is large. On all season tires I would have to chain up a dozen or so times per year, often just to move the car like 3 car lengths out of a parking spot. I've only ever had to put the chains on once with snow tires on the car, and that was bashing through 6" of unplowed crusty icy stuff up a steep driveway.

I don't pretend to understand law, mostly it just doesn't make sense at all.

Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it.

So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run

  mtr xcancel.com

I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?

Lately I've just been leaving my snow tires on year round (Bridgestone Blizzaks). It gets cold here, between November and April the number of days with daytime high above freezing is small. I used to run all seasons in the summer and snows in the winter but they were lasting too long that way. It's better to wear them out within ~5yr.

The 3L diesel in my car takes about 8qt per change. The 5.9L diesel in my truck takes 12qt.

That's why I won't touch new equipment with a ten foot pole. I buy old stuff and then end up having to do major rebuilds. I realize this is somewhat of a luxury, and damn is it nice.

In the last calendar year, this is basically the highlights (routine maintenance excluded):

On my Kubota L3010 I added remote hydraulics so I had to take all the bodywork apart. Discovered some rust, put about 20hr of panel beating, welding, and paint into the floor pan (NLA part, unfortunately). About 20hr after I got it all back together it started leaking hydraulic fluid from the clutch housing. So I get the privilege of doing all that disassembly again to split the tractor and replace the front driveshaft seal (suspected). It's a minor leak, so far, so this might wait a few years.

The 1998 12V 2nd gen Dodge is its own saga--new transmission, clutch, a bunch of paint work. Rebuilt the entire interior. Currently working on cleaning up wiring in the engine bay, killer dowel pin fix, fixing oil leaks from the injector pump gasket and vac/power steering pump, serp belt, crank balancer, etc. Still need to drop the fuel tank and replace the sending unit, as well as re-seal the axles.

My 1995 Land Cruiser just got new plugs, distributor cap/rotor, belts, crank balancer, front main seal, oil pump o-ring, etc. Should be good until next summer.

My 1999 Benz got some new A/C o-rings, all the low pressure fuel lines replaced, some rust repair (welding, panel beating, paint, undercoating, etc) on the front right jackpoint. All new stainless brake lines (https://www.linestogo.com/ 100% will buy from these guys again). This car is kind of sacrificial, eventually its engine (OM606) is going in the Land Cruiser in front of a purpose-built NV4500 transmission. If the rust doesn't get it first (ski bus duty), I'll probably shred the 722.6 by turning up the engine too much.

So it's not a small amount of work. But no reverse engineering is required. I can just read a book and follow the instructions therein and do literally anything that needs to be done on those vehicles.

Reading codes is only part of it. For the last quarter century or so (some manufacturers more than others) if you replace certain components (radio, any computer module) you need to update the ECU to recognize the new component. This requires proprietary software and in many cases proprietary hardware as well. These "features" are marketed as an "anti-theft" mechanism. This renders some repairs basically impossible for the end user to perform.

The fact that they've been allowed to build systems like that is appalling.

Why would you pay extra for some website the company could just take away from you on a whim? I have the bound paper repair manuals for my 1998 Dodge truck, my 1995 Toyota, and my 2002 Kubota tractor. Nobody can arbitrarily take those away. Why can't companies these days just print a shop manual and be done with it?

I heard if you inject yourself with bleach you can perceive the higher dimensions. Many people say this.

That wasn't a shallow dismissal. It's literally the sentence that renders the rest of the article not credible.

> It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.

In other words: bias. Tons and tons of self-congratulatory, glue sniffing bias.

Yeah this could just be some vibeslop doing normal computer stuff. AI agents are famously incompetent at reasoning about database transactions. This seems like the sort of failure you get when you try to do distributed systems without knowing how--brings us back to the early mongodb days. Or it could be deliberate. Or, as you say, both.

Either way, is this a company you want to trust with intimate secrets? "Oh, but they passed SOC2!" Lol.

I have Haier Arctic heat pumps that are made in China. They've been great so far. I've also worked with suppliers in Shenzhen for one-off custom electronic devices that would put western companies to shame in their communication, efficiency, turnaround time, cost, and engineering quality. The new transmission I just put in my truck was made in China too.

I currently have R410a heat pumps with minisplits, when they're off warranty sometime in the future I might consider putting propane in them. The main question would be whether the oil used with R410a is compatible with propane as a refrigerant.

This is probably a little bit "dangerous" in the sense that I'll have high pressure propane in the line sets and minisplits inside the house, but it's a very small volume of propane and not really any more dangerous from a fire perspective than my propane fired condensing gas boiler.

[edit] a little internet sleuthing indicates that hydrocarbon refrigerants "might be" compatible with basically any oil, so I can probably just continue using whatever oil is in it.