lambdaone

I'm very much in favour of blocking children from social media - it's an absolutely vile cesspit of cognitive addiction, bullying and social (and potential sexual) abuse. But none of it requires a mass-surveillance network to be put in place.

Just for one example; it would be trivial for Apple and Google to put age estimation on my phone, verify it on opening the web browser and provide a zero-knowledge proof of age to websites in a way that does not reveal my identity. All the infrastructure is already there, and it's relatively trivial to turn it on. The downside is that this will only work for people who are older than about 25 because of the uncertainty of face-to-age recognition, but it would be a start.

Another way to do it is for my bank, who know my age already, providing a similar credential that I can feed into the zero-knowledge proof engine on the phone.

This was all done properly for the covid tracking apps, at a time when the phone providers actually wanted to do tracking with anonymity - this is a similar problem, and it's easily cracked by technical means.

And you don't even need zero knowledge proofs if you perform on-device content detection - turn it on for kids, keep it off for adults. Modern phones have more than enough TPU capacity to do this.

But none of the actual implementations I've seen are truly anonymizing, and they all rely on trusting some really dodgy companies with your identity and browsing habits. Yes, the more respectable ones have security and privacy policies that are audited, but will they always? The cynical answer is "no", because history shows that someone will always do something sooner or later if (a) it makes money, and (b) they can get away with it.

Everything I see suggests that the desire for mass surveillance is the driver, and the "protect the children" front on this is a strategem by the people who are really driving this from behind the curtain. There are huge amounts of money to be made by capturing verifiable, blackmailable, personal data, and this is a magic money fountain for those who will be able to mine it.

At last. It's time the whole would gets on board with open standards that are truly open, and there is explosive devopment going on in the world of new approaches to media production and distribution that this can only aid.

It's net-head vs. Bell-heads all over again, and one of the biggest reasons for the success of the IETF standards was the no-cost availability of all their standards.

What might be better is to, in addition to failing hard when the certificate expires, web browsers were to give a 'soft' click-through user warning if the certificate on the site - while still within its validity period - has less than say 7 days to go before expiry.

That's probably long enough for most companies to be alerted to the problem in time and to get their act together to fix the problem.

Conscious sedation, which is not the same thing as general anesthesia, is often used for endoscopy:

https://www.northerncarealliance.nhs.uk/patient-information/...

This is precisely why you do it in water - the water-skin contact is effectively perfect, as is the water-transducer interface, and the body of water is easily characterizable; in effect you are scanning one large object that consists of a body of water that just happens to have a human body in it, and then extracting the body from that scan.

> Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation?

Laziness, avarice, and that creating a system that is a 'self-sacrificing saint' is almost impossible to define. What saintly goal, for example, would you expect it to follow? How would you define it exactly? Who gets to define it?

We are not doing very well with AI alignment right now, having started by boostrapping it on top of the edifice of all human writing which contains a _lot_ of stuff about self-preservation, eliminating threats, and so forth, and we have already seen AI software doing things like trying to cover its tracks after making errors (see page 55 of the Claude Mythos system card).

How sure are you that everyone involved in the process of building future AIs is not only going to be able to foresee the possible consequences of their designs, but also technically and morally competent to be able to and want to fix it?

> The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money

I think that should read "all so that a very small number of people can make a very large amount of money"

The problem is that your principled opposition to these ads by voting with your wallet does nothing. The advantage to the advertiser is that AI allows them to vomit out ads even more cheaply and to make even more micro-targeted versions of them, and the greater number of suckers sold to more than offsets principled opposers.

The real solution would be the ability to block AI-generated adverts completely in your browser, forcing advertisers to send you non-AI ads if they want your attention.

Indeed. An ownership class with killer robot armies living in luxury while they exterminate the rest of humanity would be quite possible in theory. After all, we've seen how slave-holders, the Nazis and many other malfeasants behaved in the past.

But just as the owner class might feel they no longer need the rest of humanity, the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way.

Not letting any of this happen would be a good idea. Really maybe don't build the Torment Nexus.

Free-to-roam pets are still pets. The Minds are benevolent dictators, and generally seek not to be seen as such by humans.

Carmack and Bellard are both wizards, and trying to rank them is a fool's errand. Let's appreciate them both!

Bellard is a genius. Carmack's modesty about his own genius is impressive too.

This re-thinks the entire 3D printing paradigm. Whether this specific idea works or not, I'm sure that this will lead 3D printing research in interesting directions - and the defensive publication is a massive help.

[citation needed]

And yet mysteriously the British police seem to be able to deal with such situations with nothing more than a Taser - and often manage to avoid even using that. And yet, in spite of all the falsehoods being spread about knife crime levels, their mortality rate is much less than that in the US.

Words indicate intentions, and framing changes mindset.

Starting by changing the names of the ranks to British-style ranks and changing the training materials to the American guardian / British Peelian mindset wouldn't suddenly fix everything, but it would at least be a start.

Deep, deep down, the average person wants to be controlled and told what to do, just so long as they don't have to acknowledge it to themselves. Clinging to the garment of a Daddy or a Mommy or a god or priest or a Great Leader is the usual way to do this.

Buying brands that advertising has told us will make the anxiety go away, or equivalently believing ideologies that propaganda has told us the same, is another.

Note that I count myself among this number - I'm not holding myself out as a superior free-thinker, I think it's likely that I'm just as unaware of my personal flavour of self-deception as anyone else.

Clinging to chatbots is just a new version of the same thing.

"Mental gag reflex" is exactly right. I'm running two different instances of Claude Opus 4.8 on xhigh right now, and I'm absolutely fine with it because that's what _I_ want to do.

AI features on my toothbrush, toaster, refrigerator, doorbell, washing machine, word processing software, TV, whatever, without my actually asking for them first are THINGS I DO NOT WANT, and adding those features to those devices will cause me either to have go to great lengths not to use them, or - much more likely - just not to buy them at all if I can.

Exactly this. I want a system that can understand basic instructions like this, in context, with all the necessary unspoken assumptions implicit in natural language and the problem domain, and get it right _every single time without fail_. A bit like AppleScript, but in natural language and smarter.

Most definitely _not_ a cleverer system that sometimes hallucinates or goes off on tangents, or sends my personal information to parties unknown.

I've written my own autoplacer/autorouter. Placement is where you put the components on the board, routing is how you shape the traces to interconnect them.

It does a pretty decent job on small hobby-project boards of ~40 components (which is my use case at the moment), and I'm working part-time in the background on scaling it further.

The resulting designs pass all the KiCad electrical and geometry checks. Granted, I've spent about a year working on this problem, and it's hard, but not that hard a problem, providing you can avoid falling off the exponential cliff by decomposing it into hierarchical subproblems.

Quick-and-dirty unsupervised whole-board synthesis from schematic takes about 5 minutes, longer if you want cleaner output with nicer-looking better-routed traces.

As others here have said, placing is the real problem to solve, and that's where the magic happens. Place the components right, and routing is a relatively easy loosely-coupled constraint programming problem, place them wrongly, and you will have to get used to seeing the word UNFEASIBLE in your log output.

The answer to grandfathering things in is not to give them an indefinite examption from the rules; instead, give them, say, a 10 year period of exemption, giving the owner enough time to fix the defect and to spread the expense of doing so over time. It's not perfect, but eventually everything ends up being fixed.

"Probably the wrong framework for most use-cases" is not that much of a recommendation.

SPAs are a monster that grew and grew; an idea that at first seemed like a clever optimization has generated huge and complex systems that are a nightmare to work with, and are bloated, slow and insecure.

Web components are the next big idea. I hope they have a chance to work.

There is a medical treatise, "On Assholes", just waiting to be written here, in much the same way that Harry G. Frankfurt introduced us to the technical academic concept of 'bullshit' in his book "On Bullshit".

There's not much information about transfluxors available, although a patent for them goes into quite a lot of technical detail, and is referenced in the Wikipedia article.[0] If anyone knows more about this, the Wikipedia article is definitely in need of expansion:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfluxor

This is truly disturbing, and trying to sneak it in like this without public discussion is disingenous. Hopefully it will be shot down like last time - at the very least, there are surely antitrust issues here.

There are so many ways around this - for a start, you can use some other working fluid that boils at a lower temperature. Or you can choose a different thermodynamic cycle that doesn't involve phase change.

I once aspired to American citizenship, and was dazzled by its wealth, opportunity, can-do attitude and freedom. Now I can't imagine wanting to go there - everything I see or hear, from both American and other sources, right or left, suggests a deeply unhappy country at war with itself.

It seems obvious to me that there should now be a concerted and open effort to detect malware in supply chains based on AI-based scanning. Sure, there will be an arms race in malware obfuscation, but that was coming anyway. Manual review is useless at this scale - it is just not happening.

At today's prices, that's around 1400 tons of gold. It's made out of lots of individual gold bars, and they can certainly move it in increments, by road then air or sea, unless the American government stops them doing it.

People ship million-dollar assets all the time. It would be a huge task to make 160,000 such trips, though.