pj_mukh

Greg Brockman has donated more money to Trump than anyone else. Republicans shouldn't even be bringing OpenAI up let alone let something get to the SEC. Meanwhile low-level thugs get blanket pardons from the administration.

OpenAI and Brockman are getting scammed by this administration and the GOP. I just really hope tech remembers it next time they want to play this "both sides are bad" game come election time.

bingo.

and famously this executive doesn't over-reach to protect "its own"?

So, the protection racket is not working? [1] Maybe some folks need to re-think whether this administration is worth "donating" to?

[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-exec-becomes-top-trump...

There is nothing in the H1B program that makes these immigrants different from the immigrants that ran IBM, Xerox and HP. Other than the country of origin of course.

Yes, and it's doing so primarily because of immigrant nerds, H1B's and F1 bros who chose America and may not have this avenue in the future. Potentially, making this the last race USA wins.

I mean this is the K-shaped economy. A swath of workers + capital owners with infinite leverage, and another swath of workers still simply exchanging 1 hour of labor, for an hour of results with very little rent to be extracted. The lucky ones have union protection (with its own problems), but the rest are just this lady writ large.

Cleo Abrams' YT tomes, albeit much shorter and more attuned to modern attention spans, are getting close to that quality level at least.

I think that’s fine, having an extremely small group of subsidized industries because of historical reasons are fine.

Going forward, I don’t expect any group of experts appointed by the government to know whether a use case is justified and being right. Chaos theory abounds and the second part of my post applies.

This is an extremely frustrating angle to take because what you're implying is that anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose. Now I don't like water going to Golf courses either but to me even the intermediate solution is to price water accurately.

Barring that, long term we're surrounded by 70% body of water with infinite energy beaming down on us, this feels like a solvable problem without having large swaths of the country fight over scraps.

"Law enforcement is setting up a multi-county dragnet by putting every version or mistype of a license plate into a warrant list"

wouldn't be a story? It should be! We should have a higher standard for the people with guns and a badge on the street.

"the TN woman who was extradited to NC,"

Yup, exactly. Look that case up, it had nothing to do with Flock. It was facial recognition software and an old school database built in 2014, so likely not big-data ML (AlexNet hadn't even come out) but classic CV.

Productivity improvements will be needed in all industries. I'd rather have fewer well-paid and well-trained, accountable LEO's that have all the productivity tools they need vs. a mini-army of union-protected tom-dick-harry's grabbed of the street, handed a gun and a database. No thank you.

No licensed engineer can say "Well Claude made this bridge for me, it's not my fault". If you're licensed by the state to carry a gun around, your standard should be higher than that, not lower.

AI has nothing to do with this. Cops have been using facial recognition since the 2010's, computers and databases with glitchy connections even longer than that. AI is just the latest boogeyman hiding the actual issue.

Paraphrasing the crux of the issue: "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list."

Insane. Practice.

As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI, but "law enforcement has an insane lazy practice" doesn't make for a very good headline anymore.

Snowy/Ice-y driving? Check out all this Canadian work!

http://cadcd.uwaterloo.ca

Disclosure: My grad student advisor.

I don't think the last two critiques are good critiques at all. The environmental impact is a function of our energy sources not energy uses. Complaining about energy and water when we have infinite energy beamed down to us surrounded by a planet that is 70% water seems silly.

And AI "Ikea-fies" art and creativity. It doesn't get rid of it. Of course you can get a generic table from IKEA, but for a real unique piece, you need to go to a real artist. Always.

The real main critique is for AI jobs that are a one-to-one replacement, your taxi driver, your dock worker etc. I don't think UBI is a viable solution (I used to) but nothing replaces the community and status that a real job gives you. This is going to be a tough one.

Wait, you jumping to national ID's are a tool for national control is fine, but me saying social media is forensically designed to be hyper-addictive[1] is somehow bizarre?

Have a nice day I guess.

[1]: https://www.addictioncenter.com/news/2019/09/excessive-socia...

"your role as parent is not to blindly follow the herd if you think it is not good."

This is just conservative individual responsibility pablum just re-imagined for IT.

"It doesn't matter if all of societies forces + giant multi-national tech corporations are conspiring to trap your child, individual responsibility is all that matters"

This argument doesn't work for smoking or drinking, and it shouldn't for social media.

Yes, and also almost all of these issues could be ascribed to all digital medical record-keeping. The fact that AI transcribed it matters relatively little.

"Decent schools also ban phones now as well."

Yes and decent countries ban social media, because like schools, the countries recognize this is a collective action issue. You get your children a smartphone when it becomes the only way they can connect with their peers. That's my point.

"This is 100% an education issue"

It is not. Most parents I know have seen what it does to their kids, but have zero childcare. I have a white-collar remote job and can police my kids. If I was dual-parent working class, I don't think I'd be able to pull it off. I'm glad these laws are getting on the books, so at least the peer pressure of a classroom can get to a good majority of kids.

The kid with the iPad at the restaurant is just saliency bias ("I see it everywhere!"). This is not that different from blaming parents for sending their kids to school hungry or for their kids getting abducted or some such.

Social media is a vortex with a very strong societal pull.

If this was America there would be 20 think pieces in the Atlantic about how AI is ruining our culture and no one would get arrested.

Could be nothing, or could be a new Havana Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome

What's sad is, 5-10 years ago, no adversary would think simply off-ing American scientists was effective strategy, America was a new scientist generation machine.

Now thanks to Research funding falling off a cliff and massive immigration restrictions, this is no longer true.

Fortunately, the slop you visibly see online is just the tip of the iceberg. I would guess 80% of AI's real usage hides beneath the surface in back-office documentation consumption, software development, process optimization and automation, investments in new endeavors companies would've never thought possible/financially feasible etc. All of that usage is hidden from this resistance, and possible now with current models (so all this new poisoning is irrelevant). The valuations could go away tomorrow, and it would've still fundamentally changed the nature of the economy.

It doesn't matter that you don't like the slop on the LinkedIn post, ban it. I think the visible slop on our various feeds that is driving people mad is a rounding error for the AI companies. Moreover, it's more a function of the attention economy than the AI economy and it should've been regulated to all holy hell back in 2015 when the enshittification began.

Now is as good as time as any.

"infrastructure improvements (grid capacity, fiber, etc)"

Do these projects fund these? Because the crux of the best argument against data centers is hinged on a lack of infrastructure (power, water etc.) availability.

have you found a model that does this with usable speeds on an M2/M3?

Is this an issue with Cactus compute stuff as well?

"there are plenty of other companies who will be happy to take the money to build them onto Boston Dynamics' platforms."

Only way to solve this is DRM. War machine (or even intimidation tool) creations on their platforms is a Terms of Use violation [1]

[1]: https://bostondynamics.com/blog/an-ethical-approach-to-mobil...

Boston Dynamics has sworn off all war machine development [1].

But as expected, others have taken their place [2]. Guilt-tripping a single non-monopoly proving useless again.

[1]: https://bostondynamics.com/news/general-purpose-robots-shoul...

[2]: https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260323PD219/military-bosto...

The EPA comparison is moot. Data centers don’t dump chemicals into the water or emit toxic gasses. A data center is not more or less resource intensive than your typical factory. All already regulated.

What you’re asking for is an EPA for “do I approve of what this data center is used for?”. Which is insane.