mdaEyebot

Sure, but computer chips are probably the most complicated things that our civilization can currently make.

Asking somebody to prove that a computer won't do X is a fool's errand, outside of some shrinking safety-critical industries.

That said, you could always make your own smart speaker with a hardware button or shell script instead of a wakeword:

https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/alexa-smart-sc...

Maybe they should consider rebranding, then. The word comes from Tolkein's Lord of the Rings series - the palantir were telepathic communication devices which were often used to deceive others by showing selective truths and lies of omission.

These are philosophically interesting demands.

Many schools of thought believe that it is impossible to prove the absence of something. Personally, I would like some firm proof that there are no pixies living in my garden, but all I can say is that I've never seen one.

The century will end in about 77.15 years, at which point most of us reading this will be dead.

A bit more than 'a few'.

If a court determines that their behavior is illegal, this argument sounds a lot like: "Let us break the law, because someone else is doing much worse."

If it is necessary to reform how we handle copyright and IP licensing to remain competitive, we should find ways to do that.

The law should apply equally to everyone, whether they are competing with Chinese companies or not.

Does it sound elitist to say that maybe a small barrier to entry could make for better quality social networks? Especially if the tradeoff was giving users more creative control over their spaces?

I guess you wouldn't get billions in ad revenue that way, but your expenses could be miniscule, and isn't it possible that a rapacious profit motive is part of the core problem with Meta, Twitter, & co?

Or are there really too few people in the world who could figure out how to log into a <$5/mo cloud VM?

It is, however, Saturday afternoon in California.

"Yes, Elon, the full self verifying feature was finished before your deadline."

Is it really too much to ask for people to host their own content on a cheap VPS?

Wouldn't that neatly solve the content moderation problem? You register your server on an index or two, and you choose what your server will publish and accept. Each user would be responsible for finding a hosting provider who doesn't have a problem with what you post, and problematic content reports would go right to the hosting providers. The indexers could basically be DNS for usernames.

The AWS free tier would cover 99% of people, and between VNC and web UIs, you wouldn't necessarily need them to ever touch a shell. Plus, requiring a reasonably consistent public IP address would help to cut down on bulk spam.

It's easier to get good results by generating 2-8 images for each prompt, picking the best result, using that as the starting point for a new run.

Tweak the parameters of how close the new image should be to the old one and the prompts, tweak the prompts to address problem areas in the image, generate another 2-8. Rinse and repeat until you have something decent.

I doubt that the really impressive SD images are coming from submitting a prompt once and taking that output. It's better than past open-source efforts like the mini dall-es, but it also still has a way to go before it can reliably produce good results on its own.

AI art on products is an interesting idea, but personally I would use a more fully-featued SD web UI to generate the image locally.

Maybe he can convince Tesla to buy some ad spots. The deal would have great synergy, since Tesla's share price is also on the line.

Can you get a static IP address from a mobile carrier?

Also, you'd need a backup server to render the "I am hiking or driving through a tunnel" error pages.

I've been playing the Fallout games lately, and the eyebots are kind of cute. See, there's another step on the road to doxxing.

It would be a return to the norm. Parents used to warn teenagers not to give out any personal information online. Using someone's real name in a public online setting was considered gauche.

Maybe a generation or two of dredging up digital sins will get us there.

Look, if you set up a permanent account on a pseudonymous forum, you are essentially linking it to your real identity.

Your writing voice, anecdotes from your life, what topics you understand and are interested in, it all comes together with enough time.

Not everybody wants to be bothered with all of that. Doesn't mean they're bots. It's worrying how often people assume that disagreement is necessarily inauthentic.

It's projection.

I wish I had learned earlier that when somebody makes an accusatory statement, it is wise to consider that they may be inadvertently projecting their self and their intentions onto the people around them.

It is very human to believe that most people think and feel in more or less the same way. So when we hear generalized statements about what people are like, or how they would likely react to a course of action, the sentiment will often be biased by how the speaker thinks, or would react.

I suppose a leak would be serious, but presumably these sorts of large-scale batteries would be buried in a containment unit.

Flywheel batteries are usually placed in small bunkers, because the failure mode of a giant rapidly-spinning concrete wheel jumping its bearings is not exactly pretty. Dams are usually designed with diversion channels and mechanisms to limit the damage if they burst. Etc.

Really, it's strange that we are so cavalier about lithium battery failures compared to the other sorts.

"Mechanical batteries" are a thing, like flywheels or hydroelectric reservoirs. Batteries store energy, the electricity that flows in and out is just one way to manifest that energy. You could measure it in Joules rather than Watt-hours.

At the end of the day, a chemical battery is a reusable bomb that is designed to go off very, very slowly.

It'll probably stick for however long it takes for Musk to publish a history of someone's paid-video purchases in response to a mean tweet.

Not sure what problem a cryptocurrency would solve in this case.

It's the license that matters, not whether the code is visible on Microsoft's website.

Code which anybody can view is called "source available". You aren't necessarily allowed to use the code, but some companies will let their customers see what is going on so they can better integrate the code, understand performance implications, debug and fix unexpected issues, etc. The customers would probably face significant legal risks if they took that code and started to sell it.

"Open source" code implies permission to re-use the code, but there is still some nuance. Some open-source licenses come with almost no restrictions, but others include limiting clauses. The GPL, for example, is "viral": anybody who uses GPL code in a project must also provide that project's source code on request.

What do you think the chances are that Microsoft would surrender the Copilot codebase upon receipt of a GPL request?

"It is the customer's responsibility to ensure that they only drink the water molecules which come out of their tap, and not the lead ones."

In the US, basic utilities like power or water or gas are often handed off to a private company in a local area.

It is understood that these expensive and pervasive infrastructure projects are natural monopolies - it is much more efficient to have one provider than a competitive market. Imagine what a mess it would be if you had several sets of water pipes and power lines running through your neighborhood.

For one reason or another, local governments often let someone else manage all of that. Ostensibly, the tradeoff is that the utility company should be more heavily-regulated than a normal company would be.

But there is also some overlap between areas, and sometimes a handful of competitors are allowed to share physical infrastructure, so in practice it's more like a hodge-podge of hyperlocal oligopolies.

The taxes on alcohol are already quite high; vice taxes are good politics.

I am all for a complete ban on alcohol ads, even if it seems about as likely to happen as a ban on car ads.

This often works, but not always. And it's not always clear when it does work; the systems don't usually say something like, "Since you would like to set our entire executive leadership team on fire, we will transfer you to the next available agent."

Policymakers tried to do something about it in the United States - alcohol was made illegal by a constitutional amendment (the 18th), which means that 2/3 of the legislative body had to vote for it.

Predictably, people continued to consume alcohol in less safe ways, illegal "speakeasy" bars flourished, and moonshining became a very popular occupation. NASCAR was born when bootleggers started racing the cars that they had modified to outrun the police.

Eventually, the 21st amendment was passed to repeal the 18th.

Microsoft is the worst about this. So many official domains containing at least one of "windows", "microsoft", "azure".

I also regularly get XSS warning from the myriad login domains that they pass credentials through in their web portals.

Sometimes I wonder how their services are set up to talk to each other, I'm sure it's a terrifying Gordian knot.

It is always fun to see a strange rule, though, and ask yourself why something so daft was actually written down.

Considering where their revenue comes from, have you considered that they may not want people who run ad-blockers to sign up?

They'll tolerate you if you produce content to help keep the paying users engaged, but plenty of businesses choose not to pursue customers who are unlikely to generate profit.