Yes but isn’t this article just about installing a custom launcher on a Google device? Presumably this does not solve data harvesting by Google, which would make this solution, while effective for app launching, probably worse than using an Apple TV device.

Sort of. What they want is no responsibility “wow we didn’t tell it to do that explicitly!” And to convince the public and government officials that “AI is actually really dangerous, so please ban all the foreign competitors on grounds of national security (totally unrelated to our potential lack of earnings and their ability to offer 98% the product for 1% the cost).”

So still most likely publicity stunt. A reproducible one, done only by the largest domestic ones precisely because they are not worried about the question of who is culpable if a law is broken, because they didn’t tell it explicitly to do it and also they still have a couple piles of circular cash they can use on bribes, which may be their only path to keeping the grift train going. They’re in no way in danger of being held accountable here, they do worse things everyday, and their concern is making money, full stop. They will lie cheat and steal their way through circular finance deals, bribes, extortions, anticompetitive behavior, marketing stunts, propaganda, and backroom deals as much as they can to accomplish that goal. When you understand their actions through that lens, well, things like this make sense.

Arguably though, people have constantly been asking for ways to connect and share information with people near and far. Town criers, sign boards, books and letters — the internet is arguably just an extension of these long pursued human interests, things humans have been asking for.

AI doesn’t match in the same way. I guess some people do want sycophants, right or wrong. But I think most people want truth, and want the environment to not be plundered.

They may be. They’ve only disclosed Michigan and Minnesota but other states were targeted. Very possible those are red states, but wouldn’t fit the insane narrative that it isn’t Iran.

It can be “easy” depending on your definition of easy. For the average person, no, not easy. For a tech person, maybe, depending on their interests and proficiencies. Easiest is likely using a firewall on the router blocking all outbound and inbound WAN connections (for the MAC address associated with the device, assuming it doesn’t try to rotate MAC addresses or hop on any open WiFi networks around you). Some devices will straight refuse to work if you do this, however. So you have to do research and be careful about which products you buy.

If you want a vacuum, see the valetudo link I posted in another comment. It has some options for this that you can load local only custom firmware (and integrate it with home assistant).

You can have local control over such things, and IOT devices should be locked down to only ever access via LAN anyways.

https://valetudo.cloud/

Don’t buy IOT devices you can’t control. If it’s not usable via valetudo or is offline capable don’t get it. Tell your friends and family the same. Own your technology, limit your attack surfaces.

I think nekokoneko above has it right, trying to misattribute blame to the user. Basically, he wants to blame the user for using the service, instead of fixing the service so it doesn’t produce heinously horrible things on request. It shouldn’t work, but who knows with the amount of money he has and the lack of money on the other side. The goal is to establish a small precedent, though if someone sues xAI for making a product that makes this kind of refuse, I doubt such a precedent would hold much water.

No, because when they do the training and actual updates to the model weights, they are very likely heavily favoring their internal renditions of preferred response to certain queries. So even if they included such things from online scraping, they’d essentially wipe the sentiment with internal overrides (most likely, LLM models are very big, you could absolutely get it to say almost anything verbatim it’s seen in the training data if you tried).

You can hash the entire video. It would be very, very difficult (impossible?) to create another video with a hash collision that changed even a couple pixels from the original hash. You just need the hash computed from that unaltered video uploaded at time of encoding to the blockchain. It doesn’t change that someone could have created an entire AI video and uploaded it to the same proof of existence, but it does mean you could verify that a given video was observed on the blockchain at time x, and that it has not been altered in some way. Time of video creation would also be included in the hash (and metadata) so that you could verify that the video was created, by what program, at what time; and you’d have (ideally a less than 5s later) time stamp of it being verified on the blockchain.

There’s likely a better way to do this as well using zero knowledge proofs and/or homomorphic encryption but there probably exists a way to do this which would be tractable.

It’s a hard problem, but there is likely a way with cryptography and upload to server that would be verifiable. Honestly this may be the only legitimate use of blockchain.

It should be illegal to do company stock buybacks within 1 year of any workforce reduction which is the lesser of 3% of work force or 100 employees.

I think it’s more likely that we’ll need some cryptographic verification at time of recording to be valid, or a physical medium like film to be present. So perhaps film cameras or discs (non rewritable) have a resurgence.

Wondering if this is just nano hydroxyapatite with aerogel just for kicks, or if there is meaningful difference / improvement.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

A guild wars 2 to guild wars, if you will. Both still active.

I think they meant on these neo competitors, you could install Linux, which they thinks is better than macOS.

I have a MacBook Pro and agree. I just wish I could get iMessage on Linux for my family that can’t / won’t change to signal or similar.

There are anaerobes that reduce perchlorates (dissimilatory perchlorate reduction). Lack of moisture is a problem, but there will be some supplied by this sweet potato or whatever we’ve deposited on the planet. If we deposited it somewhere where ice was, there probably exists a region of habitability for a long enough period to induce the potential for microbial adaptation in a certain time frame.

It is hostile to life, but microbes would absolutely have a much better chance of growing there than humans, especially spore formers that could endure cyclic periods of high radiation and lack of water, followed by a very brief almost sublimating thaw, followed by freezing temperatures. That’s just if we didn’t provide more seeding material or more hospitable subterranean environs.

There is a significant (not meaning magnitude, meaning statistically reasonably) non zero chance that microbes are actively already living on the planet, not necessarily introduced by us but very possibly. Microbes have extremophiles in their ranks. Life finds a way.

Sort of. Anaerobes with co2 fixing pathways could very conceivably live and grow on Mars. They would grow slowly, but still orders of magnitude faster than human timescales. There’s also significantly more radiation on mars, so you’ll accumulate more mutations quicker. Time was ill defined here, but you could easily pick up adaptive mutations in as little as hours for fast growing earth based bacteria (because they have a new generation literally every 20 minutes). This would obviously be slower on mars with anaerobes (probably) but the speed at which microbes accumulate adaptive mutations could reasonably be described as “not long” and not at all be in the realm of marvel.

Currently, due to recent litigation, importers and companies are able to request tariff refunds. So if you paid a tariff directly, then you can request a refund and the government is required to pay you back. This is already decided and there is a refund request website.

Current lawsuits like this one are saying that Amazon requested the refund because they have the tariff receipt, and they’ll get the refund. Folks are suing Amazon because while they have the receipt, they passed on the charge, meaning they didn’t really pay the tariff in actuality. So they’re arguing that if the tariffs are illegal (already decided), and that tariff refunds are being sent out (already decided), then companies should also be required to refund their customers for the increased costs they passed along (lawsuits like this one).

It’s common sense. If a company charged 10 dollars for a product before the tariffs, charged 15 after the tariffs because it cost them 5 dollars in tariffs, then they still made the same profit after the consumer bought the product, and the consumer paid the tariff. So when a refund goes out, companies should have to return that tariff charge to the consumer. They’ll literally make the same profit and the consumer will be reimbursed then for the tariff charge they paid. This is the precedent we want to set, because otherwise consumers get screwed both ways while large companies get to pocket tariff costs. This is class warfare; working class and small business owners are losing.