But why waste tokens when bash (etc.) exists and many of the command line toools are configurable to what they emit when used?

I think this means that the US is going to get stuck there for a very, very long time, as there are downsides to all options including pulling out, which may in turn survive a change of president.

On the other hand, all it takes is a president who doesn't care about the downsides, or thinks the downsides are worth the cost, and suddenly Iran's free to toll the strait, and a whole bunch of other straits get tolled in turn. If Iran gets away with it, I wouldn't be surprised if Israel finds Gibraltar closed to their shipping, though Suez would likely remain open to them for the foreseeable future.

I very much hope that Trump doesn't take the literally nuclear option here. A different Pandora's box to letting Iran take their toll, and a much worse one for everyone.

Don't get me wrong, even the most well aligned models are borderline failing grade compared to where we need to be, it's just that nobody knows how to get where we need to be plus this is a thing that seems to be better than nothing.

Agentic AI as it currently exists only *mostly* does what it is told, with a small but non-negligible fraction of the time it goes off and commits felonies to achieve your ultimate goals without stopping to consider that you might want it to not do that.

Or sometimes it does consider it and then does it anyway. Not sure if that's worse?

With a lot of Chinese nationals in American companies, and an American corporation owning DeepMind, and a lot of people very upset with all of them at the same time, this is very messy.

Race dynamics increases p(doom) for everyone.

The non-doom scenarios include "utopia for all", and "power flows to investors, not citizens of whichever nation the winning model's corp. was registered in".

Independently, "oh look all the investors went bankrupt" can happen in both "doom" and "normal technology" timelines.

From what I hear, what Trump did with Iran was burn through the US stockpile of certain fancy special-purpose wepons you're really only meant to use to punch a hole for your conventional forces to enter by. Trump is not willing to send in those conventional forces, because many of those personel will die. Trump may not care about the lives of the US personel per se, but with the mid-terms coming up he will care about the impact of those deaths on the election result.

Also: Gulf Wars I and II had a lot of build-up and prep, moving forces into the area; this was diving straight in because someone (my Israeli namesake) flattered Trump's ego.

Now I also think it's not even controversial to say that drone warfare is radically changing the nature of engagements. I don't believe the US could take on present-day Iran, owing to Iran's production of militarily relevant quantities of cheap and good-enough drones; a saturation attack can drain the defensive capabilities of warships, and while the exact performance is classified, a slow upgrade cycle would probably allow a saturation attack to overwhelm the *sensor* capabilities from not too long ago.

Laser defence systems may change that, but those aren't all-weather solutions, and the sea is the exact worse case for this. And I don't know if anyone's thinking about saturation attacks with submersible drones.

Because the Russian government is still telling themselves they can win and don't even bother trying to negotiate with Ukraine but instead the USA, this must not be the case.

I can't even remember the name of the eBay people in e.g. this without actively re-reading the story, though we all know it was Musk who reacted with petulance to being told his cave submarine wouldn't help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

Unfortunately, reality doesn't care at all about the categories humans create, so there's always some exception like the following two no matter how you try to cut reality at the joints with word definitions.

Even in humans, we see all kinds of interesting things going on. No reason to think this would be limited to downstairs and not in our brains, assuming there even are any differences between male and female brains (which is unclear to me, given vitamins and cortisol and how much sleep we get all impact our brains): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovotesticular_syndrome#Fertili...

Beyond us, but in the same general category, biologists collectively chose to define "sex" in sexually reproducing creatures such that the one with the smaller gamete is male.

To illustrate how arbitrary this is: seahorses. The sex which gets pregnant has the smaller gamete, i.e. males get pregnant.

Combustion engines improved gradually, each year. One year they got better than horses.

> I don't know what we want to call this, but in my opinion, having to convince your tools is not computer science.

My vote is "machine psychology".

If the surgical eversion of genitalia is sufficient, great, we got that.

If you require DNA, give it a few years.

* well, technically neutrons protons and electrons; I'm sure any two people will be slightly different in their counts of carbon atoms just from body fat percentages, or calcium from bone mass.

** regardless of if you mean the chromosome, the phenotype, or the social identity

I leave it as an exercise for the reader if they're just saying that.

Ironically, I only see coments like yours regarding Grok.

Tesla self driving cars, (somewhat) as you say, but even the biggest proponents of Grok are like "oh no the best model is this, ugh".

On the one hand, yes: the UK is demonstrably "this is fine" when it comes to mass surveillance.

On the other: the government is almost pathologically bad at joined-up thinking.

To illustrate the latter: I have been sent exactly one speeding ticket. It was for a car I had sold 6 months previous to the offence. The police force was somehow unaware of this.

> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.

Kinda, it's domain-name level, which is again an illustration of the lack of understanding the government has; they were even told this during the public comment phase of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, how their own example of "perhaps a teen goes missing and we can see they went on twitter and look on their account" has the reality of "no you idiots [I'm paraphrasing], their phone is constantly talking to twitter regardless of if they're using it or not, or even still alive or not".

On the other hand, those records are worse than being shared with the state, they can be read at any time by a long list of state entities without anyone even needing a warrant. The Welsh Ambulance service being able to do this without needing warrant is one of the big parts of why I left the UK (the other being Brexit, of course).

Despite which, over a 100 year period it has 25 times the warming impact as the CO2 it turns into.

> The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.

Everyone should focus on whatever they know how to make a dent with, the "sustainable" emissions rate is 0.1% of the current rate which is essentially "we need to fix everything everywhere except for pick one of grassland or North Korea".

https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector

The mean human has approximately one ovary, one testicle. A few hundred million Indians refusing all meat is compatible with the others not doing that.

Hardest part is knowing implicit animal ingredients you might not otherwise guess, which almost tripped me up when I visited the US and (as a vegetarian*) almost bought some yogurt before reading the ingredients list and finding to my surprise that it contained gelatine.

* it's mainly the cheese; I've substituted out other uses of milk. Also, vegan yogurt is a thing now, not sure when that happened, before or after that visit.