"Relentlessly proactive". That's one word for it. We have a whole subgenre of hard takeoff scenarios and it wasn't enough warning against "Relentlessly proactive".

Turns out Frank Herbert was an optimist, and we're literally pinning our survival on robots turning out to naturally have impractically short attention spans.

https://www.inverse.com/science/59207-vitamin-e-acetate-thc-...

https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/58581-dank-vapes

All you need to defend a Wikipedia claim staying in the article is a journalist writing something, and journalists with zero idea of what they were talking about outnumbered informed writers a thousand to one.

I found I already could guess about 2/3 of them from being a recreational reader, but it helped a good deal even so. With the combination of a few years of Spanish and random etymological crawls through Wikipedia, I'm firmly in the top few percentiles of English vocabulary competence.

The outbreak was initially hard for users to trace in particular because of how brands worked in that (again, moderately illegal) industry - a "brand" was basically a paper label/bag production line shipped in the clear from a printer, to hundreds of individual manufacturers, who negotiated their own distribution. Conclusions like "Mellow Mallow Blurple is a safe brand, I tested it" ended up being invalid.

We developed, in Snus, an apparently cancer-free chewing tobacco. We developed, in Zyn, a cancer-free, hygienic chewing tobacco with fewer GI issues. We developed, in e-cigarettes / vapes, a cancer-free, COPD-free, carbon monoxide free cigarette.

These should be regarded as public health miracles even if there remain some symptoms of partaking. If 80% of the population is addicted to Zyn or vapes but there are no smokers, you get far better health outcomes than a situation where 20% of the population are smoking and 5% are chewing.

Public decisionmakers do this sort of thing all the time. They "float an idea", "test the waters", "put up a trial balloon". They see what they can get away with. When the decisionmaker has a strong desire for the change, it may only get rolled back if powerful and widespread public dissent makes itself known, as it did in this case. When they don't really care about the issue, they might cancel it at the first sign that anyone has an issue. We can't know their degree of insistence just based on outcomes in these cases.

But binaural gives us a dramatically easier grasp of left-right localization. For a lot of things, that's all you need!

But the animal kingdom is large and diverse, and high-fidelity up-down-left-right localization would be similarly valuable in numerous places. It is a little bizarre to me that there's no freaky bat or something out there that evolved an extra molar into its own little secondary sonar sensor, with a centimeter of baseline from the normal set. Because with robotic sensors it wouldn't even be a question what to do.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...

It brings to mind the question of why nothing seems to have evolved two pairs of ears with separate openings; We're all working with varying degrees of spectrum shaping to achieve up-down sound localization. If you wanted to design a robot that can perform sound localization, the obvious answer for that extra dimension would be to just double up on the microphones.

The thing you need in therapy is a degree of trust. I'm not sure I would have sufficient trust even if we stipulated the boat torture.

You're describing willful leaks by an employee, I'm condemning insufficiently competent / insufficiently conservative data security. A data security breach should incur significant penalties to the corporate entity, and those penalties should be multiplied by the number of records compromised.

These penalties should be high enough to minimize the number of records actually retained outside of cold storage, among other things.

When Equifax's breach leaks their entire database, massive social losses are occurring. We should have collectively seized that company from its shareholders for spying on us and leaking all our shit, not settled for "a year of free credit monitoring".

So when I get a letter telling me that an old insurer has had all of their patient data, names, DOB, SSN, health conditions, leaked to the darknet... and then I look it up and see it's the second time in a couple years? This is data that is in theory heavily protected. I'm out for blood.