Still, at this level, brittle infrastructure is a political risk. The internet's famous "routing around damage" isn't quite working here. Should make for an interesting post mortem.

Longer answer: In the UK, Apple already implements age "verification" at the OS level, starting with IOS/IPadOS 26.4. If Apple had not implemented this, it would still be in compliance with UK law. Apple is anticipatorily obedient.

A company like Apple has visibility of the legislative pipeline in its markets. Looks like the UK was a test bed.

Lots of OECD countries, all at the same time, are pushing for online age verification or OS-level age verification, both equally intrusive and implemented in privacy-violating ways by conflating identity verification and age verification.

The end result is not protecttion of minors, but abolishing anonymity on the Internet. Social media companies claim to want the former, but in reality just want to shift liability to OS and device vendors. Governments happily accept the "side effect" of being able to find and root out dissidents.

The Online Safety Act does not require device manufacturers to enforce age "verification" at the OS level. If Apple had not implemented this, it would still be in compliance with UK law. Apple is displaying anticipatory obedience here, which is the opposite of good citizenship.

Two things stand out from this fiasco:

1. Apple, and those who praise them for what they just did, don't appear to have learnt from history. Anticipatory obedience used to be known as "vorauseilender Gehorsam" during a particularly dark period in the history of a country a few hundred miles southeast of the UK. It was one of the factors enabling the darkness.

2. The UK is a small enough market for Apple to treat it as a test bed. Which it probably is in this case, and which means that removal of anonymity aka "OS-level age verification" is coming to a lot more devices in a lot more countries soon. See also the uncanny coincidence of lots of OECD countries pushing for online age verification at the same time.

(Source: First hand experience.)

The UK's proposal makes the "digital ID" a pointer to an entry in a centralized database. This database is the definitive record of what you are allowed to do or not do (like reside and work). Which can be changed or deleted at the stroke of a key, through human error or malice. Then what?

When (not if) the database becomes an attribute store across a wider scope, the implications are scary. The "digital ID" as set out today can't work for its ostensible purpose. Therefore its actual purpose isn't being declared. Not hard to connect the dots.

The attractor shown in figure 1e has such periodic components, and identifying these does help, but only with very near term forecasting. When the accumulated forecast error crosses a threshold, it suddenly causes a large phase error, best seen from about point 75 onwards in the x and y components. From that point onwards the forecast is useless.

AIUI, they use the 3x3 neighbourhoods to capture local directional and curvature (i.e. gradient) information in the distance matrix. They then apply two heuristics (reduction to an 8-bit binary number and binning into sextiles) to reduce the floating point gradient information to coarse integers to aid pattern recognition.

The more recent paper adds another heuristic (empirically chosen similarity threshold) to aid finding starting points of recurring patterns.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41531-021-00240-4 , Equation (5) onwards.

One thing I don't understand is the addition of the constant 3 to the row index (in the paper just after formula 6). Intuitively this should be only 2, because the last row vector of the local topology lags the last state captured in the distance matrix by one row, and then we want to move ahead one more row to start forecasting.

What am I missing?

True, but they are harsh discontinuities, sufficiently so to have the effects I described. And yes, there is a common combination of personal circumstances (high income plus student loan repayments plus child care subsidies) which means that any gross salary between £100K and £117K means less net income than being on £99,999 gross. I've not been able find a graph for that, but the maths checks out.

The result of this particular combination is to effectively impose a ceiling on many employees at £100K gross, because they would have to receive a greater than 17% pay rise to be better off than before.

- doctors going part-time to keep their income below £100K, in the middle of a shortage of doctors across the health system

- employees turning down promotions because with the combined effects of income tax, student loan repayments and loss of childcare subsidy the effective marginal rate of income tax between £100K and £117K is > 100% (!)

- single high earners (core voters of the present government) effectively subsidising families of middling earners (the opposition's core voters) because the discontinuities apply to single person's income, not combined household income

The behaviour changes are simple first order effects. The second order effects on public service workforce availability and overall tax take were also highly predictable.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03270/tax_327...

https://www.mahngerichte.de/mahngerichte/wedding/

not at any other municipality's court.

Only do this yourself if you speak and read German well enough to handle the correspondence yourself. Otherwise you really need a German lawyer to act for you.

It is sometimes possible to agree payment of lawyer's fees according to the value in dispute instead of being billed for time spent. This can keep costs down.

Listen to professionals' advice, especially OTs and speech therapists. Their work is most applicable here.

Don't listen - in fact, run away from - anyone who offers you a "cure", because they are trying to exploit you. There is no "cure" for neurodiversity. It's a difference, not an illness.

The most important thing to do for your daughter is the most obvious one: Love her unconditionally. Everything else flows from that, you just do what it takes. What that is will be pretty obvious 99% of the time.

The most important thing to do for yourself/selves is to be kind to yourself. You will need to advocate for your daughter as she grows up, and possibly beyond. You won't be effective at this if you're running on empty emotionally or financially.

"an autonomous AI system that could behave in ways that would be catastrophically harmful to a large fraction of humans, potentially endangering our societies and even our species or the biosphere"

and explains that it would also need to be goal-directed in a way which would be at odds with human wellbeing.

Stipulating all that, what is still missing is an explanation of the mechanism by which an AI, rogue or otherwise, could do harm. How is it supposed to affect the world outside its computing substrate?

Absent humans making available the interfaces and resources to do so, it can't. The referenced article includes an example of a genocidal human doing exactly that, and using an AI as a force multiplier. That, as the trope goes, is a social problem, not a technical problem, and it needs a social solution, not a technical one.

Each of the other examples in the referenced article (military AI going rogue, wireheading, amoral corporate AIs manipulating humans) require AIs interfacing with the physical world outside their computing substrate or with the biosphere. Again, because these scenarios remain dependent on humans making available such interfaces, I fail to see how a hypothesized "rogue" AI could achieve any autonomy to do serious damage.

I see this panic about rogue AIs as well-intentioned but misguided, and perhaps exploited by folks who would like to control / diminish / force licensing of general purpose computing.

Can someone please explain to me what exactly the danger is / the dangers are of "super-intelligent" AI?

AIUI, an AI is a combination of hardware, software and parametrization. In broad terms, it exists as a black box which supplies to humans responses to token sets fed to it.

Even if an AI has the launch codes for ICBMs somewhere in its training data, it doesn't have an interface to the nearest missile silo to use them. It cannot commandeer the resources (hardware, space, cooling, electricity) it needs to operate, it is dependent on humans to supply those. So humans can pull the plug on it at any time.

Even if an AI were to become both sentient and nefarious, by what mechanism would it harm humans?

I'm genuinely looking for concrete examples of such a mechanism because I can't imagine any which humans couldn't trivially control or override.

That's not even limited to the third world. Source: Personal experience of owning farmland in a first world country, with a mining company operating nearby, while living elsewhere myself. The only mitigation is to get involved in local politics, and to play as dirty as the thugs do. Not something you can do from far away.

tl;dr: I'd be biased towards selling, after getting a couple of independent opinions on value.

The most remarkable thing about it are the manuals: They are an excellent introduction to programming, simple algorithms, and explain the need for documentation.

With all due respect, that's whataboutism. Life is much better than it would be under Ebola, too, but the issue here is that overall quality of life has deteriorated for most humans over the last two years due to the restrictions and interventions related to Covid-19.

> Life in the UK, where vaccination rates are very high, is pretty much normal.

In the UK, but also in many other previously liberal democracies the following are happening at present:

- Freedom of association and freedom of assembly are being made conditional or removed.

- Freedom to travel is being made conditional or removed.

- Freedom to just take part in daily life, e.g. go shopping is being made conditional.

- Freedom to protest is being reduced or removed.

The rule sets under which all this is happening are capricious, changing frequently, based on mostly political considerations with only a sprinkling of scientific reasoning. This removes agency from each of us.

Whether one becomes subject to a restrictive rule by the accident of becoming infected is mostly outside the control of any one person. So this, too, removes agency from each of us.

I see entire countries descending into learned helplessness, while political elites flout the rules they make for others and exploit the urgency of procurement caused by the pandemic to enrich themselves.

This is not a world I want to live in. Improved acceptability of WFH doesn't come close to compensating for all the above.