We had no idea that 20% of our revenue for the year came from illegal sales to China! And neither did the president!

I've been telling Anduril recruiters to fuck off for 2 years and it's very frustrating to hear my (well compensated!) peers make excuses as to why its actually totally fine to take a job designing Mr.Lucky's latest death machine.

I could definitely understand if taking the job quadrupled your income and allowed you to take care of your family or something but most of the people who qualify are not in that position.

The catch is, if you have this skill set, there are lots of jobs that allow you to live really comfortably without having to design murder robots. Some of those jobs even help humanity. So most of the people working these jobs either sold their morals to make $150k instead of $120k or they never had any to begin with and just went for the biggest number.

All LIDAR does is map an environment. You still have to actually do something with that data to avoid obstacles. Usually this was done with traditional control software but writing that software for something like this is really really difficult, and it wasn't really practical to run an AI model on device like this until relatively recently.

Your Roomba and the majority of autonomous robots rely on pre mapping the environment to navigate reliably. That's why you have to let your Roomba map out your house the first time you set it up. It's also obviously much slower than a drone, and I don't think they're using any kind of AI for motion planning anyway. They also don't keep track of a moving target. So no, not "every autonomous drone" does this.

Of course they didn't make their own silicon. That's an insane and stupid standard to qualify as "from scratch". If a bakery claims their bread is made from scratch, do you ask where their wheat fields are? They're obviously claiming the software and AI model they trained are their own original work. (I have no idea if that's true or not, it seems like they may have "taken inspiration" from an existing open source Chinese drone.)

Running an AI model (which is not the same thing as an LLM) to do object avoidance at speed on the device in an unmapped environment is impressive and difficult.

7 years then the British equivalent of parole. It's in the article.

Talarico isn't perfect but he's a serious improvement over the cartoonishly evil Republicans who are usually in charge of Texas. There are certain positions which are political suicide in Texas (being anti fossil fuel and anti cop) so it's a given that any candidate who actually wants to win will support that. Basically everything else about him is a huge swing to the left for Texas. I thought there was 0 hope of turning Texas into a blue state, it's a huge achievement.

Man I'm American and taking the "wait and see" approach lmao.

That's cool but some guy who read a lot of Harry Potter fan fiction about it says we're all gonna die. /s in case it's needed lol.

The hardware requirements are substantial. If companies or individuals want to run models locally, especially at the speed you'd expect from the big name models, then everyone needs a pretty serious GPU on their work station. That or the company needs to build and maintain a server capable of running whatever loads they expect to see.

None of this is impossible of course. But you pay for the tokens one way or another. Either you pay the upfront cost of the hardware and continuing cost of the electricity to run it, or you pay with the inconvenience of running a model very slowly on lower end hardware, or you pay a subscription for someone else to worry about all that.

This is why local models are still niche. Only hobbyists nerds are willing to go through the trouble of setting up and running a local model. Most companies still are not sure if AI is actually worth it for them. So it's much easier to pay for tokens than the giant upfront cost required to build you own infrastructure.

If the numbers the AI companies are putting up as far as infrastructure cost vs revenue are anything to go by, it probably isn't worth it to most companies.

"The officer and detective group includes some supervisors, since LAPD’s own rank descriptions classify Detective II and III as supervisory positions. What the payroll shows is that nearly half of the people over $300,000 held officer or detective titles rather than sergeant, lieutenant or command ones. The Detective III at the top of this story was an example and not the top of the list, since a Deputy Chief II was paid $476,701 and two Sergeant IIs were paid $456,662 and $452,971."

It's a wounder what reading the article can do for you.

Consider your words marked.

This reminds me of a reddit post from a while ago. Dude is going to a university in the US. He's randomly contacted by campus police to let him know that a student has taken out a restraining order on him. He's a graduate student, and the student who took out the restraining order is from one of his classes that's typically for undergrads. Other than sharing that class, he doesn't know the student. Never even spoken to them. He's on a student visa, if he's expelled, he'll likely be deported. He's not allowed to speak to the student and campus police won't even tell him why the restraining order is in place.

After doing some investigation on his own, he finds out the student is dating one of his roommates, who he also doesn't know very well. The roommate is stalking the student, and another roommate is helping the stalker.

The student who took out the restraining order had seen him with the stalker at some point and, because the class they share is typically for undergrads, assumed he only took the class to keep an eye on the student for the stalker.

He was able to go to his graduate advisor about it and luckily it all got cleared up, the student withdrew the restraining order. But his whole academic career was nearly derailed because a random person was able to take out a restraining order on him with zero direct evidence, and there was no established means by which he could defend himself.

Many cars have the modem / LTE as a module that can be disabled. On my car, a 2018 Chevy, the LTE antenna plugs into a networking module in the footwell. I bought an antenna cable and dummy load resistor on Amazon for ~$10 and simply unplugged the LTE antenna in the car and plugged in the dummy antenna. That disables all cell network connectivity but doesn't effect things like Bluetooth. It's also easily reversible if someone wanted to do that for some reason.

You can probably Google something like "year make model disable LTE" or "disable telemetry" to get an idea of how hard it would be on your car. Some make it very cheap / easy and some make it very difficult.

This isn't just a case of some abrasive people involved. The guy who runs the project, DHH, is an open and proud racist. He posts his very straightforward racist beliefs on his blog. He made ruby on rails, and after being rejected from the ruby community he's now trying to insert himself into the Linux/open source community. On top of that, the "distro" is Arch + some dot files. Despite that, he's managed to raise millions of dollars in outside funding, which is insane for open source project. Either his industry connections are willing to look past the racism and hand him a bunch of money anyway, or they actively agree with him and want to build a space for racists in the open source community.

Add in the AI stuff and people have plenty of reason to boycott this project.

Arnold is 6'2" and was ~250 pounds in his peak body building days. Andre was 7'4" and ~500 pounds. There were lots of huge dudes at the time but Andre really was kind of in a league of his own.

I'm in my early 30's and I remember the opposition to gay marriage when I was a kid in the 2000's, it was strong and very visible. This was in a Southern California beach town, not exactly a bastion of conservatism. Hell, Obama was opposed to gay marriage when he first ran for president. Things changed very quickly as we entered the 2010's.

Not the person you replied to, but the top right frame appears to be a reference to him.

I don't think the person you're responding to is making any claims about AGI. But the fact is, the models are far, far more capable then they were even 3 years ago. I think that has more to do with the harnesses we have now that it does with the models. The models are a bit better (and way bigger) but the harness is where the capability comes from. Software dev has changed significantly in most places because the fact is, this shit is useful for those tasks. People, appropriately or not, are trying to apply that to every office job basically.

I don't think that's gonna pan out for anthropic or open AI financially, especially in the long term. But there has been a lot of progress in capability in the last 2-3 years. I think they're right that if the timing works out badly, many employers could overcommit to AI and then collapse before they can correct once the bubble pops.

I recently played through this, somehow I had never heard of it. Some parts didn't age great but overall a very fun game. Lots of nazi killing.