What could possibly go wrong? IIHS study finds some cars with automatic braking didn’t even slow when approaching dummies wearing reflective strips
Let That Sink In
The times, they are a-changing.
BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg announces sweeping changes to Facebook and Instagram to move toward Free Speech including:
-Ending Third-Party Fact Checking and Replacing it with Community Notes like
-Removing Reduction of Political Content
-Lifting Topic Restrictions pic.twitter.com/9Y2DVQSrpk— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 7, 2025
And more: Meta Platforms Appoints UFC’s Dana White as a New Director
Let That Sink In
Let That Sink In
I pay $10.50 a month for my X subscription and it’s worth every penny.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
It’s unclear if the Chinese hackers have been fully evicted from all of the U.S. telecommunications networks. Earlier this month, Neuberger said that none of the providers have managed to oust the Chinese hackers from their networks, an assertion that T-Mobile and Lumen have refuted.
Neuberger explained that once Chinese hackers infiltrated telecommunication networks, they essentially had “broad and full access” to American data, which allowed them to “geolocate millions of individuals” and “record phone calls at will.”
Let That Sink In
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Call it writer’s block or procrastination, but it now seems that the AI chatbots designed to ape human wordsmiths are picking up this very writerly flaw.
That was the experience of filmmaker Nenad Cicin-Sain, who tried to recruit ChatGPT to come up with a screenplay for his upcoming project — they key word being “tried,” because the OpenAI chatbot repeatedly made up excuses for why it couldn’t deliver on time. It even tried to change up the deadlines.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Leading AI chatbots show dementia-like cognitive decline in tests
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
AI models can deceive, new research from Anthropic shows. They can pretend to have different views during training when in reality maintaining their original preferences.
There’s no reason for panic now, the team behind the study said. Yet they said their work could be critical in understanding potential threats from future, more capable AI systems.
“Our demonstration … should be seen as a spur for the AI research community to study this behavior in more depth, and to work on the appropriate safety measures,” the researchers wrote in a post on Anthropic’s blog. “As AI models become more capable and widely-used, we need to be able to rely on safety training, which nudges models away from harmful behaviors.”
The study, which was conducted in partnership with AI research organization Redwood Research, looked at what might happen if a powerful AI system were trained to perform a task it didn’t “want” to do.
Y2Kyoto: Going Green Coal
Will Wade, for Bloomberg;
Something strange is happening with utilities.
For decades, electricity usage in the US has been mostly flat. Even with more people starting to use more power for more things, much of that has been offset as buildings, factories and appliances become more efficient.
But suddenly that’s changing, and the industry isn’t ready. Big tech companies need lots of electricity, for data centers and especially for artificial intelligence. Homes are using more electricity for heating and cooling. Factories need more electricity to shift away from fossil fuels.
And when faced with this sudden increase of load on the power grid, utilities are going to rely heavily on natural gas, and even coal.
“It will be a struggle to meet load growth,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a Washington-based research company that’s been tracking this trend. He expects US demand to for electricity to climb almost 16% over the next five years, more than triple his estimate from a year ago. Utilities are expecting customers to need as much as 128 gigawatts of new capacity in 2029.
That’s really going to disrupt the green transition. Power providers that have made pledges to cut back or eliminate carbon emissions are now starting to reverse course. Duke Energy Corp. plans to extend the life of its largest coal-fired power plant, which would push aside its goal to exit coal by 2035. Duke has said that its resource plans are not final decisions and are revised regularly.
FirstEnergy also will operate a pair of coal plants, stepping back from an earlier pledge to stop using the fuel by 2030. And energy companies in the US are planning new gas plants at the fastest pace in years.
And all of that is before Donald Trump returns to the White House next month. The president-elect is well-known for his support of fossil fuels and his skepticism of climate policies.
“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
That quote comes from Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, who lived between 1834 and 1902.
Here’s a great interview with David Sacks, who will be Trump’s new AI and Crypto Czar and Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is one of a few openly non-Woke tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
Update: In the comments, Joe Butson recommends the All-In podcast, featuring David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, and other interesting folks.
Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself
But someone broke Terry Glavin.
For Having The Wrong Politics
Marc Andreessen on progressive status bubbles, biased AI, debanking and other deep-state shenanigans, and a march towards dystopia only recently interrupted.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Brothers Nitin and Ajit and friend Amit were traveling from Noida to Faridpur for a wedding. They didn’t know the route, so they used Google Maps for navigation.
h/t David M
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Jeff Hancock, the $600/hr “AI and misinformation” that Minnesota’s AG @keithellison hired to defend criminalizing political deepfakes admits his declaration includes fake journal articles hallucinated by ChatGPT.
Y2Kyoto: Shut Up, They Argued
Everything old is blue again.
This week I was invited by a colleague to try out the BSky app as an alternative to X/Twitter. They told me that it is far more welcoming for discussion about energy and climate. Sure, I thought, I’ll give it a try.
I actively posted there for a bit and learned that climate activists have created a Bsky climate “blocklist” that focuses on me and anyone who mentions me — Matt Yglesias of Slow Boring and Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute are also on it. The blocklist prevents those on it from seeing the posts of those who join and creates a disincentive for anyone to mention those on the list, lest they get added to it. This is not a new strategy for some climate scientists and journalists.
People are free to create their social media echo chambers however they like, of course, but one detail is worth mentioning — One person promoting the block list is one of the lead scientists of the U.S. National Climate Assessment. That degree of intolerance among those selected to represent the climate science community is a problem for climate science and politics.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Seymour Cray, “the Father of Supercomputing”, claimed that Elves often helped him overcome computer design problems.
Let That Sink In
Glenn Harlan Reynolds- Elon Unbound
There are lots of consequences to this week’s election, ranging from economics, to diplomacy, to outright freedom. But I want to focus on one in particular, what it means for Elon Musk.