The advantage of that last approach is that it has side effects and cannot therefore be optimized out by the compiler.

I did a double-take too, but she’s wearing skin-colored shorts with a red stripe on them over tights.

But the money is actually pretty good.

That’s what I’m saying.

Things that are numbers:

• a memory address
• the letter B
• an error encountered when trying to open a file
• the concept of being false, as opposed to being true

Things that are not numbers:

• this particular floating-point number

The PSF is (presumably) already required to comply with Federal anti-discrimination laws. Am I misreading the text or does it not actually create any new obligations for the PSF if they were to accept the grant?

That’s an extremely vague post. There’s some irony in arguing against the suppression of an idea without clearly expressing what that idea is.

One day we might be able to create operators with three or maybe even four question marks. Imagine the possibilities!

What gets me is when I’m not allowed to remove an external drive. Deleting a file can be delayed until later but here I am with a physical object that I need to detach from my computer and first I need to play hide and seek with the OS.

Not a great article, IMO. Some points seem very weak. (Escalation? Escalation by whom?) The focus on international law is hardly relevant to how things are actually done in the world. I think the NYT does a better job of analyzing this incident.

My own thoughts: designating drug cartels as military targets rather than simply criminals seems like it could be reasonable. They’re not less organized or less brutal than terrorist groups that have been designated as military targets in the past. Violence against them has the potential to make the world a better place, if that violence successfully disrupts their operations. With that said, having the President unilaterally designate them as such is executive overreach, and having Trump in particular do it is also likely to be a mistake in practice (or worse, an action done with no concern about being correct) even if it could be justified in principle. The shameless celebration of killing is a separate problem and both the symptom of and the cause of a more widespread moral decay.

Your options are an ugly wall that works or the beautiful lack of a wall.

The ability of red states to outright defy a Democratic federal government that followed the rules was quite limited. I don’t see defiance by blue states against a government that does not follow the rules going very far. It would be nice if states had enough autonomy in this context to act as a safety valve on federal power (and a lot closer to the original intent of the Constitution) but almost no one actually supports that as a matter of principle so both parties take turns attacking it when they control the federal government and now here we are…

I’m not saying that ice cream is healthier than a normal dinner, just that if I really crave something sweet then the cost to my health of eating it periodically is actually quite low, whereas the cost of some other desserts (baked sweets are often the worst offenders) is relatively high. That means that a lot can be gained simply by replacing one dessert with a different, equally tasty dessert. Hence my ice cream advocacy.

Your points are valid, but I think that building AI has benefits beyond simply enabling people to use that AI. It advances the state of the art and makes even more powerful AI possible. Still, it would be good to know about the amortized cost per query of building the AI in addition to the cost of running it.

I don’t see why this argument works better against AI than it does against microwaves. Those are used hundreds of millions of times a day too.

With regard to sugar: when I started counting calories I discovered that the actual amounts of calories in certain foods were not what I intuitively assumed. Some foods turned out to be much less unhealthy than I thought. For example, I can eat almost three pints of ice cream a day and not gain weight (as long as I don’t eat anything else). So sometimes instead of eating a normal dinner, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream and I can do so guilt-free.

Likewise, I use both AI and a microwave, my energy use from AI in a day is apparently less than the energy I use to reheat a cup of tea, so the conclusion that I can use AI however much I want to without significantly affecting my environmental impact is the correct one.

I know people whose grants have been put on hold and these people don’t even know if they have health insurance anymore, since grant money pays for that too. This is wild.

I don’t see why someone would need advanced technology in order to target civilians. Civilians are all over the place. They’re hard to miss even if you try. I suppose the author would respond that the technology is being used to specifically target journalists but even that doesn’t seem to be very useful when so many people have cell phones.

Historically technology that made weapons more precise has reduced civilian casualties. One might argue that Palantir’s technology is not yet good enough to do that but it is being used as if it is (which I suspect is true) but my bet is that in the long run technology like theirs will be like a modern precision bomb as compared to WWII-style carpet bombing.

Are there currently any government contracts put at risk by this? I didn’t think that the feds were major spenders on AI. And is Trump aware that Musk is currently the one man trying to provide the sort of AI that Trump wants?

It’s not unreasonable to simply dismiss what Trump says entirely, but it’s a different matter to assign it a meaning other than the meaning that can be inferred from context. You’re just putting words in his mouth at that point.