nmeagent

It was the most random thing I could think of to ask at the time. It is apparently pungent enough to be banned on public transit in some Asian countries, though I couldn't tell you which one(s). I've never had it myself, but they were cutting a large amount of it in the fruit section of a supermarket in Shenzhen once when I was there and that alone was an interesting experience. Some claim it's delicious and it just might be, but hoo boy its smell is strong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian

Durian fruit -- yea or nay?

I keep chromium installed mostly to run virtual tabletop software (specifically Foundry VTT), because webgl performance in firefox is not great (though it has improved somewhat in the last couple of years). There are also a few sites (mostly restaurants for some reason) that just refuse to work properly in firefox, so I sometimes fall back to chromium. I wish I could drop it like a bad habit, because frankly Google's shenanigans piss me off on a semi-regular basis.

So all it takes to overturn federal statute is an authoritarian decree and maybe some signage changes then? That's not how any of this works and you should know better. It's more than a name change anyway; it is indicative of sweeping philosophical change in the defense and intelligence communities as a whole.

Do you live in a country where the rule of law has already been thoroughly destroyed and rule by fiat is the norm? I don't! It is still possible to turn things around here, and this means resisting any instances of fascist bullshit, big and small. The name has not been changed by edict just as the 14th amendment and a zillion other laws have similarly not been changed. Do not just accept and accommodate their assertions of arbitrary and unbounded power -- do not obey in advance (e.g. see the excerpt of some rather decent writing on this notion here https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny)

No it isn't. The name was set in statute by the National Security Act of 1947 (as amended in 1949); as with many if not most of Trump's regal decrees, changing it would require an act of Congress, not mere executive fiat. Don't obey in advance.

Department of Defense. Don't obey in advance.

In the mid-80s the world was estimated to have some 60000+, so 12000 is somewhat of an improvement. Ideally through arms control we could reduce this further, but that's no trivial undertaking.

Are the livelihoods of the original creators still there?

> We didnt go extinct from the nuke

Yet. We've come very close (see e.g. Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls). A catastrophic mistake or miscalculation could trigger a massive exchange at any time; it could happen on any given Thursday.

Well, that AI mouse pointer idea is one of the most horrifying things I've seen in quite awhile. Hard pass, do not want, do not trust anyone involved.

I always thought it would be low-grade hilarious to record a fairly long video of the unboxing and assembly of a ridiculously elaborate in-case LED setup, only to reveal with a straight face and at the absolute last minute that the case in question is entirely opaque.

I've run into a few restaurant sites whose ordering pages just do not work properly (or at all) in Firefox. Also webgl2 performance is unfortunately still much better in Chrome vs Firefox; as an example, FoundryVTT (virtual tabletop software) works fine in Firefox but is a stuttery mess IME (though it has improved slightly in the last few years).

> I wonder how long these sorts of games will play before the law applies itself.

Perhaps roughly as long as the law turns a blind eye to AI corps flagrantly violating the attribution requirements of software licenses that apply to their training data, as well as basically ignoring other copyright requirements at scale. Fair use, my eye.

> Now my company...

Which company is that? Do let us know so I can make sure to never be your customer.

> As will everyone

Nope. Not for me, not ever.

"Man, you guys really need to get inside sometimes and touch Linoleum..."

I find it surprising how many non-technical friends and family constantly anthropomorphize LLMs, regularly bringing up instances where they "asked AI" about this or that and it "told them" whatever. I'm tired of trying to explain that they are merely statistical sequence generators, don't have a mind, are occasionally completely out to lunch, and ultimately cannot be trusted. This is usually a losing battle. The sheer bullshit that "AI tells them" is often astonishing or ridiculous, but a lot of the time it's given undue weight and trusted anyway. The future is bleak.

And probably a lot of uncool sci-fi like stuff, e.g. The Machine Stops.

I don't understand why anyone would want to work for a firm that will not allow their employees to do their entire job properly, but will instead insist that they delegate a large portion of it via natural language of all things to some stochastic parrot from hell and hope after enough iterations of this that it will all somehow turn out okay. This sounds like a complete nightmare! To be frank, this entire situation is absurd and honestly sours me on the entire field.

So when you bring this up with your coworkers, do they tell you just what to do with or where to put your value judgments of their hobbies?

Forget legal, they want any action to not be obstructed by guardrails.

> That freedom must be balanced against the interests of the rest of society to avoid risk from certain kinds of harm which can easily proliferate in an environment where any program can run with the full authority of the owner and malware spreads willy-nilly.

No, no, a thousand times no. This is an argument for authoritarian clampdown on general computing and must be opposed by all means necessary. I have the right to run whatever code I wish on my own damn property without the permission of arbitrary authorities or whatever subset of society you favor, and if you or they have a problem with this, you or they can proceed to pound sand.

Either this is masterful satire or I should be asking you how the weather is in St. Petersburg, eh tovarisch? (no offense to the poor folks who live there and aren't paid to troll Internet fora).

> There's an immigration checkpoint near my house. I've had to present my ID. It took all of 5 minutes and then I moved on with my life.

There's a very real possibility now that if you have the wrong physical attributes, encounter the wrong federal agent, or (in the near future) are insufficiently loyal as deemed by some unaccountable bureaucrat, that it may not take five minutes, but instead quite a long time, when at that checkpoint you are instead arbitrarily and illegally detained, whisked away to some holding camp several states away, and held without access to counsel or due process for some indeterminate length of time. Draconian immigration enforcement is currently used as an excuse to habituate people like you to arbitrary inspection and force. You're going to miss the rule of law when it's gone, so now would be a great time to stop being obtuse with this left-right culture nonsense and instead support the protection of all of the people's constitutional rights.

Warrick apparently retracted that accusation after closer examination, FYI.

"You must sign in to view this post."

No.

I was going to look into this once, but instead I opted to go into Tosche station to pick up some power converters and unfortunately never quite got around to it.

> I just asked AI

Please stop doing this. If someone wants to read LLM-generated hooey of some variety, they can submit a prompt somewhere and read the resulting text themselves.

Beware of "you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride." Some people don't survive that ride. Sometimes that ride lasts many years.

No. They shouldn't be able to do this within 100 miles of a border either, since that's not a reasonable distance for the border exception to apply by any sane reasoning. The rights of roughly 2/3 of the US population don't evaporate because of some absurd assertion of distance that is clearly off by two orders of magnitude. We must uproot this particular crop of dystopian bullshit and salt the earth in its place.