throwworhtthrow

> peak power consumption is about 200W for the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra, and 300W for the Mac Studio with M5 Ultra — a fraction of the power used by a common toaster.

(Emphasis added.)

I believe you are sincere. But "is about to be a huge, costly, global train wreck" lacks the nuance of "are you sure this is right?" and will rub some people the wrong way.

Edit: I'm not suggesting you should have written it any differently. I think you made the right choice to be a bit provocative because it grabs the attention that's needed.

Your argument is persuasive and well illustrated. I think the problem is the intro paragraphs come off as too certain of catastrophe which, when juxtaposed with your claim that "smarter people than me have been working on this", makes it sound like you don't actually believe they're smarter than you. The rest of your essay feels fair and not judgmental.

I would point out that someone having been FTC Chair does not inherently mean that they know what they are talking about, as demonstrated by the current FTC Chair.

I certainly wish for this to be a productive line of attack against the AI labs, but I'd like to read a more thorough argument showing that it would hold up in court. (It's academic anyway; we'll all be paperclip'd by the time there's a change in administration and a prosecution can be brought and worked through appeals.)

Source: https://x.com/linamkhan/status/2099204390548639960 (seems like a single post, so you don't need to log in and see replies)

I can't tell if Khan is being realistic when she says laws against “unfair or deceptive [acts]” or “unfair methods of competition” apply to AI labs. Her 2-sentence justifications aren't enough to convince me. But maybe it's sufficient for state AG's who want to start investigations.

I believe this is a reaction to Dario Amodei's essay yesterday, "We Must Pace the Frontier": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49672510

Cohere's disagreement seems mostly about who makes the rules. From the essay (which does seem significantly written by AI, sadly):

> The rules around AI are getting written either way. What's still open is whether they get written by a group anyone can join and with evidence anyone can check, or by a handful of companies in a room with the door shut.

Of course none of the AI companies will suggest that they should be accountable for the illegal actions taken by agents they host, but I feel like that could be a very effective "pacing mechanism", and addresses the concerns brought up by this essay about fairness and transparency.

There's the punctuation and word choice tells. And the overall voice. But let's set that aside because some human writing shows similar traits, or perhaps a human used an LLM to "fix the grammar". So I'll point out another tell that this article is pure slop:

This article is overflowing with links, numbers, and graphs. When a human writes that densely, it takes effort to incorporate all those details. So the human only does that if each detail contributes to their argument. In this article it's mostly irrelevant. It's LLM filler to pad out an article that really has nothing to say beyond its (also LLM-scented) title.

The blog's About page says Max "writes" about transportation, but I'm skeptical he's even read his own slop here, or he would have presumably fixed some of the worst nonsense sentences before posting it. I doubt he even had the courtesy to ask Claude to run a fact-check on its output. Curse anyone who wastes my reading time like this.

Thanks for the link. His decades of tech columns were so well-served by his skeptic curmudgeon style. There's danger in bringing that persona to all topics, I now see, shown by this regrettable chapter of his blogging life.

I'm glad this worked for your family, but in my kids' experience this is too heavy to use as balance bike. By the time they were comfortable hoisting their de-pedaled 12" / 5.4kg bike off the ground, they'd nearly outgrown it. They preferred a cheap hand-me-down balance bike which was half the weight (the upscale ones with brakes and pneumatic tires are self-defeatingly heavier).

Just as ChatGPT is now called "Chat" by the kids (go ahead and finish grinding your teeth, I'll wait...), if Antigravity takes off then it'll get an irksome nickname like Antigrav or just Grav.

NHTSA now recommends "8 and 4" hand position. Did see the memo about this?

I'll go ahead and make sure you get another copy of that memo: https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/steeringtechniqu...

The quote you've selected is an unfortunate example of the NYT poorly summarizing the findings of their own study (not your fault, they're the ones who wrote it). You can find a more precise explanation at the end of the article in the Methodology section.

"200 to 400" is from their model of decreasing hood height for existing collisions. But from the article:

> There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: They have taller hoods. And they tend to have larger blind zones.

It doesn't appear that NYT included in their model the larger blind zones and how that causes more collisions. So they shouldn't have said their 200-400 estimate covers the increase in vehicle "size" when it only models one dimension of size growth.

In the 70s in SF my father had his car window broken by someone who wanted to steal his parking space. He found his car pushed in front of an adjacent driveway, and ticketed.

His doors were unlocked the whole time...

$9B/yr is less than half of the Pentagon's more recent estimate of $2T through 2088 for the F-35 program (according to Wikipedia and its sources, which is all I have to go on).

And again, the F-35 is not synonymous with the entire air force.

What's your source for:

> California [has] removed qualified immunity for their law enforcement officers at the state level.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity#State_law, it's Connecticut, not California, as the third state which limited qualified immunity.

I think the only one lying here is Gwern for calling the NYT liars. Gwern's claim is that by discussing someone's vape-induced injury in an article about flavored nicotine vaping, NYT misleads, because they are different vape product lines. The implication is that there cannot be an honest reason to mention the injury in this context. I disagree (as does the injured teenager, according to her quote in the article). I think it could also be understood as explaining that teens who enter the vaping market by way of flavored nicotine also have more exposure to the illegal products that caused the injury.

Gwern's evidence that NYT succeeded in their deception campaign is... riled-up internet commentators in the comments section who think vaping is evil. Which doesn't mean much because [pardon my cheekiness here] a) every comments section on every article everywhere on the internet is full of riled-up people, and b) we all know no one reads the article before commenting, therefore these outraged commentators must have developed their opinions without the aid of the NYT.

> all they have to do is

US IC assessment is Iran is 5-10y away from delivery tech, and there's no imminent threat.

Context:

The FBI Director Is MIA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47813001 (18 days ago)

F.B.I. Director Sues The Atlantic Over Article Claiming Excessive Drinking - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/us/politics/kash-patel-at... (15 days ago)

FBI investigating leaks to journalist who wrote explosive article on Kash Patel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037332 (8 hours ago)

Beware, this is a book excerpt rather than a standalone blog post, so it ends on a cliffhanger. Still a fun read.

> Our entire economy is built on scientific advancement and advantage.

Devil's advocate: Only productivity gains, not the entire economy, are built on scientific advancement. But wages haven't grown with productivity in half a century, so the loss of scientific advantage won't affect wage growth, therefore the economy will be fine.

(I know it's not convincing, but it's the best I can conjure.)

The article charts a Nature survey that shows "percent trusting the scientific community" was sub-50% for both D's and R's from 1985-2015. That's more interesting and concerning to me than the relatively recent divergence in partisian opinion. I'd wager we return to that status quo within 10 years, but even that state seems dire.

If you're the type of person who checks the comments on a post with this kind of headline, then you probably also want to (re-)watch the 2 minute highlight reel of Mark's backyard meat-smoking party. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBxTEoseZak

Israel violated the 2024 ceasefire over 10,000 times [0], not counting all the ones since Feb. 28. I guess this time they're not satisfied with having only 50 "freebies" a day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Israel%E2%80%93Lebanon_ce...

> or just ignoring the laws, and illegally reporting from dangerous yellow or red zones

I skimmed Wikipedia [1] but couldn't find any mention of laws in Ukraine that forbid reporting from certain areas. I see laws forbidding statements of support for Russia, and laws enabling censorship. Maybe I've misunderstood: are you referring to anti-trespassing laws in general, and not specifically about reporters?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press_in_Ukrain...

No, this is a different strike. Please read the NYT article you linked more carefully.

> The Feb. 28 attack occurred the same day as a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck a school in the city of Minab, several hundred miles away, killing 175 people. In the case of Lamerd, though, it involved a weapon that had been untested in combat.

I assume this is an infuriatingly subtle parody, because:

> Why can't you just celebrate this good thing?

reads like <font size=2> /s </font>.

Another situation where bad actors benefit. From the article:

> What really interests Cian, who has published research[1] exploring how audiences tend to have less trust in media outlets that are transparent about their AI use, is the fact that the Post disclosed its use of algorithmic pricing at all. “If you ask people [whether they] want transparency on what’s behind your pricing strategy, people say ‘yes,'” he says. “But what we found in my research is a paradox, in the sense that people think that they want to know, but once they know, the reaction is worse than not knowing.”

> [1] https://ideas.darden.virginia.edu/AI-disclosure-dilemma

Note the way he brushes off his own attorney's objections, not even looking at or reacting to her, while he discusses why someone who's mass-canceling grants doesn't need any grant-writing experience. Total disdain for any kind of expertise, whether academic or legal.

No. This person should not try to circumvent moderation by creating new accounts. They should ask the moderation team for reinstatement of normal posting privileges, but be willing to accept a refusal. They've behaved appallingly.