Charles Stross' Laundry series is basically this concept set in the present day: magic is a branch of mathematics, which means it can be computed and programmed.

It is perhaps worth noting at this point the series genre is cosmic horror.

Right? Most of this stuff was already the case in 2012, so it barely even counts as a prediction.

China's lead in rare earth production doesn't exactly come out of nowhere, nor does Haiti having a crisis of some sort or terrorists being called freedom fighters. And having AI do the targeting work in place of humans has been floating around as an idea since what, when The Forbin Project came out? 1970 or so?

OpenAI: "Our AI is so powerful it's an existential threat to humanity if we don't solve the alignment issue!"

Also OpenAI: "We can devote maybe 20% of our resources to solving this, tops. We need the rest for parlor tricks and cluttering search results."

lmao, Zoom is cooked. Their CEO has no idea how LLMs work or why they aren't fit for purpose, but he's 100% certain someone else will somehow solve this problem:

So is the AI model hallucination problem down there in the stack, or are you investing in making sure that the rate of hallucinations goes down?

I think solving the AI hallucination problem — I think that’ll be fixed. 

But I guess my question is by who? Is it by you, or is it somewhere down the stack?

It’s someone down the stack. 

Okay.

I think either from the chip level or from the LLM itself.

I'll preface this by noting that the sin of sloth has traditionally been understood to be a sin of omission, not just commission, i.e., you are insufficiently devoted to the things you ought to be.

Which means you could, in theory, have a (reflavored tiefling) devil paladin so devoted to sloth he works against evil causes. He's not interested in good per se, it's just that advancing the interests of good and traveling with a good adventuring party has the best ROI for failing to carry out his evil responsibilities.

Naturally, this has caused a fair amount of controversy among sloth devils, and there is a multi-century trial going on in the Hells about whether this ought to be allowed. This is not expected to be resolved in the foreseeable future because the advocates for both parties keep filing their responses well after petition deadlines expire.

Environmentalists are fond of saying that “There is no second Earth“. They are wrong! Here’s why: 

There is an entire second Earth right here on Earth.

Second Earth is a waterworld. It’s the vast Pacific Ocean that covers half the planet.

Well, he's a little fuzzy on the concepts of halves and wholes, but let's hear him out on colossal geoengineering projects.

Biblically-accurate Ace Combat aircraft.

I conclude that scheming is a disturbingly plausible outcome of using baseline machine learning methods to train goal-directed AIs sophisticated enough to scheme (my subjective probability on such an outcome, given these conditions, is ~25%).

Out: vibes and guesswork

In: "subjective probability"

American Rounds

What, was the Circus of Values brand too expensive to license?

Orbital stratagem timings make no sense, and are strictly a gameplay balance issue that *cannot* be realistic: the loading screen shows the first helldiver drops well outside the atmosphere and take several minutes to reach the ground, but turrets take 3 seconds to deploy?

I assumed this was because equipment can endure acceleration that would make a person pass out, or at least be combat-ineffective on landing. A trip from the Karman line to the ground in a few seconds would involve some deeply unpleasant G-forces...in opposite directions, back-to-back.

Come to think of it, this might explain why different gear has different call down times, as more fragile stuff might require a slower and (relatively) gentler drop.

Nice, I wonder if this thing can help fill out my restaurant/tissue bank paperwork now.

Oh, he must have grabbed one of the barrage gunner helmets by mistake.

No, there's an actual paper where that term originated that goes into great deal explaining what it means and what it applies to. It answers those questions and addresses potential objections people might respond with.

There's no need for--and, frankly, nothing interesting about--"but, what is truth, really?" vibes-based takes on the term.

For sure. It's kind of fascinating, in a grim way, to contrast Haiti's revolutionary course with the US, where basically every major power was cool with them a few years after their revolution.

One wonders how history would be different if the nations of the world had spent centuries screwing the US with debt and propping up their worst leaders and left Haiti to do its own thing.

See also Brigador: apart from the various lasers, exotic ballistics, and nightmarish chemical weapons it includes, there's also the prosaic "Mãe Dois." The tech entry leaves no doubt about what it is:

My understanding is that this weapon not only predates the colonies, but space travel entirely. If that is the case then it's a truly venerable design, and one I'm told will continue to serve for the foreseeable future.

I'd really like that. Enriching posts with this kind of metadata is what sets this apart from just a Google Image search, IMO.

Like you said, it's important context, and it's really helpful to have when I want to learn more about an artist or image. I'm way more likely to revisit something if I have more than just a title or author to go on, especially since traditional art isn't guaranteed to be online or easily researchable.

"If you think about the major journeys within a restaurant that can be AI-powered, we believe it’s endless."

My dude, you work for Yum Brands, not Starfleet Command. Nobody taking a "major journey" inside a Pizza Hut needed AI help to get there. (Though they could probably use a cup of water, and maybe an Uber home.)

[The AI]’s going to fall in love with you

Fortunately for everyone, they went out of business before a mandatory reporter had to make the weirdest call ever to CPS.

Even if falling doesn't result in a complete kill, it would be neat if it at least resulted in a mobility kill. That has to be hard on the tracks.

OpenAI and Microsoft recently redefined “artificial general intelligence” as OpenAI making $100 billion profit.

Defining intelligence this way means that virtually no human who has ever lived qualifies as intelligent, either. That's one way for machine intelligence to reach parity with human intelligence, I suppose.

Then again, Sam Altman has lit enough of Microsoft's money on fire that he especially doesn't count as intelligent according to this definition. So maybe it has some merit after all.