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From Wikipedia:

"In 2023, former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato said that France downed the plane while targeting a Libyan military jet in an attempt to kill Muammar Gaddafi. Amato said that Italy tipped off Libya about the planned assassination and consequently Gaddafi did not board the Libyan military jet"

To be honest, this theory of mistaken identity sounds much more plausible than anybody shooting down (or bombing) a random passenger plane flying an Italian domestic flight on purpose. Whether the presumably Libyan plane they actually targeted was transporting nuclear material or Gaddafi, I have no idea. Shame on them anyway for covering it up.

Already quite a while ago I was entertained by a particular British tabloid article, which had been "AI edited". Basically the article was partially correct, but then it went badly wrong because the subject of the article was about recent political events that had happened some years after the point where LLM's training data ended. Because of this, the article contained several AI-generated contextual statements about state of the world that had been true two years ago, but not anymore.

They quietly fixed the article only after I pointed its flaws out to them. I hope more serious journalists don't trust AI so blindly.

Yep. If the Swedish government really cared about children, they would do something to stop the massive underage gang violence problem the country has. 12 year olds being used as hitmen for drug gangs is not normal, yet that's the reality.

I've always wondered how big of a part Soviet Union / Russia psych ops played in stirring this completely irrational anti-nuclear mentality. The side-effect of getting Germany hooked on Russian gas was extremely convenient to them.

Of course the Chernobyl disaster played some part, but it didn't result in such irrationality in most other surrounding countries. Perhaps the anti-war mentality and guilt from the horrors of WW2 also plays a part?

In any case, what a disaster German energy policies have been for whole Europe.

They are revolutionary for use cases where hallucinated / wrong / unreliable output is easy and cheap to detect & fix, and where there's enough training data. That's why it fits programming so well - if you get bad code, you just throw it away, or modify it until it works. That's why it work for generic stock images too - if you get bad image, you modify the prompt, generate another one and see if it's better.

But many jobs are not like that. Imagine an AI nurse giving bad health advice on phone. Somebody might die. Or AI salesman making promises that are against company policy? Company is likely to be held legally liable, and may lose significant money.

Due to legal reasons, my company couldn't enable full LLM generative capabilities on chatbot we use, because we would be legally responsible for anything it generates. Instead, LLM is simply used to determine which of the pre-determined answers may fit the query the best, which it indeed does well when more traditional technologies fail. But that's not revolutionary, just an improvement. I suspect there are many barriers like that, which hinder its usage in many fields, even if it could work most of the time.

So, nearly all use cases I can think of now will still require a human in the loop, simply because of the unreliability. That way it can be a productivity booster, but not a replacement.

I tend to agree with you. If what Putin has done so far doesn't cause a massive internal revolt, then selling what they've gained by now as a victory shouldn't be too hard either.

Attitudes (and apathy) of the Russian population is the most astonishing thing about this whole conflict, and something that should be remembered when dealing with the country in the future, even after Putin.

Generally the US does a pretty good job training and keeping their grunt soldiers alive, and evacuating them if wounded. Russia really hasn't done well in these aspects if we look at the Ukraine war, or any earlier wars for that matter. Their tactics tend to prefer quantity over quality.

But yes, as pointed out I'm sure Russia places some more value on lives of skilled, well trained personnel than the average poorly trained grunt soldier, simply due to higher utility value.

Well, it should be noted that the helicopter in question was designed to be used by an organization that couldn't care less about loss of life, as we have again seen in recent years. So I guess this aspect of human life wasn't a big concern to the designers, the military can always get new human resources from Siberia or whatever poor part of the country.

Too much sun exposure is definitely bad, because it increases likelihood of skin cancer. Moderation is the key.

Nuclear has its role to play when the weather isn't windy or sunny, at least until storage technology gets good enough. Especially in Northern parts of the world it's a big deal, because during winters solar is pretty useless.

Getting rid of coal (and natural gas, to lesser extent) should happen ASAP, and nuclear can be a part of the solution for the transition period.

Have there actually been advances in robotics that could make them mainstream, or is the progress still painfully slow? I think robotics would be the next logical step after AI hype, but I'm having hard time figuring out which company will be the next Nvidia there.

Server-grade motherboards that have been widely used for a long time sounds like a legitimate product business. Whether or not they have long-lasting competitive advantage, that is another question.

IMO humans are quite well equipped for manual labor, much more so than for most office jobs. Millions of years of evolution perfected us for eye-motor coordination, not writing code or attending Teams meetings. Building robots that can do it as well as humans is going to be a difficult task.

I agree. Specialists who understand (or even do) cutting edge research will be in demand, because LLM's need existing data to train on for good performance. People who can talk to different stakeholders, and deeply understand the company and its business domain will probably be also needed for requirements gathering and management. But the average programmer who writes CRUD apps or integrations like millions of others, and converts fairly refined requirements to code, they will likely impacted very much.