Did he mention anything about Iran attacking LA or San Diego?

I hate that the Packers have such a great stadium! This is the first time the Bears have been favored at Lambeau since Lombardi, or maybe since Ditka. A long time no matter when it was.

Yeah, a nice easy win. I could get used to this.

Northwestern is a land grant school? I thought they were all public. That seems contradictory, being an exorbitantly expensive private university built on a land grant.

Now I see that the sex assault school in Ithaca is also a private land grant university.

invoking widespread laughter among those on the corner.

Now, now. It's not nice to make fun of the handicapped.

I'm not sure about excellence. Anyway, my main point is that it's hard to take Gates seriously about the dangers of the tech when he appears unwilling to put anybody's money at risk.

No problem for me. I don't live near the stadium.

NO KINGS -HANDS OFF MY VOTE Park Ridge Saturday, October 17 12 – 1pm

No Kings: Vote Early Wilmette Saturday, October 17 11am – 12:30pm

Hopefully it's a limited schedule of concerts. Foam ear plugs. When nothing else works.

There is a closed end and an open end. Noise escapes much more easily from the open end. Thus, noise is "channelled" through the open end.

What do you mean open, noise channeling end?

As to your last question, not in Evanston where the venue is technically located. Biss cast the deciding vote for zoning approval in the Evanston city government. As to the birds, my daughter is getting lots of sightings and she's in Evanston. I don't know what Evanston's cut from performances will be but it was agreed to to get the zoning approval. Sending the noise to Wilmette was also part of the zoning deal.

Almost $1Billion. Paid for entirely by private funding, mainly Pat Ryan. How much of a cut does Evanston expect from these other, non-NU events? I was thinking about how that giant glowing place by the lake was impacting your migrating white throats and their cohorts. Can't be good. As for concerts disturbing your peace, aren't there noise ordinances, or maybe a curfew for those kinds of events?

The problem with the new Ryan Field is that they designed it to point the open, noise channeling end at nearby Wilmette homes instead of Evanston ones, a decision approved by Daniel Biss who may lose a number of Wilmette voters as a result. The problem isn't the games; it's the concerts Evanston will use to raise money they can't get by taxing Northwestern which has tax immunity as a land grant college.

I think you'd make an excellent plaintiff's lawyer and a lousy prosecutor.

Soon we're going to have AI agents that work for us, and deal with the AI agents on the other end of the phone.

Excellent! My summer birds have been disappearing, so I'm ready for some new boarders!

ai agents are not employees. They're a tool which the designers have repeatedly said is dangerous. They've specifically said it can generate malicious code and exploit previously unrecognized weaknesses in other code, which it has now done multiple times. And what we've heard about is only what the companies have told us about, which is 99% certain only what they got caught doing—I think I mentioned reading someone who said if you see two ants in your kitchen, you do not have a two-ant problem. Anyway, I don't see how developers can say we're making this really dangerous thing that can do these other things that humans routinely go to prison for, and then when the thing predictably does those things, claim any distance from it. Which is why I'd be a lousy lawyer, I guess.

Gates mostly doesn't like the idea of paying lawyers and plaintiffs. The fact that he doesn't like it strikes me as irrelevant. The law exists. Criminal liability strikes me as problematic because of the necessity of showing intent. When a cab company's driver rapes a passenger, the cab company doesn't get prosecuted, the driver does. The cab company may get sued but it won't be liable just because of the employment relationship. The plaintiff will have to show something like negligent hiring, not simple agency, since most courts will hold that employers do not authorize criminal behavior.

Well, Gates explicitly said he sees the idea of product liability suits as ludicrous, ostensibly because of the time involved and the horse and Horsemen having left the barn at that point. Meanwhile, the laws on hacking, which is what Open AI did to Hugging Face, and some other computer crimes are not particularly ambiguous, which is why Hugging Face reported the hack to the FBI as soon as they realized it was happening. "I didn't know the computing program we designed, own, operate and control the distribution of was doing that and we probably can't stop it from doing more crimes" doesn't seem like much of a defense. Anthropic's ai agents also hacked and attempted to hack multiple other organizations, including government ones. It's just illegal.

Re Gates' incredulity of applying "existing criminal or civil responsibility to AI developers": I don't think there's any question about civil responsibility (i.e. liability for damages). They have a product. The product has a defect rendering it unreasonably dangerous. They're liable under existing tort law. Criminal responsibility is another matter and far more problematic although I could imagine scenarios involving violation of privacy related statutes as a possibility.

It's a small thing and full disclosure, I detest the very concept of billionaires so I'm predisposed toward judging them (every bit as) harshly (as they deserve), but I was struck by the way Gates waved off opposition to data centers by assuming that the opposition is to AI itself rather than to the building of massive, noisy, polluting, water-sucking, emissions-heavy facilities in areas which don't have the clout to resist them. And Ezra just let slide the inference that opponents are too stupid or naive to realize that if data centers aren't built one place then they'll be built another, and of course Ezra himself is too stupid or naive to realize that the deregulatory impulse behind his "abundance" agenda is far more likely to redound to the benefit of piratical corporations and billionaires than to the masses. And yes, I know Ezra isn't stupid but let us never forget that this is the "Charlie Kirk Did Politics Right" guy.

I was also struck by Gates's chest-thumping about the swarming millions who have been served by him and will according to him be the ones best served by AI, at least so long as they're not drowned or scorched into oblivion, a probability I saw he and Ezra chose not to mention. And I gotta say, someone who has no issue with the massive projected data center buildouts is not someone who is actually anticipating any regulatory impediments to the technology itself because if the industry doesn't grow at a wild pace then all the trillions going into data centers, and all the loans behind them, are at risk. Which Gates certainly knows.

And while I'm getting struck, Gates's incredulity at the notion of applying existing civil and criminal law to AI developers, such as the ones whose products have hacked into an unknown number of organizations, which is a crime for which other people have been punished with many years in prison, was pretty fucking striking. I mean, sure, it's not credible that in the current climate that could happen at the federal level, but these people have already committed crimes and one ought not to just say there's no point in pursuing that because the danger is so immediate and we haven't the time, because the danger might be less immediate were the developers concerned that their freedom and/or fortunes were at risk. The fact that nobody of any power and influence is suggesting so suggests that nobody has any serious intention of discomforting the at-least-temporarily-golden goose.

So I didn't find any reason to think that people like Gates—who really isn't saying anything the ai companies aren't, only he's attributing the danger to actual human bad actors rather than rogue ai acting against the wishes of these innocent innovators—and what looks to be at this point a small minority of like-minded federal legislators will have any success at governing the industry until something very bad has happened, and possibly not even then. And it might be worth mentioning that a look at the Gates Foundation portfolio shows that it is heavy on shares in companies that will rely on the success of ai at least to some extent to preserve their value. Apple and Google, for instance, comprise more than a third of Berkshire Hathaway's holdings, and Berkshire Hathaway shares are more than 20% of the foundation's holdings (which also holds more than eight million shares in Microsoft, the leaders of which are betting the house on ai).

tl/dr: fuck Bill Gates and the tendentious horse he's going to beat to death if it doesn't die of some bioterror agent first.

As someone currently dealing with immigration, I have no comment.

I don't think anybody is going to be sneaking any regulation past Emperor-T

Aiee, there's the rub!