The non-cynical answer is that they’re counting contractor/vendor time in this full time equivalent answer. Which would probably be a good thing, because I imagine that the best people in cybersecurity aren’t actually employees of Microsoft.

To put it in more simple terms:

When Alice chats with Bob, Alice can’t control whether Bob feeds the conversation into a training data set to set parameters that have the effect of mimicking Alice.

Also, phones don’t use a lot of power to purely listen for Wifi beacons. They’re not transmitting until they actually try to join, so leaving wifi on doesn’t cost significant power unless you just happen to be near a remembered network.

Your scenario 1 is the actual danger. It’s not that AI will outsmart us and kill us. It’s that AI will trick us into trusting them with more responsibility than the AI can responsibly handle, to disastrous results.

It could be small scale, low stakes stuff, like an AI designing a menu that humans blindly cook. Or it could be higher stakes stuff that actually does things like affect election results, crashes financial markets, causes a military to target the wrong house, etc. The danger has always been that humans will act on the information provided by a malfunctioning AI, not that AI and technology will be a closed loop with no humans involved.

to my knowledge, Bluetooth doesn’t work with airplane mode

The radio regulations were amended about 10 years ago to allow both Bluetooth and Wifi frequencies to be used on airplanes in flight. And so cell phone manufacturers have shifted what airplane mode actually means, even to the point of some phones not even turning off Wi-Fi when airplane mode is turned on. And regardless of defaults, both wireless protocols can be activated and deactivated independently of airplane mode on most phones now.

an airplane full of 100 people all on Bluetooth might create some noise issues that would hurt the performance

I don’t think so. Bluetooth is such a low bandwidth use that it can handle many simultaneous users. It’s supposed to be a low power transmission method, in which it bursts a signal only a tiny percentage of the time, so the odds of a collision for any given signal are low, plus the protocol is designed to be robust where it handles a decent amount of interference before encountering degraded performance.

It makes them look weak and pitiful

To whom? Are we even the intended audience here?

Reporting over the last 10 years has shown that Xi Jinping has been obsessed with the idea of “color revolutions,” whereby popular movements from within a nation’s population overthrow the ruling apparatus. Rightly or wrongly, the current CCP sees revolution from within being the most dangerous threat on their power, so much of what they do is best understood as being aimed at stifling that kind of movement.

Given I’ve been described as a right with conspiracy theorist for saying that capitalist countries experience less starvation than socialist ones, I’m going to have to take this assessment with a grain of salt.

That’s not the methodology used, unless your description of starvation literally includes QAnon hashtags:

Tracking commonly used QAnon phrases like “QSentMe,” “TheGreatAwakening,” and “WWG1WGA” (which stands for “Where We Go One, We Go All”), Newsguard found that these QAnon-related slogans and hashtags have increased a whopping 1,283 percent on X under Musk.

And if not, then I’m not sure what your observations add to the discussion.

One of the worst companies in recent years has been Purdue Pharma, which worked with the also shitty McKinsey to get as many Americans addicted to opioids as possible, and make billions on the epidemic.

Both Purdue and McKinsey were privately held.

Koch industries is also a terrible privately held corporation.

Being public versus private doesn’t make a difference, in my opinion.

After being acquired by Google, YouTube got better for years (before getting worse again). Android really improved for a decade or so after getting acquired by Google.

The Next/Apple merger made the merged company way better. Apple probably wouldn’t have survived much longer without Next.

I’d argue the Pixar acquisition was still good for a few decades after, and probably made Disney better.

A good merger tends to be forgotten, where the two different parts work together seamlessly to the point that people forget they used to be separately run.

Hmm, is this a new take on the “Stop Doing Math” meme?

If construction is delayed by an injunction

Can you name an example? Because the reactor constructions that I’ve seen get delayed have run into plain old engineering problems. The 4 proposed new reactors at Vogtle and V.C. Summer ran into cost overruns because of production issues and QA/QC issues requiring expensive redesigns mid-construction, after initial regulatory approvals and licensing were already approved. The V.C. Summer project was canceled after running up $9 billion in costs, and the Vogtle projects are about $17 billion over the original $14 billion budget, at $31 billion (and counting, as reactor 4 has been delayed once again over cooling system issues). The timeline is also about 8 years late (originally proposed to finish in 2016).

And yes, litigation did make those projects even more expensive, but the litigation was mostly about other things (like energy buyers trying to back out of the commitment to buy power from the completed reactors when it was taking too long), because it took too long, not litigation to slow things down.

The small modular reactor project in Idaho was just canceled too, because of the mundane issue of interest rates and buyers unwilling to commit to the high prices.

Nuclear doesn’t make financial sense anymore. Let’s keep the plants we have for as long as we can, but we might be past the point where new plants are cost effective.

IT IS SAFER, CHEAPER, AND LESS POLLUTING THAN LITERALLY ANY OTHER OPTION!

It’s not cheaper. New nuclear power plants are so expensive to build today that even free fuel and waste disposal doesn’t make the entire life cycle cheaper than solar.

Don’t forget “foreign power just starts drawing borders” like India/Pakistan partition and the ensuing chaos, or the Sykes-Picot Treaty carving up the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.

The only instance I’m aware of where the US military built a specific model meant to be a replica of a real place was the Osama bin Laden compound. Which they did, in fact, raid.

The building of a fake town isn’t the unusual part. The building of a replica of a specific place might not even be that unusual, but it is a strong signal that they definitely intend to attack the real world place that is being replicated.

If you think that society was friendlier to trans people in 1999 compared to 2024, you are mistaken.

Versions of this dataset bias have been circulating since the 1960s.

I remember reading an article or blog post years ago that persuasively argued that the danger of AI is not going to be that it ends up doing things better than humans, but that it causes a lot of harm when entrusted with tasks it actually isn’t good at. I think that thesis seems much more plausible now, watching people respond to clearly flawed AI systems.

If your company’s secret sauce is that it employs a particular person, then your moat is whatever it takes to poach that person. If that person is willing to leave behind whatever intellectual property, un-vested equity, and relationships behind, then your company was never that valuable to begin with.

free association includes the freedom to not associate.

Reminds me of the Simpsons episode where the aliens campaign for the US presidency, and can’t figure out why “abortions for all” and “abortions for none” are both unpopular opinions.

In other words, it’s about freedom of choice, not mandatory association.

That’s the fundamental tension here.

The right to control your own posts, after posting, imposes an obligation on everyone who archives your posts to delete when you want them deleted.

For most of the internet, the balance is simply that a person who creates something doesn’t get to control it after it gets distributed to the world. Search engines, archive tools, even individual users can easily save a copy, maybe host that copy for further distribution, maybe even remix and edit it (see every meme format that relies on modification of some original phrase, image, etc.).

Even private, end to end encrypted conversations are often logged by the other end. You can send me a message and I might screenshot it.

A lot of us active on the Internet in the 90’s, participating in a lot of discussion around philosophical ideas like “information wants to be free” and “intellectual property is theft” and things like copyleft licenses (GPL), creative commons licensing, etc., wanted that to be the default vision for content created on the internet: freely distributed, never forgotten. Of course, that runs into tension with privacy rights (including the right to be forgotten), and possibly some appropriation concerns (independent artists not getting proper credit and attribution as something gets monetized). It’s not that simple anymore, and the defaults need to be chosen with conscious decisionmaking, while anyone who chooses to go outside of those defaults should be able to do that in a way knowledgeable of what tradeoffs they’re making.