I’m curious why you dismiss the sentience argument with its “just numbers.”
I think our brains are just a bunch of cells and one day we will have a full understanding of how our brains work. Understanding the mechanism won’t suddenly make us not sentient.
LLMs are the first technology that can make a case for its own sentience. I think that’s pretty remarkable.
Making parents control devices is too much. People do what’s “normal” right now normal is to give unrestricted access to kids when they’re 10 or 11.
It takes incredible conviction and force of will to keep your kids off the phone till they’re 16. Fewer than 1% of parents manage it. The problem is that the teenager wants a thing that everyone else has and it’s hard to keep saying no.
I think internet connected smartphones should be illegal for kids under 16 to own or use. It’s a tough sell tho.
You're right that it seems close enough, but only as long as we're talking about the time it takes a single vehicle to "fill up". Taking 2 minutes vs 8 minutes to fill up your car doesn't matter to you personally, but it is a significant difference to those installing and operating the fill up infrastructure since it takes 4 times as many charging points as it does gas pumps to serve the same volume of customers in a given period of time.
In a lot of cases that probably won't matter since chargers can be installed in more places than gas pumps and for gas stations that serve mainly local customers I'd expect demand for an equivalent charging station to be lower since some people will charge at home at least some of the time. But things like highway rest stops could be more of a challenge since you'd expect customer volume for EV charging to be similar to the demand for fuel so you'll need more charging stations at each stop to handle the increased time it takes each customer.
I just said that China is taking the biggest share of the market, and you counter with the price of a Volvo? Prices are the biggest advantage of the Chinese models. BYD for example has the Dolphin compact at £30K, Atto 3 SUV at £38K, and Seal sports car at £46K.[1]
BMW is coming on strong though, and gives us close equivalents to compare. The 2027 i3 is supposed to start at $53K according to Car and Driver,[2] and Edmunds agrees.[3] It's all-wheel drive with fast bidirectional charging, 440 miles EPA range, 463 horsepower, and plenty of high-tech features. By comparison, the gas-powered all-wheel drive 3-series starts at $50K, and has 255 horsepower.[4] The M340i has 386hp and starts at $62K, and if you want more power then you'll be up into the 70s or more.[5]
For SUVs you could compare their iX3, coming out this summer, with the gasoline-powered X3. The M50 X3 at 393hp costs $67K, and the iX3 at 463hp will start at about $60K, with a 400 mile EPA range.[7]
Hi thanks for this brilliant feature. It will really improve the product. However it needs a little bit more work before we can merge it into our main product.
1) The new feature does not follow the existing API guidelines found here: see examples an and b.
2) The new feature does not use our existing input validation and security checking code, see example.
Once the following points have been addressed we will be happy to integrate it.
All the best.
The ball is now in their court and the feature should come back better
This is a politics problem. Engineers were sending each other crap long before AI.
Engineers also wrote good code before AI. We don't get to pretend that the speed increase of AI only increases the output of quality code - it also allows engineers to send much more crap!
..so they copy/paste your message into Claude and send you back a +2000, -1500 version 3 minutes later. And now you get to go hunting for issues again.
In the past I’ve hopped on a call with them and where I’ve asked them to show me it running. When it falls over I say here are the things the system should do, send me a video of the new system doing all of them.
The embarrassment usually shames them into actually checking that the code works.
If it doesn’t then you might have to go to the senior stakeholder and quietly demonstrate that they said it works, but it does not actually work.
You don’t want to get into a situation where “integrate” means write the feature while others get credit.
There’s a case for allowing digital privateering against countries that routinely allow fraud. For example fraud is 68% of Laos’s GDP.
If Laos wants to be taken off the list of permitted targets then it can crack down on fraud. They have effectively allowed digital privateering against us by failing to crack down on fraud.
The issue is those jurisdictions that have allowed such rot to take hold truly don't care.
Both Cambodia and Laos have governments where leadership is directly tied to organized crime, but the PRC has continued to expand their relationships with both because of their strategic position and because their governments directly cooperate with Chinese law enforcement.
Similarly, in the threat hunting space, it's been common to find Russian originated malware that would shut itself off if it identified an indicator or signature that implied that the workload was within the CIS.
In the same manner, if I were to conduct illicit cyberoperations in a jurisdiction like the UAE but not target the US, India, China, and a couple other jurisdictions with strong ties with the UAE I could operate with impunity.
It's the same reason Neville Singham is in Shanghai and Guo Wengui is in New York. It's also the same reason Ecuador handed Assange after the government changed from being hard-left and aligned with Russia and Venezuela to center-right and aligned with the US.
Edit: can't reply
> the case that fraudsters can already target Loas and Cambodia with impunity from certain jurisdictions
Not legally or morally, but this is de facto the case.
That said, the countries most annoyed at Laos and Cambodia (eg. Thailand, Vietnam, and the auS) would much rather use regime change, or use pressure points like financial crimes prosecution which dramatically reduces your freedom and dramatically increases your risk of being used as a pawn to trade, and offer the carrot of negotiated immunity deals in return for flipping.
These kinds of organizations don't exist with impunity - they are pawns that are discarded the moment their value can no longer justify their liabilities.
Are you making the case that fraudsters can already target Loas and Cambodia with impunity from certain jurisdictions?
If you are then I would point out that being legitimate allows you to attract better talent. See America’s private military contracting sector. Yes you can go and be a mercenary abroad and operate in a legal grey area, but if you’re a Private Military Contractor working for a major US company then you won’t go to jail in the US when you come back, and you can put it on your CV.
There used to be county lines drug dealing outside my house.
County lines drug dealing is where organised gangs in London send people out to deal drugs in small towns outside London. It’s obvious because of the race of the people involved.
2 years ago the police did a massive crackdown and the county lines drug dealers disappeared. County lines drug dealers haven’t come back and now there is no obvious public drug dealing in my neighbourhood.
The police do a difficult job and they are fantastic at it.
I'm traditionally conservative and have many law enforcement in my extended family. Law enforcement is very required for society, but it's a blunt tool.
There are classes of crime that will not be reduced no matter how many people you put in jail. Mental health and addiction issues (often they go hand in hand) really should be solved differently than just jail time.
My small town has a swat team and two bear cats. They've never been used outside of training. They're very likely never going to be used outside of training. This is a ton of money that the police justified by "If we don't spend it, we lose it". That's not fiscally responsible and it's something as a conservative we do need to push back on and some of that involves defunding the police's overly excessive budgets and reducing taxes or at least reallocating it towards other social programs that will help beyond just locking people up.
> It’s obvious because of the race of the people involved.
I think I know what you're saying. You're saying that non-white people are trouble, aren't you? I mean, why wouldn't such a thing be considered a fact and why wouldn't it be obvious? You said it, so it became a fact and also it became obvious.
I know they’re drug dealers because they tried to sell me drugs.
The English countryside is over 95% white. It’s obvious when organised violent gangs consisting entirely of people of color from London take over and start selling drugs.
The police put a stop to it and we are all very grateful.
You don't know they are drug dealers, because not all of them tried to sell you drugs, did they? That's a ridiculous statement. You know that some of them tried to do that. Even so, the fact that they were not white had little to do with it, so it was not obvious by any measure.
> when organised violent gangs consisting entirely of people of color from London take over
In what respect did they take over? And how can you tell that they were all selling drugs? Maybe some were there as tourists, maybe some were visiting family etc.
You make some racist assumptions without evidence that I believe should be called out because you're hell-bent on proving something that may not actually be supported by evidence. You, my dear colleague, are fabulating.
Not only that the National Police Chiefs' Council County Lines STRA (FY Apr 2024 to Mar 2025) reports that 63.6% of recorded individuals involved are White (with 22.9% Black, 11.6% Asian, 1.8% Other)[0], but "county lines" narrative is routinely racialised and can amplify stereotypes [1], like you appear to do with your comment.
I could see them operating from my home office window. There is a corner where two roads and a footpath cross. It’s a walkable neighbourhood so there is a lot of foot traffic. A daycare center is about 50 meters away.
Every afternoon one of the men would be standing at the corner selling drugs. People would walk up to the man to buy the drugs. They worked a rotation but there were about 4 regular dealers at my crossroads.
The first few times I walked past by myself they tried to sell me drugs. Then they knew I was not a customer and ignored me or greeted me politely.
One of them was very chatty and I had to explain to my daughter that we don’t trust him even though he is friendly because he makes bad choices. County lines gangs are involved in human trafficking as well as drug dealing.
Every dealer I saw on that corner was from an ethnic minority background. Usually county lines drug dealers live in London and commute out to where they sell their drugs. This is why the ethnicity of the gang does not match the local population.
I sincerely hope that you never experience anything like this.
I think our brains are just a bunch of cells and one day we will have a full understanding of how our brains work. Understanding the mechanism won’t suddenly make us not sentient.
LLMs are the first technology that can make a case for its own sentience. I think that’s pretty remarkable.
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