Yes, and many of those who know think countermeasures suddenly became futile. Rather, the time when mitigation is easiest and most effective is always exactly now. So, whatever anti-collapse action (or inaction) you all put off or planned for “later”, start it today. You will never again have a chance to have this impact.

when in reality there was no prior test to ensure the individual could do the task at all

Why would such a test be needed? I presume the researchers did the reasonable thing and assigned the participants to the two groups randomly.

It took them 10 years to find out what they were told and did not want to believe: Shooting yourself hurts. If they ever rejoin they will have wasted decades for nothing and ruined many lives. This is what an incompetent ruling class accomplishes. They have no clue what they want and no plan to achieve it. Dictatorship of the proletariat is overdue.

So there will be trillions spent on land and energy wasting data centers to get a dressed up ELIZA that will not solve a single world problem (like hunger, homelessness, poverty, ecological collapse). Simply great! Why not end capitalism right now? It is the only reasonable path at this point.

Why are there no populist socialists? I mean people like Milei or Trump, but unapologetically radical far-left, who bring a chain saw to slash landlords, or implement a myriad of taxes that hit the wealthy. They would be incredibly popular. I don’t want timid liberals who worry that capitalists emigrate to evade taxes. I want dyed-in-the-wool Marxists who confiscate their property and let them flee to whatever country wants them or put them in camps if they don’t behave.

I sell individual cables. Some are new (some in original packaging), some are used.

If it was about real AI – not stochastic parrots – I would be all for it. What happened to those developments that started in the 70s where you have automatic formal proofs that a piece of code does what it is supposed to do? That is intelligent. Producing slop more voluminous and convoluted than humans could produce or understand is not intelligent software architecture just like fixing a hole in a roof by throwing what sticks at it is not intelligent building architecture. Both may do the job for some time. But what are the long-term costs and who is capable to clean up? In my opinion, what’s most desired is tools that are bug free, do what they should without annoying the user, and are radically simplified in their architecture. (For example, I would be happy with a perfectly working product that does what NFS or Samba aspire and fail to do for decades.) Apparently, AI can’t deliver that. To have the billionth app that is a browser wrapper and shows me exactly one website is much more important.

I started to sell cables I don’t need anymore, this year. Works great and keeps the copper in the ground.

Runs on anything that runs Linux:

NAME
       pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.03)

SYNOPSIS
       pdftotext [options] PDF-file [text-file]

DESCRIPTION
       Pdftotext converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text.

       Pdftotext reads the PDF file, PDF-file, and writes a text file, text-file.  If text-file is not speci‐
       fied,  pdftotext  converts file.pdf to file.txt.  If text-file is ´-', the text is sent to stdout.  If
       PDF-file is ´-', it reads the PDF file from stdin.