Hertz rental cars in sacramento

So basically mostly corporates have car hire charges program. You can save a lot of tax via this.
Get the car registered in someone's else name in the family whose income is zero or almost nil. Let's say your mothefather. Now, your company will make an agreement bw you and the owner of the car which will show that owner has lent you the car on monthly charge and the same monthly charge will be deducted from your salary and paid directly in the owner's account after deducting 2% TDS. So you can reduce your salary by that much amount. Monthly charges - 30K Annually deducted from salary - 360k Tax saved on 360K at 30% slab- 120k Tax to be paid by the owner -( 360k-250K)5% =5500 Net saving =355K

Tl;dr
Hi guys I just need some advice. My boyfriend (M31) & me (F27) have been dating for 6 months now. We live together for the past 2 months now & we are expecting our first baby together in a couple of months. Lately when he gets drunk he gets really mean. He calls me a he, says I’m fing everyone, says whenever I’m on my phone I’m texting other guys when I’m literally replying to my FEMALE friends, says the baby isn’t his, says I’m using him, how all women are wh*s & just like to use men & how everyone just takes advantage of him (past relationships). & then when we talk about it he apparently doesn’t remember! I’m totally lost & baffled through all of this. We used to get pretty wasted together prior to me getting pregnant & he NEVER acted this way EVER! He’s always been very sweet & gentle & caring with me as I have dealt with physical & verbal abuse with past relationships & he assured me that real men don’t treat their women like that & that he’d never do that to me bc he loves me so much & he wants to start a family with me & have plans to get married in the future. He’s a completely different person when he’s drunk. This is now the 4th time this has happened! All 3 times before he’s broken down & cried & apologize & said this would never happen again. I told him I don’t want him to drink if this is how hes going to act he assured me he won’t.
Well today (now the 4th time) he got wasted at my niece bday party & was saying the same things I’ve listed above on the drive home. He legit tried to jump out the car while I was driving bc I told him he was acting like a b**h so he started screaming at me to get out of his car & how I’m a he. When we get home I hid my gun bc I was afraid of what he was going to do, while I was in the shower he was looking for it, crying saying how everyone hates him, no one loves him & how he wants to end it all(his life) he then proceeded to go out to the balcony as if he was going to jump I told him to get back inside & to go to bed & sober up. I told him don’t come crying to me in the morning & he said he’s not & that he deserves to be single. That I can just leave & put him on child support & he’ll get the baby on the weekends. As he’s snoring sound asleep I’m wide awake crying in the guest room & just don’t know what to do! I don’t know where this came from or why he’s acting this way but this is not the type of environment I want to raise my child in. I already come from an abusive toxic broken home & I want to break that cycle.
His ex always used to say he has a drinking problem & when he said that I first thought she was crazy but now I’m starting to realize it. He was the problem in their relationship he was the one who started all the arguments. When he’s sober he’s totally different he’s sweet & kind but when he’s drunk it’s as if he’s not even there anymore. I love him so much but idk what to do. I know he’s probably going to cry again when we talk in the morning & apologize but I told him last time was the last time I was going to forgive him for this. Idk what to do. Also lately when he’s sober now he’s always accusing me of snap chatting other men & saying I’m being sneaky with my phone I told him he has my password & that he can go thru my phone whenever he wants bc I have nothing to hide. I’m not sure why he’s acting like this lately but idk what to do. I need advice!! Help!
TL;dr I need advice what should I do? He’s never acted this way why is this happening?

Hi, using a throwaway because I have family who is on reddit a lot and knows my account. I also want to apologize if any of this is formatted poorly or hard to read, I tend to just write what immediately comes to my mind.
Anyways, last night I (nb19) got off of work late and my dad picked me up (I don't have my license yet) and we started to drive home. On the way, my dad got a call from one of my mom's best friends and when I asked why she would be calling him since it wasn't really normal, he said he doesn't know but he couldn't answer now. He also told me he knows she and my mom were talking on the phone when he left. I found this weird because I know he can easily answer the phone while driving (it's connected to the car and he's done it before) and it only made it worse when I saw that she then sent him 4 texts after he let it go to voicemail.
My suspicions were right unfortunately, because when we got home I could hear my mom yelling and crying in her bedroom and she was clearly drunk, but worse than she normally gets because I could barely make out what she was saying even when she was yelling. The living room is right by my parent's bedroom and the walls are pretty thin, so I promise I wasn't eavesdropping in their conversation. Honestly, I really, really didn't want to be in the living room but I had other responsibilities that I could only do in there at the time. However, it meant I was subjected to hearing my mom cry and yell about how nobody loves her and it broke me.
I also heard my dad mention that her best friend wanted him to get her to a hospital but she refused, I don't think they ended up going but I ran downstairs to my room as soon as I could so I don't know for sure. I don't know why my mom is hurting so much, I know she has been for the past couple of weeks and she's been verbally berating my dad during them. And please know this is all just from an outsiders perspective, I don't know what happens in her mind at all or what really happens in their relationship but it's been very emotionally taxing to hear it. She's also been on a shorter fuse lately, as she's been yelling at me more as well. She's always had a bit of a problem with yelling when I was growing up but she had gotten better in the past few years until now.
Anyways, I go downstairs to hide in my room and a few hours later I get a text from my dad at 1 am telling me to dump out all the alcohol in the downstairs bar. Of course, I said yes but it was a very surreal experience. I was standing there in my underwear at 1 am, opening the fridge and every cabinet I can looking for alcohol and pouring them down the drain. I spent about 20 minutes doing it, and I even had to dump out my dad's 's collectable bottle of jack daniel's that he's had for years which felt even weirder. I really don't know how to accurately describe what I was feeling, but I almost felt like I wasn't in my body at some points.
I finished it, texted my dad, texted my best friend about the experience because they were the only person I could think to talk about it, and then cried myself to sleep.
Today has been fairly normal, as far as I'm aware. I've been downstairs for most of it but my dad seems fine thankfully, but I've only seen my mom from a glimpse of her sleeping in their bedroom earlier in the day. I don't know what happened or what will happen but I'm scared and I feel like my life is falling a part and I don't know who else I can go to to vent, I really really don't want to bother my friend anymore with it because they already have so much shit happening in their own life. I figured here would be a good place to let it out.
And if I can be selfish for a second, and I'm really sorry if I'm making my mother's struggles about me, but I can't help but to mentally berate myself over this. I don't know what I did to make her life so miserable, I can't remember the last time I ever did something that made her happy. I've been trying even harder the past few weeks because I noticed she's been struggling with stuff, offered to help her with more stuff, offered to buy her more snacks, got her ice cream for mother's day (this is the first mother's day I've had my own money because of my job). But it's not enough and she still broke down and I don't know what to do. I don't know why I can't make her smile, why everything I do makes her mad, I just feel so lost and I hate knowing that my mom would be happier if I was never in her life.
Thank you to whoever read it this far, sorry it's so long.

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I feel like I’m missing something or doing something wrong in Unbound. I’m not winning races as my car is to slow (clean races, no bumps, always get overtaken and I’m not making enough money to buy parts to upgrade and win, I’m going for collectables for cash.
What can I do?

Hello,
I was driving a passanger to DC ,and an airport police pulled me over and told me that its illegal to use any ometting blue light (the sign is sticker to the front windshield), I explained that I'm a new uber driver and just wanted to identify my car as uber driver since its illegal to not to.
he came back with a citation that says "tnc charge".
I'm nervous as I have never had any ticket by a police officer and my record is clean, he emphasized that this is a "to appear in court" ticket and that i can't just pay it online, this made me so anxious on why he wanted me to appear in person.
am i in trouble ? should i hire a lawyer?
thank you

So I (25 m) have a little brother (10) and for about the last year we've spent most weekends together doing things of his choosing. About 2 months ago I bought him a bike and planned to teach him how to ride, but he refused to even attempt to learn, when I asked him why he doesn't want to learn his response was "I just dont like bikes. I dont want to learn." In conversations trying to convince to at least try to learn to ride, he eventually said he wants a skateboard, which I thought was stupid, and dangerous (but I didnt tell him the stupid part). A few days after he proclaimed his want for a skateboard, I took him to get one, which cost twice as much as the bike (didnt realize skateboards were so expensive) and even bought one for myself. Before heading out to buy the skateboard I told him if I buy it Im not buying him anything else, except food (actual food, not snacks), until he learned how to ride the skateboard and the bike, the stipulation for having "learned" being that he can ride a block without falling or crashing and execute a turn. He happily took the skateboard after hearing this. In this time I've learned to ride the skateboard (although I hate it), and we've rode a few times together and hes trying to learn "tricks" although he hasnt passed the criteria for having "learned" (he cant go more than 10 feet without almost plowing into a parked car, and has atleast twice), and he still refuses to try to learn to ride the bike. Until about two weeks ago he was still asking me for things and Id tell him no and point out what Id said as the reason for my no. The last time this occured he asked me how long Id keep saying "no" to everything and I told him again until he "learns" both, he asked "what if Im 20" and I told him Im sticking by what I said. He told me "then I dont care, because youre trying to force me to learn to ride the bike" Which is true because I dont drive and if he could ride a bike itd make us getting around faster, where i live a 30 minute walk is like a 5 minute ride. And skateboarding is slower than walking because our streets are crap.
So AITA?

Have my 2008 crown vic die on me when I was accelerating turning right today. Was in heavy traffic no way to get off highway I removed air filter it ran for a short distance to get it off the highway then she sputtered out and wouldn't start. Eventually I moved the fuses around under the hood also I turned the key on and pushed the inertia button in the trunk. She started up and I drove her home. Where should I start looking for the problem? I put a code reader on the car at home and it just has the same old obd codes any ideas or thoughts would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

Order gets here, guy gets out of the car. Handsome guy, well put together. The getting out of the car thing was a little odd, but he seemed nice so I shot the shit with him for a little while. We started talking about jobs, and he humored my rambling about my current career for a bit before offering to let me join him and his wife on some sort of business venture. I kind of tuned out once I heard the beginnings of a prepped speech, but it was something about the value of having a mentor, the age of him and his wife relative to their success in life, and the opportunity to be your own boss. I interrupted him and asked
“Is it Amway?”
And he kind of paused and replied,
“What do you know about Amway?”
I said I knew a few people who had worked with them, and he kind of went back to talking about opportunity. I politely asked again if it was Amway, and he said something like
“Well it’s more about the offer”
I’m not quite sure what that meant, and I didn’t want to be rude so I just kind of wrapped it up with a “hey thanks for the food, thank you for the offer. You have a great night” and went into the house. From the limited information given, was this guy trying to pitch an MLM? Or was I just being rude?

I see everyone on here talking about choosing orders by mileage, which I dont understand at all, like I'm in a pretty populous area, but unless you all live in a big city I can't see accepting by mileage being condusive to consistent enough orders to make anywhere close to 100 dollars in a day. I always go by dollars per hour. I'm sure it's not ideal for my car but I'd surely be spending a third of my money on gas just waiting most of the time if I went for 2 dollars a mile like I've seen suggested.

I stay in Mumbai in an area where there are many similar such buildings which were made in 1980. Now 4 buildings have decided to go for Redevelopment (actually Redevelopment talks are happening since like 5 years). All societies have majority in terms of members who want to go ahead with this (some 3-4 flats have issues for dumb reasons). Problem is that out of the 4 buildings, 3 of them are road facing and have shops beneath them. Many shop owners are also ok but there are couple of them who are investors and are keeping frivolous demands and are trying to delay / stop redevelopment. Their demands being... * More width of each shop than current one * 33% current area than current shop *14ft ceiling *car parking for each shop
The builder has already accepted first 3 out of 4 demands but the shop owners (actually 2 of them who are creating more problems are agitating others too) are stuck on car parking demand.
As per BMC norms, if area is under 500 sq feet, you CANNOT get car parking. Still just because one of the shop owners got parking from a different builder in some other society, he is adamant here and also sent legal letter through advoccate.
What are our options to quash such demands which even as per BMC rules is not allowed? Obviously we are going to send them notice through our advocate accusing them of sabotaging redevelopment for their vested interest. Also there is some sort of 79A thing I believe can be done where if we have majority over certain percentage, other opinions don't matter, not sure how it works when we have residential + commercial like this.
There is also talks about sending each shop owner BMC notice as almost all have illegally extended their shops and are using areas not meant for them. But this is more like an arm twisting tactic and is last option.
Main problem is being created by couple of investor shop owners who don't even live in the state.
People here whose society went through redevelopment or is currently in discussion can please suggest what options are there.

Hi, we have a brachycephalic cat. We’re in the process of a family move and are planning to take him on the plane with us. Of course he would be in the cabin and not cargo as we know most airlines have banned brachycephalic pets from cargo.
Even with him flying in the cabin, we’re quite worried for him. It’s a very long flight (13 hours) and we can’t imagine what we’d do if something happened to him. He does seem to get stuffy quite a bit and he already seems to have some travel anxiety: he pants when riding in the car. Do you think we should feel safe flying with a brachycephalic cat in the cabin or do you think there is a risk even if he’s in the cabin with us?

Sleep walking, and dreams don't always mix well together especially when your dreams take you to places you've never been. Ruby thought that the stories she read about weird things happening to people who slept walk always seemed too farfetched. So when she settled down for the night Ruby knew she would always wake up in bed safe, and sound.
Until tonight…
The sound of the wind and leaves rustling made Ruby sit upright on a bench she found herself sitting on finding it odd. Who would put a bench in the middle of the woods?
"Where in the world am I?"
She stood up, taking a moment to look around now facing the bench she had awoken on. Patting her hoodie pocket, she found a small flashlight tucked inside.
"Where did this come from? Wait where is my cellphone?!"
Going through her pockets she was unsuccessful in her search. "So not only am I in the middle of woods. I do not have my cellphone" taking a step back she turned the flashlight on pointing it at the bench.
Nothing was particular about it but that the wood seemed odd? The frame is pitch black and did not seem to be made of metal. The seat looked like worn leather that had been stretched too many times.
"Wait is that... skin and bones?!" Ruby gasped
She stumbled backwards stepping on a twig the brittle thing snapped under her foot. She moved her flashlight upwards slowly shining it on the tree behind the bench. Tangled in the branches were tattered pieces of old rust-colored clothes, and dangling shoes tied together by their laces.
What exactly has been happening here?
Ruby moved her light to the ground to look for a trail out of here. Surely, there had to be one, right? An extra set of footsteps slowly began to approach, and humming accompanied it. The tune they hummed was out of place and creeped her out.
Hiding behind one of the trees she turned out the flashlight. The footsteps stopped along with the haunting tune. A voice spoke out to her.
"Where did you go? It has been such a long time since someone last came here...Oh! Are we playing hide and seek?" they giggled "Oh where oh where could you be?".
The steps seemed as if the person they belonged to was skipping coming close to her hiding spot behind the tree. Ruby clasped a hand over her mouth to prevent herself from screaming, she closed her eyes hoping this person did not see or hear her.
The footsteps stopped right next to Ruby causing her to shiver.
They tapped their chin looking over at her "You should find a better hiding spot than that".
Ruby opened her eyes looking at the person across from her. They were missing skin on their hand along with half of their face. All that was there was just skeletal remains.
"It isn't nice to stare" they turned to face Ruby taking a step forward closing the distance between them "Now be a good girl and come with me" they extended their skeletal hand to her.
Ruby took a step away making them furrow their brow "I won't ask you again. COME WITH ME" they growled showing a pair of fangs. Ruby began to run through the forest turning on the flashlight she still held in her hand hoping she would reach the end if she kept going in one direction.
Unfortunately, no matter how far and how long she ran there did not seem to be an exit in sight.
Coming to a stop she saw a stone wall with something written on it in blood.
To whomever reads this...there is something strange about the forest. Along with a mysterious bench that seemed to have been made of human remains is an individual who hunts down people who are brought here. I have tried looking for an exit, but there does not seem to be one. If you make it out, please tell my family...
The rest seems to have been smeared out by someone. The crunching of leaves startled her as she turned her flashlight shining in the direction of the noise. A boney hand placed itself upon her shoulder making her freeze in place.
“Caught you” they whispered close to her ear.
Ruby crumbled to the ground fainting.
The sound of crunching leaves moved around her along with someone talking. A hand touched her shoulder shaking her. Slowly, she opened her eyes looking around her. It was early morning, and raining a man with an umbrella was knelt next to her.
“Oh, thanks the gods” he exclaimed feeling relieved upon seeing Ruby open her eyes then asked, “What are you doing out here all alone?”
She sat up looking around. There was no stone wall or no talking undead. Wait! What about the bench, and the tree? Ruby looked at the man “The b-bench". He looked at her confused “Should I call an ambulance for you?”
Ruby shook her head, and stood “No, t-that’s okay” she walked with the man out of the forest and made a call at the ranger station just outside the trail for her mother to pick her up. On the drive home her mother asked her when she had snuck out of the house last night, but Ruby did not know herself and said she must have sleepwalked.
When she really did not know how she got there in the first place herself. Looking over in the car side mirror she paled seeing a figure with a skeleton hand waving goodbye and mouthing ‘I’ll see you soon.’

I've started looking into getting a new car within the next few months and I'm having a pretty hard time making up my mind on what I should get. I'm pretty outdoorsy and snowboard a lot during the wintecamp during the summer and I'm looking for a car with AWD/4WD to make getting around a bit easier.
​
I'm considering getting a 3rd gen Tacoma, because I just love how the truck looks. Every time I see one out on the road, I can't help but admire it, especially if it's in the Lunar Rock color and has a camper shell. To be honest, I can't imagine myself leveraging everything a truck has to offer in my day-to-day life, but it's just something I would love to have for my outdoor adventures. I'm looking into buying a house in the next 2-3 years too and having a truck seems like it'd make home improvement projects so much easier.
​
I think I've made good financial decisions so far in life. I drive a 2017 Honda Civic that I bought preowned for 13k right before used car prices went crazy a few years back. It's paid off and still worth the same price now after I put 30k miles on it. This truck isn't that bad of a financial decision right? Especially since Tacomas hold their value really well and if I end up wanting to sell it a few years down the line, selling it shouldn't be an issue. Local dealerships have the TRD Off-road in my preferred color for about ~42k MSRP.
​
Some cars I've also considered:
- RAV4 (don't really want it, because everyone and their dog's mom has one)
- Outback (hate the new front design that look like teeth)
- Bronco

My mom has had a addiction for over 25 years. Parents are married. Dad financially supported my two half Bros and my mothers toxic side of the family. We lost our apartment while I was in college. My mom, middle brother and I stayed with my narcissist gma for 2 years and a half, it was traumatizing. Dad and mom started living in a motel. I found an apartment 2 bedroom thinking my parents would move in. But now I live with my brother his two kids(i baby sit when they are here every other week). Than my oldest brother started staying without asking no one if he can. He moved in didn't have a job haven't started paying rent until this year in February. My oldest brother had a car but he would ask my mom, dad, middle brother or me for money for gas or for repairs. The car wasnt in his name but in his paternal gma name ( he has so many tickets in her name)His alcoholic girlfriend started staying here cause she got into a fight in a shelter in January and ended up getting cut in her chin. My oldest brother and his girlfriend got into verbal fights almost everyday. Until last month it got physically and she left and called the cops. Detective come to my house a few days later asking my middle brother, mom and I questions while he out hiding in my bedroom. Also my brothers can never keep my house clean and they can't even buy tissue for the house, i have to beg and scream sometimes for them to get dish washing liquid. My uncle on my mom side comes to the house to clean bcus my parents request. Now my uncle has an addiction as well and doesn't know boundaries as well. Now he wants to spend a night in my house bcus he doesn't get along with the mother of his child. He checks in at the shelter but doesn't want to stay there. He goes into my refrigerator without washing my hands and cooks my vegan food and offer me some. I feel like i too nice like my dad is. My rent is so high, my uncle ask for money constantly and he is in his 50s. We just paid his phone bill and we don't have enough for the rent rn. My mother stays at our apartment every weekend so she can get her fix and cheat on my dad while he works from home (he knows he cheated in the past but I hinted at it to him recently I didn't have any proof so he didnt think she is cheating). I'm the only girl. In the future, I'll move in with a roommate or ill get my own place because I can't do this with my toxic family members. My brothers aren't giving enough money for the rent, so my dad has to start helping. In a way i feel like they need me I don't need them with the exception of my mom. What should I do? I have a part time job now, I have an associate degree and I start my 4 year in August. Im also studying for a certification exam so i can start working in my field. Im on the right track but it's taking so long to get the finish line and to be financially secured. I tired of males asking me for money when I'm younger than them. How can I set boundaries?

Because lately, I'm seeing people claiming that we're all going to die within this decade:

Experts are warning AI could lead to human extinction. Are we taking it seriously enough?
Human extinction.
Think about that for a second. Really think about it. The erasure of the human race from planet Earth.
That is what top industry leaders are frantically sounding the alarm about. These technologists and academics keep smashing the red panic button, doing everything they can to warn about the potential dangers artificial intelligence poses to the very existence of civilization.
On Tuesday, hundreds of top AI scientists, researchers, and others — including OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis — again voiced deep concern for the future of humanity, signing a one-sentence open letter to the public that aimed to put the risks the rapidly advancing technology carries with it in unmistakable terms.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” said the letter, signed by many of the industry’s most respected figures.
It doesn’t get more straightforward and urgent than that. These industry leaders are quite literally warning that the impending AI revolution should be taken as seriously as the threat of nuclear war. They are pleading for policymakers to erect some guardrails and establish baseline regulations to defang the primitive technology before it is too late.
Dan Hendrycks, the executive director of the Center for AI Safety, called the situation “reminiscent of atomic scientists issuing warnings about the very technologies they’ve created. As Robert Oppenheimer noted, ‘We knew the world would not be the same.’”
“There are many ‘important and urgent risks from AI,’ not just the risk of extinction; for example, systemic bias, misinformation, malicious use, cyberattacks, and weaponization,” Hendrycks continued. “These are all important risks that need to be addressed.”
And yet, it seems that the dire message these experts are desperately trying to send the public isn’t cutting through the noise of everyday life. AI experts might be sounding the alarm, but the level of trepidation — and in some cases sheer terror — they harbor about the technology is not being echoed with similar urgency by the news media to the masses.
Instead, broadly speaking, news organizations treated Tuesday’s letter — like all of the other warnings we have seen in recent months — as just another headline, mixed in with a garden variety of stories. Some major news organizations didn’t even feature an article about the chilling warning on their website’s homepages.
To some extent, it feels eerily reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic, before the widespread panic and the shutdowns and the overloaded emergency rooms. Newsrooms kept an eye on the rising threat that the virus posed, publishing stories about it slowly spreading across the world. But by the time the serious nature of the virus was fully recognized and fused into the very essence in which it was covered, it had already effectively upended the world.
History risks repeating itself with AI, with even higher stakes. Yes, news organizations are covering the developing technology. But there has been a considerable lack of urgency surrounding the issue given the open possibility of planetary peril.
Perhaps that is because it can be difficult to come to terms with the notion that a Hollywood-style science fiction apocalypse can become reality, that advancing computer technology might reach escape velocity and decimate humans from existence. It is, however, precisely what the world’s most leading experts are warning could happen.
It is much easier to avoid uncomfortable realities, pushing them from the forefront into the background and hoping that issues simply resolve themselves with time. But often they don’t — and it seems unlikely that the growing concerns pertaining to AI will resolve themselves. In fact, it’s far more likely that with the breakneck pace in which the technology is developing, the concerns will actually become more apparent with time.
As Cynthia Rudin, a computer science professor and AI researcher at Duke University, told CNN on Tuesday: “Do we really need more evidence that AI’s negative impact could be as big as nuclear war?”

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/30/media/artificial-intelligence-warning-reliable-sources/index.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThere%20are%20many%20'important%20and,that%20need%20to%20be%20addressed.%E2%80%9D

Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down
BY ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY MARCH 29, 2023 6:01 PM EDT
Yudkowsky is a decision theorist from the U.S. and leads research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He's been working on aligning Artificial General Intelligence since 2001 and is widely regarded as a founder of the field.
An open letter published today calls for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
This 6-month moratorium would be better than no moratorium. I have respect for everyone who stepped up and signed it. It’s an improvement on the margin.
I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.
The key issue is not “human-competitive” intelligence (as the open letter puts it); it’s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence. Key thresholds there may not be obvious, we definitely can’t calculate in advance what happens when, and it currently seems imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing.
Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.” It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers.
Without that precision and preparation, the most likely outcome is AI that does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general. That kind of caring is something that could in principle be imbued into an AI but we are not ready and do not currently know how.
Absent that caring, we get “the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.”
The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss. Valid metaphors include “a 10-year-old trying to play chess against Stockfish 15”, “the 11th century trying to fight the 21st century,” and “Australopithecus trying to fight Homo sapiens“.
To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.
If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.
There’s no proposed plan for how we could do any such thing and survive. OpenAI’s openly declared intention is to make some future AI do our AI alignment homework. Just hearing that this is the plan ought to be enough to get any sensible person to panic. The other leading AI lab, DeepMind, has no plan at all.
An aside: None of this danger depends on whether or not AIs are or can be conscious; it’s intrinsic to the notion of powerful cognitive systems that optimize hard and calculate outputs that meet sufficiently complicated outcome criteria. With that said, I’d be remiss in my moral duties as a human if I didn’t also mention that we have no idea how to determine whether AI systems are aware of themselves—since we have no idea how to decode anything that goes on in the giant inscrutable arrays—and therefore we may at some point inadvertently create digital minds which are truly conscious and ought to have rights and shouldn’t be owned.
The rule that most people aware of these issues would have endorsed 50 years earlier, was that if an AI system can speak fluently and says it’s self-aware and demands human rights, that ought to be a hard stop on people just casually owning that AI and using it past that point. We already blew past that old line in the sand. And that was probably correct; I agree that current AIs are probably just imitating talk of self-awareness from their training data. But I mark that, with how little insight we have into these systems’ internals, we do not actually know.
If that’s our state of ignorance for GPT-4, and GPT-5 is the same size of giant capability step as from GPT-3 to GPT-4, I think we’ll no longer be able to justifiably say “probably not self-aware” if we let people make GPT-5s. It’ll just be “I don’t know; nobody knows.” If you can’t be sure whether you’re creating a self-aware AI, this is alarming not just because of the moral implications of the “self-aware” part, but because being unsure means you have no idea what you are doing and that is dangerous and you should stop.
On Feb. 7, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, publicly gloated that the new Bing would make Google “come out and show that they can dance.” “I want people to know that we made them dance,” he said.
This is not how the CEO of Microsoft talks in a sane world. It shows an overwhelming gap between how seriously we are taking the problem, and how seriously we needed to take the problem starting 30 years ago.
We are not going to bridge that gap in six months.
It took more than 60 years between when the notion of Artificial Intelligence was first proposed and studied, and for us to reach today’s capabilities. Solving safety of superhuman intelligence—not perfect safety, safety in the sense of “not killing literally everyone”—could very reasonably take at least half that long. And the thing about trying this with superhuman intelligence is that if you get that wrong on the first try, you do not get to learn from your mistakes, because you are dead. Humanity does not learn from the mistake and dust itself off and try again, as in other challenges we’ve overcome in our history, because we are all gone.
Trying to get anything right on the first really critical try is an extraordinary ask, in science and in engineering. We are not coming in with anything like the approach that would be required to do it successfully. If we held anything in the nascent field of Artificial General Intelligence to the lesser standards of engineering rigor that apply to a bridge meant to carry a couple of thousand cars, the entire field would be shut down tomorrow.
We are not prepared. We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems. If we actually do this, we are all going to die.
Many researchers working on these systems think that we’re plunging toward a catastrophe, with more of them daring to say it in private than in public; but they think that they can’t unilaterally stop the forward plunge, that others will go on even if they personally quit their jobs. And so they all think they might as well keep going. This is a stupid state of affairs, and an undignified way for Earth to die, and the rest of humanity ought to step in at this point and help the industry solve its collective action problem.
Some of my friends have recently reported to me that when people outside the AI industry hear about extinction risk from Artificial General Intelligence for the first time, their reaction is “maybe we should not build AGI, then.”
Hearing this gave me a tiny flash of hope, because it’s a simpler, more sensible, and frankly saner reaction than I’ve been hearing over the last 20 years of trying to get anyone in the industry to take things seriously. Anyone talking that sanely deserves to hear how bad the situation actually is, and not be told that a six-month moratorium is going to fix it.
On March 16, my partner sent me this email. (She later gave me permission to excerpt it here.)
“Nina lost a tooth! In the usual way that children do, not out of carelessness! Seeing GPT4 blow away those standardized tests on the same day that Nina hit a childhood milestone brought an emotional surge that swept me off my feet for a minute. It’s all going too fast. I worry that sharing this will heighten your own grief, but I’d rather be known to you than for each of us to suffer alone.”
When the insider conversation is about the grief of seeing your daughter lose her first tooth, and thinking she’s not going to get a chance to grow up, I believe we are past the point of playing political chess about a six-month moratorium.
If there was a plan for Earth to survive, if only we passed a six-month moratorium, I would back that plan. There isn’t any such plan.
Here’s what would actually need to be done:
The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. If the policy starts with the U.S., then China needs to see that the U.S. is not seeking an advantage but rather trying to prevent a horrifically dangerous technology which can have no true owner and which will kill everyone in the U.S. and in China and on Earth. If I had infinite freedom to write laws, I might carve out a single exception for AIs being trained solely to solve problems in biology and biotechnology, not trained on text from the internet, and not to the level where they start talking or planning; but if that was remotely complicating the issue I would immediately jettison that proposal and say to just shut it all down.
Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.
Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature. Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.
That’s the kind of policy change that would cause my partner and I to hold each other, and say to each other that a miracle happened, and now there’s a chance that maybe Nina will live. The sane people hearing about this for the first time and sensibly saying “maybe we should not” deserve to hear, honestly, what it would take to have that happen. And when your policy ask is that large, the only way it goes through is if policymakers realize that if they conduct business as usual, and do what’s politically easy, that means their own kids are going to die too.
Shut it all down.
We are not ready. We are not on track to be significantly readier in the foreseeable future. If we go ahead on this everyone will die, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.
Shut it down.

https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/

I fully expect to die in the AI apocalypse in 5-10 years, and I'll be surprised by happy if I don't.

https://old.reddit.com/Futurology/comments/134g9zp/one_of_the_creators_of_chatgpt_said_that_the/jifgp46/?context=3

People are going to say no because it would be inconvenient, but I don't see what's stopping AI from ending all life in the next couple of years. Alignment is an unsolved problem, and an unaligned AI will most likely try to kill anything it sees as a threat to its mission.

https://old.reddit.com/artificial/comments/13xsbnt/is_ai_going_to_cause_the_complete_extinction_of/jmjzpmo/?context=3

Yes, AI will probably cause human extinction in the next decade. Paul Christiano, former senior employee of OpenAI, said that there is 20% chance that AI causes human extinction. Eliezer Yudkowsky, major contributor to AI safety and development, thinks it is 99%.

https://old.reddit.com/artificial/comments/13xsbnt/is_ai_going_to_cause_the_complete_extinction_of/jms84rb/

I am trying actually! I organized a picket outside OpenAI's HQ in May, before the Extinction statement.
You can search Eliezer Yudkowsky podcasts on youtube, or his blog. The podcast i recommend is Bankless one.
He says that our death is the most likely outcome from AI, and is now living off his life, like it is his last years.

https://old.reddit.com/artificial/comments/13xsbnt/is_ai_going_to_cause_the_complete_extinction_of/jmsqj28/
Based on these, it seems like we're far more likely to go completely extinct than we did before with AI, COVID-19, nuclear weapons, and so on. None of those existed during Medieval Era, so maybe we should've never left that era.
Thoughts on these?

Im staying in Maarkedal for a holiday in July. I was going to bring my own bike but seems a hassle with the chunnel.
Anyone have any recommendations for bike hire in that area.
Thanks !

I was supposed to hang out with my friend today but I left halfway through because I was fed up with her not taking my time or effort into consideration and she doesn't seem to understand why I'm upset.
My friend and I have been trying to make plans to hang out but sometimes plans change either a few days before or they aren't solidified in time so we don't follow through.
This time was different because we had a plan! I was going to pick her up and we were gonna get our nails done. We never solidified when or where before we fell asleep but we were gonna do it today. So I called and texted her at 9am asking about the hang out to get the deets,, she didn't pick up. So I texted her asking about details and took a shower to get ready to pick her up or wait around for when since I didn't have plans. At 1130am she texted me that she's gonna get her nails done by herself and we can get lunch after. I was kinda annoyed because I was looking forward to it and she didn't wanna wait for me to make it to her side of town. But I decided to ignore it and just try to find a lunch spot for us.
She didn't tell me where she was but she wanted something close or between us so she doesn't have to drive and she shot down like 2 of my locations that I gave her. Then we finally agreed on a spot but she didn't tell me when she was leaving the salon or how long it'll take her to get to the restaurant and when I ask she tells me to stop asking so many questions. So she gets there and I get there much later because she's MUCH closer to the location she approved than I am (and I'm guessing she withheld that info from me so I'd drive further).
When I got to the place she joked about how she had to wait 30 minutes for me to get there. It was now like 340. Mind you I havent eaten lunch or breakfast. We meet up and talk for a bit then at 4 o clock I go order my food and while I'm ordering she says she's gonna go to her car to smoke a cigarette and she'll be right back. I thought it was rude but 5 minutes no big deal, no. 20 minutes later I sent her a text that I'm gonna head home because it's obvious she doesn't value my time. I had been sitting there eating by myself when we were suppose to have lunch together. She's upset because I'm leaving and doesn't seem to understand why no matter how much I try to explain it to her. Anyway I don't think I wanna hang out with her again.
So AITA for leaving her halfway through our plans?
Tldr: I left my friend at the restaurant after she took a 20 minute smoke break in the middle of our lunch.

Sunday, June 4th 2:30AM
I have no clue what happened, but I heard a car slide off the road and crash at exactly 2:30AM from my window. Anyone else in the area hear it? (Near Thornwood Public school, and Metro).