Exactly. This is as much a virus as the program I wrote as a first year CS student that rebooted the computer due to a bad pointer dereference was a virus. (That one would probably just segfault today, but I started back in the DOS dark ages . . .)
AI is a conspiracy theory—companies are just hiring people in lower-income countries to impersonate machines!
(/s, of course, but with just enough truth to it that there’s probably someone somewhere out there who thinks the above statement is plausible.)
Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts?
We do have originals of some much older texts, though (cuneiform on clay that was fired after impression seems to be a pretty good archival medium, overall). We’d probably have a lot more original Greek and Roman documents if they hadn’t been destroyed in wars and other disasters, or recycled for various purposes. There’s a big survival rate difference between documents that receive basic care throughout their lives—no rough handling handling, minimal direct sunlight exposure, and some degree of temperature and humidity control in the storage area—and those left to fend for themselves. That’s why old documents in surprisingly good condition sometimes turn up in caves, which tend to have constant temperature and humidity levels.
(But, yeah, current electronic media doesn’t have much chance, with select optical disk media stored under carefully chosen conditions offering the best chance for your files being retrievable decades later, if you can find a drive to read them on.)
Air Canada is not a vital service (some of the little bush airlines that are the only way in or out of remote communities might be, but not them). Believing that the government should intervene on their behalf is such excessive hubris that I can’t even.
Someone overreacted here, but it wasn’t just the police. Who calls the cops over a water gun, for crying out loud?!
Pale Moon, originally forked from Firefox many years ago (although the codebases have diverged so far that most Firefox patches no longer apply). Still xul, still supports Firefox extensions from back in the day as well as extensions purpose-written for it. On the downside, it occasionally isn’t compatible with the latest bleeding-edge nonstandard Javascript features—I keep Vivaldi around for the extremely rare occasion when something goes wrong with a site that I absolutely must visit for some reason (I think I’ve needed it twice in the past five years).
The Soviets never sent humans into the reactor to remove melted core material. The remains of the Chernobyl No. 4 core are still there inside the sarcophagus, and I don’t think anyone was making serious plans to remove them even before the Ukraine war got in the way.
(The job that got so many Soviet workers exposed was moving solid radioactive debris from the exploded core so that the initial containment sarcophagus could be built and the other three reactors on the site restarted. Nothing comparable was required at Fukushima because the explosions there didn’t breach any of the cores, thus no chunks of highly radioactive graphite to shovel off the roofs. I understand that the Soviets did try robots, but radiation isn’t good for electronics and, well, it was Soviet equipment in 1986—they just weren’t very effective.)
Even if Singh were just in it for the pension (which I don’t believe), he has never shown an interest in dismantling public health care or building unnecessary additional highways, which makes him a better person than Ford. I wish Ford were just in it for the pension.
To put it another way, the difference is push vs. pull. A catalogue is a pull offering: the person looking at it is doing so by choice, because they’re interested in what it offers and want to buy something (or at least window shop). An online ad is a push offering: it’s presented to people who did not choose to see it, are not interested in it, and just wish it would go away and let them get on with what they’re actually trying to do. Pull advertising is (usually) acceptable. Push advertising is not.
Keyboard typing is a manual skill distinct from tech savvy and has to be taught as such. You’re not going to learn it by dealing with a touchscreen swipe “keyboard”. I’ve known a fair number of programmers who were two-finger typists because they were too busy taking CS courses to learn to type.
On the gripping hand, my early-Boomer mother, who learned on typewriters, can type fast and accurately but is quite technophobic.
The issue is how to rejigger the universities’ income streams so that they can keep themselves afloat without that. We can start by looking into why some seem to be having more trouble than others.
Problem is that the prices were originally arranged to that first-class lettermail subsidized the rest of the services. Then the amount of lettermail tanked, and the pricing structure never quite straightened itself out afterwards. Someone has to sit down and rethink it from scratch, and so far no one’s been willing to do that.
We still need the postal service, though—it serves smaller and remote communities that the couriers would prefer not to deal with.
CGI was a pretty early invention, so you would have had to be on the Web very early indeed to remember when it was entirely static. Main difference between the server-side era and now was that the usual way for pages to show changes back then was to autotrigger the browser’s reload mechanism after a fixed time.
From the viewpoint of an observing human, what’s the difference between the robot saying something which is believes to be true but isn’t (very common with current software, and unlikely to change even in the distant future, see “humans, purportedly intelligent”) and lying on purpose? If it lies on purpose, does the intent to lie come from the robot itself, or its programmers? Ultimately, it seems like the presence and source of intent is the only difference. Regardless, a robot will never be right about everything it says, so its statements have to be weighed in a way similar to how one would weigh statements coming from a human.
TL;DR: I expect robots to tell me untruths from time to time regardless of how I feel about it.
Different group, I think, and not as close to success. The thylacine has a better chance at long-term survival if we do bring it back, though—it isn’t an ice age creature, and it was surviving despite competition from other creatures in a similar niche until humans started aggressively hunting it down.
It suggests that the best the chatbot can do, after being carefully tailored for its job, is no better than the old methods (because the goal is for the students to be able to handle the subject matter without having to check every common operation with a third party, regardless of whether that’s a chatbot or a textbook, and the test is the best indicator of that). Therefore, spending the electricity to run an educational chatbot for highschoolers isn’t justified at this time, but it’s probably worth rechecking in a few years to see if its results have improved. It may also be worth doing extended testing to determine whether there are specific subsets of the student body that benefit more from the chatbot than others. And allowing the students to seek out an untailored chatbot on their own is strongly counterindicated.
Not that long gone—the last relict population on Wrangel Island only died out about 4000 years ago. That’s (barely) within historic time. There are probably islands in the Canadian and Siberian Arctic that could still support them (and have no or few human inhabitants).
I see two big issues. First of all, not all knowledge among elephants is transmitted genetically, and I expect mammoths were the same. Who will the new ones learn from? They’ll have to redevelop best practices for dealing with their environment from scratch.
Secondly, global warming. This seems like about the worst possible time to bring back an ice-age-adapted critter. We’d be better off transferring the effort spent on this project into de-extincting the thylacine, a more recent loss which doesn’t have that specific issue.
Loss of consciousness is not a normal symptom of migraine or cluster headaches (even if some sufferers wish it would be). The moment the ambulance brought him in unconscious, the doctors should have started testing for meningitis, tumours, etc. The fact that they apparently didn’t suggests that they were either incompetent . . . or severely overworked and so exhausted that they couldn’t tell a zebra from a horse even when it shoved its stripy butt in their faces. This kid is lucky that his mom kept fighting for him, and lucky that they were close enough to a major city that “bring him straight down” was only a matter of a couple of hours of driving.
Except the-service-formerly-known-as-Twitter isn’t being “shut down”, it’s being stopped at the Brazilian border. This actually happens all the time with print publications in many countries that don’t take Free Speech to toxic extremes—they get confiscated at the border by Customs officials. It’s less common these days than it used to be, but I’d bet that there are still instances of fringe porn and unapologetic Nazi propaganda being seized.
X-Twitter is free to go about its business in the country in which it’s based and in any other country where it hasn’t been banned, just not in Brazil, until and unless it decides to comply with the courts there. Which it is free to do at any time.
X is forbidden from offering services in Brazil until and unless it complies with the local courts (the company refused an order to suspend some accounts, then wouldn’t appoint a local representative as Brazilian law requires). Local ISPs are required to block it. I don’t know about Australia.