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Comment Re:These people are hallucinating (Score 1) 315

As a matter of fact, it's more difficult than even that.
We don't know whether AGI is even possible. It's faster-than-light travel all over again. Some are optimistic about it, but the more we advance in a certain direction (LLMs), the smaller the chance is that it's the right direction to advance in.
Don't get me wrong, I also like the idea of AI helping out lives, and in theory it seems to be something great, however, when applied in practice, it kind of still falls flat on its face.
Makes me remember the holy grail that graphene was touted as, a few years ago. Or flying cars, for that matter. We can build both, but scaling them to relevant levels, not so much (or at all). Wake me up when that's a common thing :)

Comment Re:These people are hallucinating (Score 1) 315

The point is: using "just" trivializes the effort, makes it look like it's all some small step that needs to be taken, some superfluous gesture and the problem would be fixed.

Analogy: If I buy a car horn and a windshield wiper, it makes no sense to say "what remains to meet the definition of owning a car is just buying the rest of the car"; while technically correct, it makes me look like I'm at 95% of owning a car, instead of 5%.

Case in point: "widening the scope" is not a matter of adjusting a couple parameters or coding for a few days. "Widening the scope" is definitely not "what remains", it's actually most of the effort. It's the devil in the details. It's the Pareto principle all over again, applied here as the roughly 20% of missing features which have an 80% share of effect (or lack thereof).

The very foundation of LLMs is ultimately the feet of clay on which the whole thing sits. It started with the wrong principles, and it keeps being built on, adjusted and steered in the wrong direction. The overhyped AI is a glorified trained monkey, or parrot, or what-have-you, which is able to eloquently utter words (be them in writing, sound or video) which it does not understand. The only difference compared to the above-mentioned beasts, in this regard, is the ability of LLMs to access a wealth of data and mix those words in many ways, but it ultimately is incapable of understanding the information it handles. It's a giant idiot, mutilated in 1000 places; and some people expect it to "just widen its scope". Yeah, good luck with that.

Comment Money grab (Score 3, Insightful) 50

It looks to me like Axios is rushing to grab as much money as they can before shit goes under.
Standard pump and dump.

Look, news aren't going to go away, at least not quality news.
Back in the day, there were local storytellers who were "broadcasting" news to the village.
Then newspapers came. Storytellers* were now writing articles.
Then radio came. Some article writers moved there, others* kept writing. Radio didn't replace newspapers*.
Then television came. Neither newspapers*, nor radio* disappeared.
Internet came afterwards. TV*, radio* and newspapers* didn't go away.
With AI, there will still be someone who needs to capture the information before it would be processed and spit out through a LLM.

*the good ones, at least. The mediocre and shit ones went away, which shouldn't surprise anyone.

Comment Re:Woketrix - GO WOKE GO BROKE (Score 1) 215

Agreed, however...

TL;DR -- the Corporations, and the Government too, took the concept of "Woke" -- the real "Woke" of being aware and fighting against oppression, and turned it into a way to make a lot of Money and Power.

If you look at top grossing movies, you might think that's the case, however for each of those movies is countered by at least two other productions that flopped, some of them flopped HARD.
Barbie made bank not because it's pandering (spoiler: it IS pandering, big time), but because of the hundreds of millions of kids who wanted to see it, together with their parents, without caring what kind of message is sent. Same reason for Super Mario and Little Mermaid. The Corpos took known and loved emblematic items and turned them into a money making machine, but that only works once or twice per entity. Maybe there will be a successful Barbie II too, but it's not a sustainable IP, unless they change "the message".

I recently re-watched Airplane and Airplane II (which was objectively worse), my wife and me laughed hard.
Man, I miss that kind of movies.
And I can't stop thinking that, if such movie ideas would have floated today, those movies would have NEVER been made. As a matter of fact, I'd wager to say more than half of "classic" movies out there, the ones that achieved "legend" status, would have never been made today.

Comment Re:Cost/Benefit (Score 1) 44

No kids, but plenty of pets.
Maybe I should point out this is my second marriage (I learned a LOT from the first one).
We are together 100% of the time. Working from home is a blessing.
And yes, plenty of small compromises to go around, but they are all openly discussed and agreed; I'd say the count of compromises is 50/50.

I'm aware this type of relationship is very rare, but I've seen it at my maternal grandparents before. 53 years of blissful marriage, through pretty rough times in part, until one of them sadly passed away.

Comment Re: These Laws Don't Prevent Parents From Parenti (Score 1) 159

Yes, legally.
Well, I have to nuance a bit. In my country, you can order alcohol and tobacco online, if you're over 18, of course. ID is not checked (in person or on the website) if you order online. I know of several cases where someone (incidentally, an adult, but, again, there was no online ID check) ordered alcohol online and the package was delivered to their homes, where their child received it from the courier.
Firearm ownership is illegal here, unless you fill a ton of paperwork, and people who have the right to own them are exceedingly rare. But alcohol and tobacco can be very easily ordered online, even through delivery apps.

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