Chat GPT and its rivals are the latest incarnations of 50 to 60 year old programs like ELIZA (1962-4) and PARRY (1972). Then in the 1990s Andrew C. Bulhak's Postmodernism Generator using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars. and Jason Hutchens' MegaHAL which used, in part hidden, Markov models to produce often lucid text and, of course, others.

Chat GPT has the advantage of a huge corpus of text in its training data, tools for decoding natural language & (probably) more computing power than the entire world had in the 1970s.

While journalists keep saying that Chat GPT is artificial intelligence, the reality is it is a clever implementation of an LLM. Provided the answer to a question is well represented in its training data, it has a good chance of producing a factual, preferably useful, answer. Ask for something that it limited representation of in its training data & it can "hallucinate". Ask for an artistic response (poetry, screenplays, etc) and it will oblige, but the answers seem somehow flat.

When I first started exploring Chat GPT, I set it a number of tasks: Writing a short stand-up comedy set on a given topic, writing poems in given styles on given topics, rewriting the end of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliette and Hamlet to have happy endings, given the first half of the script for first scene of my satirical fantasy play The Grin Reaper: The Bunny's Tale complete the scene. In each case it produced something compliant but the "comedy" was dead flat, the poetry lacked emotion &, as for the Shakespeare, nah!

Does this mean that AI can't compete in the arts? No, it means that 2023 LLMs can't but the technology is improving and if the creators of them see a business advantage to improving them in that direction, we can expect something a lot better

I wonder if the relative thinness of the Earth's crust is related to the giant-impact hypothesis which would suggest that a lot of the crust of both the early Earth & Theia would have been ejected into space?

Yes, and if for some reason they decide they need a full featured multi-user OS, there's always the *BSD operating systems.

Can't speak for the others but FreeBSD's NanoBSD is a tool for creating "small" FreeBSD system images for embedded applications.

US news site CNN reported it in Euros & gave a translation "Meta has been fined a record-breaking €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) by European Union regulators for violating EU privacy laws by transferring the personal data of Facebook users to servers in the United States."

Although it doesn't name the US security services, it strongly implies them in this RNZ post is sourced from Reuters and is probably much the same. I've highlighted the relevant bit.

You first have to find a country that will allow you to move there, although if you are going as a student it's usually easier to get a student visa than a work visa ... as long as you are enrolled at an accredited tertiary institute

Unless it's an English speaking country, you'll probably have to learn the language that education is conducted in there

Very few countries offer free education to foreign students, so you'll need the cash to pay for your courses.

It's terribly naive to think that the main worry is Chinese spyware when, given the past behaviour of the two countries, it is far more likely that the US government is more worried that it can't factory install its own spyware. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/0...

Except they won't be wiped out, the sea level will rise gradually over several years and they will be displaced, moving inland or north. They will have lost their homes & businesses and many will end up on the streets or working minimum wage, but they will be alive.

I find it hard not to see a parallel with the displacement of people that was the basis of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath eighty-some years ago.

Or maybe the regulations they hand government to impose will be carefully phrased to stop new entrants in the market?

Broadcom are a fabless semiconductor company so I can't see why they should be the reason for shortage in chips, probably the foundries they subcontract to are the bottleneck. Yes, Raspberry have created the RP2040 dual core 32 bit ARM chip used in the Pi Pico but scaling from being able to do that to designing a quad core 64 bit chip would be a massive job & they would still be fabless at the mercy of others.

Ukraine and several other ex Soviet countries also use Cyrillic. As does Serbia.

Are you sure it's Russian?

Sounds like time to introduce the tachyon language to the mix ... the worse the source code, the faster it runs.

I thought China had massive firewall infrastructure. How did this thing manage to operate for over a decade?

Any people after this service have to be identified & in the UK to make prosecution likely.

Solution: Accept the order and payment then tell them "Nah". Tell them to come to UK if they want to sue.