The movie analogy is old and outdated.

I'd compare it to a computer game. In any open world game, it seems that there are people living a life - going to work, doing chores, going home, etc. - but it's a carefully crafted illusion. "Carefully crafted" in so far as the developers having put exactly that into the game that is needed to suspend your disbelief and let you think, at least while playing, that there are real people. But behind the facade, they are not. They just disappear when entering their homes, they have no actual desires just a few numbers and conditional statements to switch between different pre-programmed behaviour patterns.

If done well, it can be a very, very convincing illusion. I'm sure that someone who hasn't seen a computer game before might think that they are actual people, but anyone with a bit of background knowledge knows they are not.

For AI, most of the people simply don't (yet?) have that bit of background knowledge.

And yet, when asked if the world is flat, they correctly say that it's not.

Despite hundreds of flat-earthers who are quite active online.

And it doesn't even budge on the point if you argue with it. So for whatever it's worth, it has learned more from scraping the Internet than at least some humans.

We didn't. The media and the PR departments did. In the tech and academia worlds that seriously work with it, the terms are LLMs, machine learning, etc. - the actual terms describing what the thing does. "AI" is the marketing term used by marketing people. You know, the people who professionally lie about everything in order to sell things.

It is not just ludicrous, it is irrationally dangerous.

For any (current) LLM, whenever you interact with them you need to remember one rule-of-thumb (not my invention, read it somewhere and agree): The LLM was trained to generate "expected output". So always think that implicitly your prompt starts with "give me the answer you think I want to read on the following question".

Giving an EXPECTED answer instead of the most likely to be true answer is literally life-threatening in a medical context.

But "95% of international traffic" is not the same as "95% of traffic". You are slicing the wrong pie, Happy Thanksgiving!

That's the problem: they are not a web. The original idea of the internet was to have a web of connections so that a few cables or nodes going bad wouldn't stop data movement, it would route around the bad spots via going through adjacent parts of the web. Seems we have to return to the original vision.

Technically they usually route around damaged sea cables via a larger scale redundancy, such as through another continent, but the webbiness needs to be per sea based on the rate of damage so far.

"Epstein diddit"

Really? I've noticed a lot of other reasons not to buy one:

1. Import of Chinese electric vehicles, of which many are cheap and not that bad
2. Import of much cheaper second-hand Teslas, which eat the market for new cars of this model
3. Finally, a large expansion of EV models from European car makers, of which some are inexpensive and, unlike the musk abortions, some begin to look like real cars.

There is a bit of a badwill from his escapades, but I doubt it is noticeable as the hate musko got in the US.

To sum it up, musk was doing well when he could get away with heavily subsidized crap because there were few other options. This era is now over, and his crap will end up alongside the similar Chinese crap.

You do realize that what you're describing is all of about ten lines of Javascript with the right libraries (audioTrackList property, subtitle library, currentTime property), right?

It is marketing. So what? And there is reason to believe US (and European) car-makers stupidly left the market to China. And now China is ahead by a large margin. That is not how you win the future.

Yep. I do not think this has changed today. If you want to know, it matters little whether it is a trip to the library or to wikipedia.

I do not doubt that. We have some large-ego-small-insight "tech" people here, same as any tech forum. These then state total insightless nonsense with confidence. People like that are unable to tell when to fact-check, but have total confidence in their knowledge. And they are always around in some form.

Come to think of it, modern LLM communication is modelled on these idiots, because they can convince people. People like that also do well in sales, religion and politics.

Funny thing: I was asked about the same thing about 15-20 years back by a security consulting customer (very large bank). They wanted to store their Root CA secret keys by just putting them on bootable memory stick in a safe. My recommendation was to use industrial CF instead (which are essentially SLC FLASH with better properties that has 10 or 20 years data endurance and that endurance is in the data-sheet), but by any means to have several laser-printed copy on paper in addition. As CA secret keys are small, they went wit that. But they would have faced a real possibility of an expensive disaster otherwise.

Does it use the same "sandwich" batteries as the other autos in their fleet? Because if it does, you won't want one. Not for very long anyway.

Sure, deny it all you like. There's plenty of video evidence. But don't let me stop you from keeping your head in the sand.