What are good places these days? I miss Fry's Electronics, CompUSA, Computer City, etc. :(

If Apple still sold newer small and light iPhones models like its minis and SE, then I would get the newer models. :(

Or not. Kind of like a drug-dealer that prints warnings on their product...

Western pharmaceutical companies have gotten fat and lazy and do not take the risk of doing R&D anymore, with rare exceptions. If China kicks their collective behinds, all the better.

AFAIK, nobody has demonstrated a viable SMR prototype of any kind. No, marine reactors do not count, they have the wrong characteristics and are far too uneconomic for this, even worse than civilian designs. The two that exist (Russian and Chinese) do NOT come with any or any believable cost figures. In addition, the he Russian one is a military design and the Chinese one is a highly experimental pebble-bed reactor based on German patents. The Germans wrecked three of these and two are still highly radioactive ruins that nobody know how to dispose of. On the plus-side, pebble-bed reactors cannot melt down, which is a decided plus.

Still, anybody that has high confidence in the approach is simply an idiot.

They are NOT going to make it. And then the whole bubble will burst.

SMART tests are not really defined. But reading a cell should automatically trigger a refresh if the read was weak or did require ECC. This is not a visible "write", more like housekeeping.

Good luck with that. The occasional hallucination will kill that dumb idea.

There's always Greenland.

The movie analogy is old and outdated.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.