Well, and FWIW, 2C is probably an underestimate, like most of the forecasts. The official forecasters never want to sound too extreme.

OTOH, it still depends on what we (as a world civilization) do. So far we've kept raising our CO2 discharges, but we *could* reverse that.

I suspect they'll just ignore it because no one will want to actually use it.

The problem with these ideology-based projects is that they have no mass appeal. No one out there in userland gives a flying fuck about free software. They want the latest apps. They want a seamless experience. Especially Gen Z who were raised on mobile devices. Tell them that they should give up iPhones and Android phones because "Free as in Freedom is the right way", and they're going to look at you like you're a tentacled thing from Mars. There simply aren't enough nerds on the fringe to make a "free" phone system work.

Makes me glad I gave up on TV. (OTOH, it makes me worry about the next time I need to replace a monitor.)

It's a combination of training data and rewards. Chatbots are trained to never admit that they don't know, and to always be willing to be convinced that the person talking to them is correct. This makes them more popular, and enchances engagement, but at the cost of accuracy.

I think that if they're actually generating feature length films, they'll probably be decent...well, not much worse than what they've been doing. Films are expensive not just to shoot, but also to make, so I expect there'll be lots of steps where "editorial judgement" is applied.

OTOH, I'm not a movie goer. I don't know the current quality. And Ed Wood is a level it's pretty hard to go below.

No. The scam callers speak English. Perhaps not well, but it's English that they are speaking.

To repeat a point I made earlier, information is not knowledge. Knowledge may be either true or false (i.e. it's a signed quantity). Information is most densely contained in (at least apparently) random noise.

IIUC, the chinese ideograph system is common between all those languages, and therefore would count as one common language...until the computers started audio processing. (FWIW, it's my understanding that many of the Chinese ideographs even have approximately the same meaning in one of the Japanese writing systems.)

A point, but (and this is admittedly a quibble) I wouldn't call languages a "vast body of human knowledge". The data encoded within that language might qualify, but not the language itself. Unfortunately, without understanding the language there's no way of reasonably estimating the size of the contained "human knowledge" that isn't contained in sources already covered.

FWIW, I think treating "the internet" as a body of human knowledge is foolish. Parts of it are, but much of it is negative-knowledge (i.e. learning it makes you stupider). The internet *is* a body of human information...but some information is garbage.

Now I admit that, say, Tamil may contain encoded large amounts of history and large amounts of myth. Whether they are clearly enough separated to be called knowledge isn't something I can tell. (Actually, Tamil should contain much of the history of the development of math...but it's not clear to me that this would be readily distinguishable from the related myths even by a careful historian, much less by a current LLM.)

Loans always have such vile terms that I do my best to avoid them. I've been pretty successful, but sometimes there is no real choice. But whenever I bought a car it was cash down, no interest.

As far as I am concerned, the importance of this law is that the person writing the contract has to make the terms clear to the person accepting it. "fine print" has always been a despicable legal tradition.

This isn't something they can't read. This is something that requires a trivial conversion. But you got the message correctly.

It's been reported that the conversion is trivial. So this is purely symbolic + nuisance.

The FOSS crowd is known for avoiding likely law suits. IIUC, the WPS format would be likely found to be a copyright violation if one didn't have a powerful government on ones side. (Or at least a firm of powerful lawyers and deep pockets.)

Yes, it absolutely is a shit format, but for distributing documents it's a widely deployed lowest common denominator that works for everyone. Unless you're suggesting we go back to fixed width text files (or you can figure out how to get the entire world to immediately start using LaTex) it's probably the best distribution format you're going to see without falling into the xkcd 927 trap.

They have altered the deal. You can supply the rest of the quote for yourself.