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Comment Re:Interesting Idea (Score 1) 54

I suspect phone manufacturers will attempt to find ways to block installing it on their devices

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.

Comment Re:All right, but is it any good? (Score 1) 34

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.

Comment Re:Bonus Data (Score 1) 46

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.

Comment Re:English dominates vs Tamil && Hindi (Score 1) 46

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.)

Comment Re:researchers call "mode amplification" (Score 2) 46

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.)

Comment Re:PDF is an awfully shit format. (Score 1) 140

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.

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