I want them to bring back Slashdot subscriptions. I'll happily pay to support Slashdot, but I uncompromisingly reject advertising. Not to mention, the few times the newer ads have gotten through uBlock filters they've been atrocious.
I know the site has been on life support for a decade but subscriptions seem like a pretty easy way to make some money.
Yeah but radio ads are generic and not 2 way conversations. They are not an asking what you are saying and twisting it towards explaining why you need product X.
It will be as reliable as asking a used car salesman for advice. Somehow it's gonna be advice about how a car would for me
Clippy
Cortana
Copilot
Maybe they need to pick a new letter. Bring back Microsoft Bob?
I think the word Republican in the above should be spelled with a small r
To be fair, they capitalized all sorts of random words in the 1700's.
Nicely said.
A favorite quote by Christopher Hitchens, describing Martin Luther King, Jr:
This does not in the least diminish his standing as a great preacher, any more than does the fact that he was a mammal like the rest of us, and probably plagiarized his doctoral dissertation, and had a notorious fondness for booze and for women a good deal younger than his wife. He spent the remainder of his last evening in orgiastic dissipation, for which I don’t blame him. (These things, which of course disturb the faithful, are rather encouraging in that they show that a high more character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.)
Even though it sounds brusque, the first time I read it I found it to be incredibly encouraging and uplifting. And Hitchens was no opponent of personal vice, so it's really not quite the insult some might take it as. There are no perfect humans - every one of us is a physical creature with unique and personal baggage bestowed on us by our flaws, circumstance, and the times in which we live. The whitewashed saints often presented for emulation are uninteresting and useless as genuine role models.
Exactly this. Airlines are now essentially banks with a side hustle flying planes.
I want them to fix the JavaScript related memory leaks in Mobile so I don't have to kill it several times a day. I guess that's too much to ask since this has been going on for literally years.
I've used Firefox Beta as my primary browser on my Android phones for years and have never encountered this. Maybe there's an issue with some specific features used by sites I don't visit. Doesn't prove anything but I guess one anecdote deserves another.
> Sure, do this instead of better tech
Regardless of what you think of the new mascot, do you really think the same people responsible for drawing pretty pictures of foxes are the same ones designing "better tech" and writing code and fixing bugs? Groups of people can do more than one thing at a time.
And I'd guess this is also an attempt to raise some money and awareness to the browser. At this point it doesn't matter how great Firefox "tech" is, they have lost the popularity context against Chrome and Chromium knockoffs, and will never get it back. Google will do and spend whatever it takes to keep Chrome on top, so Mozilla is probably looking for ways to at least retain what they have and keep the lights on.
Whether artificial intelligence systems will end up being a positive or a negative force for humanity is still an open question. But we might find ourselves one day with AI embedded at every layer of our existence, living lives of toned down and diluted humanity with only our dreams for escape. Although I am not yet convinced of this worst case scenario, I believe it is important that we as software developers have at least the option to opt out of that system altogether, to be able to continue hacking, working, and tinkering in a space of our own in total absence of artificial intelligence systems, and share this luxury with our users.
I designed a software license for this purpose. It is called the Human Only Public License, or HOPL for short.
While a license like this is probably entirely unenforceable and goes against a strict open source ethos (both traits shared with the problematic "do not evil" JSON license), the appeal of continuing the tradition of one human creating something specifically for other humans is understandable. It also gives those developers who are concerned with the negative impact AI tools may have on software development as a field and career a way to push back.
The license is also published on GitHub.
The day will come that an AI will learn something that we did not deliberately teach it. When an AI is able to improve its own code, it won't be bound by the limitations of its human creator. It's only a question of when.
LK
Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.
LK
Don't agree at all and I think that's a morally dangerous approach. We're looking for a scientific definition of "desire" and "want". That's almost certainly a part of "conscious" and "self aware". Philosophy can help, but in the end, to know whether you are right or not you need the experimental results.
Experiments can be crafted in such a way as to exclude certain human beings from consciousness.
One day, it's extremely likely that a machine will say to us "I am alive. I am awake. I want..." and whether or not it's true is going to be increasingly hard to determine.
LK
Only if we define consciousness to be a state of awareness only attainable by human beings.
An LLM can't suddenly decide to do something else which isn't programmed into it.
Can we?
It's only a matter of time until an AI can learn to do something it wasn't programmed by us to do.
Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.
LK
the core challenge of renewable energy is it's inconstancy. Physical batteries are a bandaid and long distance grids are a council of despair. The real solution for reliable renewable energy is to just build out four or five times the peak load. Then when it's cloudy or not windy you still have way more power than you need to supply the peak load. But of course this has the problem that you just spent four of five times as much capital. And that's a non-starter. But the easy, though bad solution, to this is bitcoin batteries. Just mine bitcoin with the excess and shut off the mining when it's cloudy .
Now along some AI. What a match made in heaven. A completely portable task. Move the calculation to whatever data center currently has power whether it's Norway or Texas. You can soak up all that excess renwable power. Plus there's plenty of non-real time batch jobs you can run that can adapt. For example training.
Perfect.
Shame the US decided to lose the AI power race by nixing renewables
HA. The whole point of being retro is the hipster aspect of being cooler. But no one can be cool if they are not socially observed as being cool. It's the tree falling in the forest. You are only cool if people know you are cool. Affectations of retro style require humble bragging.
"I am your density." -- George McFly in "Back to the Future"
