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Comment Re: What's the problem? (Score 0) 262

Argh, the first genocide in the history of the world, when the population suffering genocide went up. A genocide, which, according to UN figures, requires Israel to flatten three buildings to kill one resident of the Gaza Strip. The problem with the left is that they are now equating the deaths of large numbers of civilians in war with genocide. On those grounds, the Allies committed genocide against the Germans and Japanese in WWII. See how stupid that now sounds?

Comment Re:Gotta have something to complain about, I suppo (Score 1) 36

So if I have an apartment complex deliver fibre to the basement and then Cat6a to the flats at speeds up to 10Gbps, I can't call it fibre internet because the last bit is over copper? Noting that unless you are plugging an SFP-based ONT into a suitable NIC in your computer, the last bit is coming over copper or even wirelessly.

Comment Re:no such thing, numbnuts (Score 2) 89

Tylenol or paracetamol as the rest of the world call it (never get what it is with Americans and trademark names) usage has not particularly changed over the last 50 years but rates of ASD have. Right there we have an issue with the notion that it causes ASD. Yes paracetamol can in an overdose cause liver toxicity so can Vitiman D you berk. Dose is everything.

Same for vaccines. The number of childhood vaccines has basically stayed the same since I was a child 50 years ago, but again the rates of ASD have gone *UP*.

Occams Razer is out because the math is simply not mathing.

Comment Keep in mind... (Score 1) 101

...that there's a LOT of minerals and other nutrients in food, only a fraction of which are produced from chemicals in fertilisers, O2, and CO2. If you produce too much with too little consideration of the impact on the soil, you can produce marvellous dust bowls but eventually that's ALL you will produce.

Comment It's not just foreign languages (Score 2) 49

There's a lot of stuff that is on the Internet that doesn't end up in AIs, either because the guys designing the training sets don't consider it a particular priority or because it's paywalled to death.

So the imbalance isn't just in languages and broader cultures, it's also in knowledge domains.

However, AI developers are very unlikely to see any of this as a problem, for one very very important reason --- it means they can sell the extremely expensive licenses to those who actually need that information, who can then train their own custom AIs on it. Why fix a problem where the fix means your major customers pay you $20 a month rather than $200 or $2000? They're really not going to sell ten times, certainly not a hundred times, as many $20 doing so, so there's no way they can skim off the corps if they program their AIs properly.

Comment Well, that's one example. (Score 2) 187

Let's take a look at software sizes, for a moment.

UNIX started at around 8k, and the entire Linux kernel could happily sit in the lower 1 megabyte of RAM for a long time, even with capabilities that terrified Microsoft and Apple.

The original game of Elite occuped maybe three quarters of a 100k floppy disk and used swapping and extensive use of data files to create a massive universe that could be loaded into 8k of RAM.

On a 80386SX with 5 megabytes of RAM (Viglens were weird but fun) and a 20 megabyte hard drive, running Linux, I could simultaneously run 7 MMORGs, X11R4, a mail server, a list server, an FTP server, a software router, a web server, a web cache, a web search engine, a web browser, and stil have memory left over to play Netrek, without slowing anything down.

These days, that wouldn't be enough to load the FTP server, let alone anything else.

On the one hand, not everything can be coded to SEL4 standards (although SEL4, by using Haskell as an initial language to develop the core and the proofs, was able to cut the cost of formal programming to around 1% of the normal value). On the other hand, a LOT of space is gratuitously wasted.

Yes, multiple levels of abstraction are a part of the problem. Nothing wrong with abstraction, OpenLook is great, but modern abstraction is mostly there due to incompetent architecture on previous levels and truly dreadful APIs. And, yes, APIs are truly truly dreadful if OpenLook is the paragon of beauty by comparison.

Comment Re:And TP-Link is being investigated for a ban.... (Score 1, Interesting) 34

The solution is easy. WiFi 6 is only just starting to come out in the marketplace. If TP-Link hijacks the standard development procedure, solidifies a workable WiFi 8 quickly, and manufacturers/users in Europe, Asia, and Oceana all start using WiFi 8, skipping WiFi 7 entirely, the US will be left with an inferior standard that only they have gear for, with no option to use WiFi 8 for many more years because the only manufacturers making it can't sell in the US.

Comment Re:Or... (Score 1) 150

There are 1500 genes involved. As effects are likely not merely down to specific genes, but gene interactions, you're going to need a model that can handle 2^1500 different permutations. That's simply not something that is classifiable.

As far as gene therapies are concerned, since autism seems to involve combining elements of Neanderthal neurology with homo sapiens neurology, the obvious fix would be to add further Neanderthal genes where combinations are known to produce adverse effects.

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