So, it's basically like a Cane Toad then?

I personally didn't like Curiosity Stream when I tried it years ago. The docos always felt a little too close to entertainment for my liking.

My favourite streaming service is The Great Courses. It had a small hiccup when it rebranded as Wondrium for a few years and merged its content with Magellan etc, but the users complained loudly and the company went back to their core competency. I have no problem giving them my money even though I will never get through all the courses they have on offer.

Why would we want private industry to build it? They're already fucking us over six ways from Sunday, do we really need another way to get shafted?

The high speed rail in most of Europe is owned and run by the country's central government and is generally extremely good. The high speed rail in China is the best on the planet, owned and run by the central government. In Japan and a couple of other countries it's managed by private companies which report to, and take direction from, the central governments.

Or perhaps this is just one of those things we're uniquely incapable of doing, like providing healthcare or keeping control of our military spending.

Yes, I've seen what happens when government owns and runs the rails, we've ridden the trains in Spain, Italy and Portugal, and they're outstanding.

The point is to explicitly extend android to be more 'laptop/desktopy'. So it's still a linux distribution, and looks like it won't be *really* distinct from Android....

They might not have had a choice. The memory vendors getting sweetheart deals from AI supply chain might require other markets to increase their commitment or get nothing.

So the choices might be either stockpile or not have any supply at all for their mainstream product. It's worth a risk of overpaying for memory when you have no other viable option.

Free is a fiction that exists exclusively in the minds of stupid people.

In case of the CIA top-secret cloud, Amazon had an actual SCIF (Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility) where only people with an appropriate clearance could come in. It's probably be something similar for Google.

Oh, for dialog it would suck. I'm thinking more about commanding 'sidekicks' to do certain things. Like voice command saying: "Bob, get up to that ledge (while pointing your crosshairs indicating the ledge) and provide cover with your sniper rifle". Today you can't direct non-human 'squad mates' with that level of specificity, so they do their specific scripted things or vaguely adjust their behavior in accordance to your vague command based on a press of a directional button. Natural language command of NPCs could open up possibilities to fix long-standing annoyances/limitations with NPCs trying to actively contribute to these situations.

For dialog, you lose the ability to be confident that the correct information has been conveyed to the player. So you can use it for background dialog for NPCs with no actionable info, but that dialog is going to be pretty pointless and particularly painful if it's hard to tell if an NPC is just background or has actual information for you.

Not if the party in question has been repeatedly caught concealing malice. You'd be a fool to trust, or even assume good will, when dealing with anything by Microsoft, NSA, Facebook, etc.

Here, we have something that looks bad and has been done by a prior offender. Thus, it needs to be viewed with suspicion by default.

Directing NPCs using natural language could enhance single player experience, where games have long sought to have NPC "sidekicks" and at best had to settle for very basic inputs in a real-time scenario "focus on my target, pick your target, form up, spread out" and even then it is generally making the input "too busy". These NPCs are a common source of frustration today, and if the gaming industry can't seem to give up on them, this could at least make them less infuriating... maybe...

Eventually? We are kind of already there. I recall some question on one of these going viral, attracting a lot of actual humans to write up why they felt the AIs struggled with it including answering in their writeups. So then their writeups made their way into the RAG inputs into LLMs and also into training material. The AIs suddenly got better at that question, what a surprise...

Just like most specific examples of LLM screwups get self-corrected in short order, automatically as the mocking ironically shapes the RAG component to avoid the specific behavior. Suddenly the LLMs got really good at counting the number of 'r's in strawberry, even as they couldn't actually count letters, but the internet now said how many rs were in strawberry just a whole bunch of times...

History lesson Children.

First things first, the Nazis never called themselves Nazis... We did that. I mean the German exiles in Britain and the British press were very happy to run with it. The Nazis just called themselves "Germans".

Secondly, one of the core tenants of Fascism is the transformation and rebirth of language, the idea was that you could control the way people thought if you controlled the language they used (which as history has shown was bass-ackwards, language evolves to reflect what people think and not the other way around). Hitler tried to purge the German language of anything he felt was foreign, in particular the French words in pre Nazi German. Socialism was one of these words he wanted to change the meaning of. he, and I quote "wanted to take the meaning of Socialism back from the Bolsheviks". Hitler defined socialism as more a form of civic pride, patriotism border-lining on jingoism. Obviously this didn't work as we kept using the Bolshevik definition of socialism (I.E. collective ownership) and keep using that definition to this day.

Drinky is quite right however, only complete idiots try to claim the Nazis were in any way socialist (as we describe socialism).

Because you might make the trip once a year, some people make these journeys several times a month, if not several times a week.

Smelling the roses gets old fast. So does smelling the cow shit too (for context, a Californian friend once described the I-5 as "smells like cow shit and that's the highlight" but it's the fastest way to drive from SF to LA, I'd already took the PCH up there and had to drop the car off).

Because this is happening in the USA? The land of fake peace plans and stolen elections, where nobody cares about the truth?