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Comment Re:Who decides what is fake? (Score 1) 146

I suspect most here on slashdot would have sided with those "experts" had they lived at the time

And they'd do well, because the Ptolemaic guys were better than anyone else in predicting the movements of planets.

And by keeping with the good work, their successors were able to keep compiling and refining good observations, and ultimately be able to overcome the previous model that have served them well.

The point is not to have "The Absolute Truth" at any one particular point (only religious nutjobs do that), the point is to have a reasonable corpus of observations that get cross-checked with reality so that you do not get blinded by dogma.

Comment Re: Generation ships would never work (Score 1) 21

Not to mention the fanaticism effect of being born and raised all your life with a "purpose larger than you".

There would be a few sceptics that curse their ancestors for condemning them to a life enclosed in a tin can, but my guess is for most of them to live like a small community of religious pilgrim settlers.

Comment Re:2D? (Score 3, Insightful) 23

I've got news: atoms are not 2 dimensional. I can't help but think any publication that prints this stuff isn't worth the paper it's no longer printed on.

By that logic, a map cannot be 2D because it will always have the width of the material it's printed on. The mere concept of 2D would be meaningless for anything but abstract mathematical objects.

However that's not how we use words and meanings in language. If you build a computer on a layer of material where the width is not relevant - because by design it's impossible to build it any thinner, for all practical purposes it's correct to call it a 2D material, and it's pedantry to point out that any physical object necessarily has at least 3 spatial dimensions.

Comment Re:In other news... (Score 1) 212

It sucks that she got death threats and all manner of illegal things, there's no excuse for that, though the vast majority of it is likely justified anger at the company she chose to publicly represent. She literally signed up to be a PR and public face, and now regrets the harder parts of that position. It's hard to feel too much sympathy for a well paid corporate shill.

That may justify criticism. It does not justify harassment. "Justified anger" must be channeled through reasoned opposition, not character assassination, which is what you're supporting with your stance.

Comment Re:I know itâ(TM)s not cool here butâ (Score 1) 38

But the thing I feel the /. community always discounts is the elegance of the NT kernel, and the NT OS in the days before win32 got sucked into the kernel. Cutler and team developed a disciplined, adaptable, efficient, and powerful core system

It's common knowledge that MS has some of the smartest people in the world working on systems and language design tools; I don't think people in general are disscounting that.

It's just that all that is orthogonal to the monopolistic, evil business practices that the company uses to sell those software products and dominate the market. People can equally admire the former and despise the latter.

Comment Re:Epistemology (Score 4, Informative) 109

You misunderstood the above post. There is no proof that they have the same nature as "common energy" and "common matter", but there is overwhelming observational evidence that the universe doesn't behave as the Standard Model of cosmology predicts it should given the known amount and distribution of mass in the universe. That discrepancy between what is predicted and what is observed is called "dark matter", and you can't deny that the observations exist.

Comment Re:AI is right, but... (Score 1) 96

Unless this is hard-coded behavior, such unexpected response would be a sign of agency. That is, a sign that AI is capable of more than just correlate input and output based on a dataset.

That mindset is a category error; you're attributing to the automated system human qualities that it lacks.

The AI text-creation model follows the model of reflex actions: it receives stimuli, and spits out a response based on its evolved design.
If the generative model has any level of awareness at all, it's on par with that of an amoeba. If there is any human-like quality, it's in the humongous amounts of human-created training data it assimilated, not the generation process.

It's just like those petri dishes where bacteria get to solve some moderately complicated mazes, by growing towards the paths closest to the exit. There's no intelligence in the bacteria, it's the maze design what contains the information needed to both represent a problem and being able to solve it.

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