To the extent that the situation you refer to is a problem, it's a problem of market share and the resulting funding for ongoing development of an open source OS. Google's ability to enforce requirements on Android OEMs is limited because the big players or any significant consortium of the smaller players can simply choose to cut ties with Google if Google is too pushy.

Yes, Chrome established a different business model from the outset. Android went a different direction because, rightly or wrongly, it was believed at the time that it was necessary in order to fend off other participants in the smartphone ecosystem, and over time it has gotten harder to change the model, not easier. In particular, one major Android OEM has amassed so much market dominance that they can and often do simply refuse Google's requests. Legally, Google could cut ties, but that would be bad for Google and i think it would be bad for Android users, since it would instantly fragment the ecosystem. IMO, Android users (and I am one) are better off with a slower-moving but relatively unified ecosystem.

IIUC, all the journals require payment for the article to be published. Some of them are *only* in it for the money, but all of them *are* in it for the money.

People already pay to have scientific papers published, so that would have at most minor effect.

I mean, the way things are currently going, it appears they will in fact be stopped in Ukraine.

Oh, you meant *voluntarily* stop? Nevermind then.

When I said "I'm not sure AGI is possible" I intended the implication that people don't have "general intelligence". I agree that they don't.

No, this is about the merger of the platforms. It probably will eventually result in some reduction in staffing, but it's not happening now, and hasn't happened in any significant way. Both Android and ChromeOS have been relatively untouched by layoffs.

The pascals that I was familiar with allowed you to concatenate two strings if different lengths and compare the result with either of the original components. It wasn't the same problem at all.

Carbon dioxide is a red herring here, completely insignificant compared to the other environmental costs of burning coal, let alone all the other costs of manufacturing solar panels in a country with no effective environmental regulations at all. Just China's terrible mining practices, for example, do more environmental harm in a single year, than all the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels in the entire history of China, possibly in the entire history of the world. And then you have what they're doing to their water and air.

Are solar panels made in China still a net win for the environment? I don't know, honestly. But I do know, if you're only looking at the CO2, you aren't even a little bit serious about enviornmental impact, you're just mindlessly virtue signaling your partisan politics.

Eh. In practice, what you really need to know here is that this disease isn't realistically ever going to be an epidemic in the modern developed world, *even* if it develops a strain that is 100% resistant to all antibiotics (which thus far hasn't quite happened). The conditions for massive spreading just aren't there. It was a large problem in the medieval world, but conditions were very different then. The plague doesn't normally spread from person-to-person directly, in the manner of something like an influenza or a coronavirus. I'm not saying that can't ever happen at all, but it's far too unusual to ever result in any kind of epidemic. To have a bubonic plague epidemic, you have to have a completely out-of-control population of intermediate carriers (principally, rodents) living in close proximity to the human population, and a lot of biting insects (principally, fleas) that routinely prey on both. We're talking full-on Monty-Python-and-the-Holy-Grail levels of societal poverty here, people laying down in straw beds because that's what's available, dealing with flea bites by scratching, grain stored in burlap sacks, rats everywhere, mice everywhere, the whole nine yards. If you clean up your society and control the vermin, ipso facto, the plague is mostly contained and hardly spreads at all.

Sure, it's not completely extinct. But it doesn't need to be, because it doesn't spread that readily. You're five thousand times more likely to be killed by a drunk driver, than to be infected by the plague bacterium. (This is assuming you live in America; yes, I looked up the actual numbers.) And most people who do get infected, don't die, because it's treatable these days, because, you know, modern medicine and stuff.

Cholera, similarly, is not an epidemic threat if you have anything resembling modern sewage treatment. So you can cross that one off your panic-immediately-if-there-is-one-case list as well.

The one that would be all kinds of scary if it ever got loose in the human population again, is smallpox. That thing spreads almost as readily as influenza, and most countries haven't vaccinated for it in decades. In America, routine vaccination was stopped more than fifty years ago, so most of the population, has not been vaccinated. We do *have* quite effective vaccines for it, but in the event of an epidemic, I doubt whether we could ramp up production fast enough, to keep up with the terrifying rate at which smallpox spreads. The one notable piece of good news is, it doesn't mutate much, so once any given patient is vaccinated against smallpox, they won't need the vaccine again. Booster shots not required, thank God. If that weren't the case, we'd probably still be losing a double-digit percentage of the human population to it every generation or so.

The goal is to reduce engineering effort. Even Google has to consider costs.

Eh. I do really question the wisdom of including Cubans in this. Venezuelans, despite the undeniably genuine nature of their need to get out of Venezuela, are a sudden surge, a large numeric increase within the last few years, and that has significantly contributed to the disruption and the problematic nature of the current situation in America. Haitians, as a group (albeit, perhaps not every person individually), have made their own problems at home. Nicaraguans, I don't really know their situation, so I can't really comment on their inclusion. But Cubans have been trickling into America to more or less the same extent for more than half a century; they're victims of international communism that was *not* home grown in Cuba and is ultimately not really their fault at all, individually or collectively; and they are (as a group) pretty consistently good workers, reasonably innovative (not in a high-tech sense necessarily, but I mean in economic terms: they find ways to contribute positively to society); they're overall a net gain for the US economy, have been for decades; and most of them are generally law-abiding. They also have a pretty good naturalization rate, and a reasonable integration rate (meaning, they don't just keep to themselves as a closed-off isolated community; they interact with the rest of society, pretty extensively, albeit mostly within certain geographical areas). Maybe I'm missing something, but I really don't see how involving them in this whole mess is a good idea.

Not really. Super-intelligent in a narrow area is a lot easier than ordinary intelligence over all fields. We've already got it in a few areas, like protein folding.

The kicker is AGI. I'm not sure that with a definition that matches the acronym that it's even possible, yet some companies claim to be attempting it. Usually, when you check, they've got a bunch of limitations in what they mean. A real AGI would be able to learn anything. This probably implies an infinite "stack depth". (It's not actually a stack, but functionally it serves the same purpose.)

This was announced on June 12, 2024.

It doesn't mean Android and ChromeOS will share a common UI. Android already supports several distinct user interfaces for different platforms (mobile, wearable, auto, TV), and there's lots of customization even within those spaces. I expect that once the transition is complete, ChromeOS will still look and act much like it does now. It may run Android apps a little better than it does now (though it already runs them fairly well). It'll just share a lot of infrastructure with Android underneath the surface.

"Pledges" is just a synonym for "promises". You don't need to read anything extra into it. It's probably just a bit of a shorter headline.

And of all the AI companies I know of, they're the one I'm least desirous for the success of. I literally would prefer China. Altman's no prize, but Zuckerberg...