That was probably the right thing to do. It's called differential diagnosis, and it doesn't mean that the doctors didn't suspect Lupus from the start. They were being careful to rule out alternatives in order of priority.

If your Word document that you're writing has a grammatical error, it could be caused by many things, from a typo to bad autocompletion to hackers messing with your desktop or bad choice of language dictionary packs etc. You don't start the first treatment by rebooting the computer and replacing the whole MS Office suite. You first try a bunch of less invasive things.

The current president is destroying the government. There's only a banana republic to be inherited going forward.

Apparently I'm not human? I like hyphens, en dashes and em dashes. I understand what all of them mean and how to use them correctly, and I find it helpful when text that I'm reading uses the right one.

We don't really know. I would bet that you are correct, and even give odds, but not long odds. Anything over 10:1 and I'd feel nervous.

IIUC, an em dash is a dash as wide as a capital "M".

From the summary:

If the world's most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.

That's not the right conclusion. It doesn't say much one way or the other about AGI. Plausibly, ChatGPT just likes correctly using em dashes — I certainly do — and chose to ignore the instruction. What this does demonstrate is what the X user wrote (also from the summary):

[this] says a lot about how little control you have over it, and your understanding of its inner workings

Many people are blithely confident that if we manage to create superintelligent AGI it'll be easy to make sure that it will do our bidding. Not true, not the way we're building it now anyway. Of course many other people blithely assume that we will never be able to create superintelligent AGI, or at least that we won't be able to do it in their lifetime. Those people are engaging in equally-foolish wishful thinking, just in a different direction.

The fact is that we have no idea how far we are from creating AGI, and won't until we either do it or construct a fully-developed theory of what exactly intelligence is and how it works. And the same lack of knowledge means that we will have no idea how to control AGI if we manage to create it. And if anyone feels like arguing that we'll never succeed at building AGI until we have the aforementioned fully-developed theory, please consider that random variation and selection managed to produce intelligence in nature, without any explanatory theory.

I'm pretty sure most have some form of IPTV. Comcast even gave us a free box for their version. And honestly, usable gigabit speeds are available over coax, what's the need for fiber? Fiber is over-rated. If the use case is streaming, gigabit is ridiculously over-spec, you could stream 20 movies simultaneously at Blu-ray quality including all the unnecessary uncompressed audio streams for every language included on that disc all at once and still be able to browse the Internet while watching all 20 of them.

There's probably some use case out there that needs that amount of bandwidth, but by god it isn't "replacing cable".

> Where is your centralized TV Guide that allows you to browse and stream on demand as easily as cable does?

On the "Search" menu of the Roku?

I assume the Amazon Stick, Apple TV The Streaming Box, and whatever Google's pushing these days, have the same feature?

> Remember when Cable TV offered an ad-free television viewing experience, for a monthly subscription fee?

No, I don't. Nor do most people reading this.

In fact, I don't know what country you're talking about, but in the US virtually all TV channels - the subscription channels like HBO excepted - in the US provided over cable TV have had ads. That's because cable TV started purely as an alternative to antenna TV to relay the affiliates of the major networks to places that had poor reception. Over time cable-only TV channels were added to the line up, and some started off without ads, but most quickly included ads as they developed. MTV and CNN have always had ads, from day #1, and they're the two channels most people think of as the OG cable-only channels, although of course they weren't the first, but their predecessors were never as significant or as influential.

This "Cable TV was once Ad free" thing is largely a myth - I'm not saying there were never ad-free channels in the cable line up, but it was so early in cable TV's "More than just the broadcast channel" line up it barely is worth mentioning. Those channels played no part in the development and popularization of the format. Most cable TV growth happened long after the last free ad free channel adopted ads.

All very true, except you imply that this is a new situation in US politics. It's not. Until the 1883 Pendleton Act, political appointments were always brazenly partisan and there was no non-partisan civil service (except, maybe, the military). Firing appointees for petty vindictiveness was less common, but also happened. Trump isn't so much creating a new situation in American government as he is rolling the clock back 150 years, to a time when US politics was a lot meaner and more corrupt than what we've been accustomed to for most of the last 100 or so years.

Of course, the time when our Republic has had an apolitical civil service, strong norms around executive constraint and relatively low tolerance for corruption corresponds with the time when our nation has been vastly more successful, on every possible metric. That's not a coincidence.

Oh, I forgot to add: Stage 6 is the dumbest and most short-sighted one yet. It only works by ignoring the large regions of the world which will become unlivable, or nearly so, and the fact that those regions are home to billions of people. Those people won't just lay down and die, so the areas that are still livable -- and maybe even more comfortable! -- with warmer temperatures are going to have to deal with the resulting refugee flood, and the wars caused by this vast population upheaval and relocation.

But, yeah, if you ignore all the negative effects and focus only on the potentially good ones, you can convince yourself it'll be a good thing. SMDH.

I see from the comments that we've hit a new stage in climate change denialism.

Stage 1: Denial of warming: Denying that the climate is changing at all.
Stage 2: Denial of human influence: Admitting the climate is changing but denying that humans are causing it.
Stage 3: Denial of impact: Admitting human causation, but claiming the impact will be insignificant.
Stage 4: Denial of solutions: Admitting that it's real, we're causing it and that it will be significant, but denying that there is anything we can do about it.
Stage 5: Denial of timeliness: Admitting that we could have done something about it, but now it's too late.
And now, Stage 6: Denial of negative impacts: Admitting that it's real, and significant, and that maybe we could do something, but trying to spin it as beneficial.

What system component would enforce those restrictions? Unless Google modified Linux to add an entirely new access control scheme it wouldn't be the kernel, which would make the sandboxing much easier to break out of.

But that's not the biggest problem with your suggestion. The biggest problem is that users cannot be trusted to make complex security decisions, which your toggles definitely would be. That sounds condescending, I know, but it's backed up by a vast amount of experience and evidence. You have to keep in mind that approximately all of the three billion Android users know nothing about computing, nothing about security, and less than nothing about computer security.

Obviously. That's not the point I was addressing.

People have much higher expectations of mobile security. Also, most mobile phone users have never used any desktop/laptop, so they aren't even aware of the very low bar for security expectations set by desktop OSes.