When I was a kid, we too had stupid things. Besides elephant jokes (how many elephants can you fit in a VW Beetle? Five -- two in the front, two in the back, and one in the glove box), the dumbest joke I remember was to run up to a friend fast and breathless and demand "Guess what!" as if you'd seen a UFO or fire engine run by, then shout "Langendorf bread, that's what!" and run away cackling like Kamala Harris.

https://reason.com/volokh/2025...

It's a legal blog with a legal perspective.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

We'll be fine, then. There's lots more gold than Sarah Conner clones.

Precisely.

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.

What did you expect from an algorithm named after the Roman Empire?

There are 1500 genes associated with autism and nobody has them all. This gives us 2^1500 different forms of the condition. So, yeah, more than one.

Autism is definitely a complex phenomenon. The number of people diagnosed today in the US is about the same as was being diagnosed in Europe 25 years ago, so no, I don't think anyone is jumping onto bandwagons, it's just Americans are being less stupid.

How gullible are you, and how gullible do you think I am, or anyone else?

They've been screaming for decades that 1.5C is the panic point, and 2.0C is right out. There's your tenths.

If human activity was on a fixed time, that point in time could never be visible to astronomers, at least not unless LIGO was rebuilt on the moon. This doesn't necessarily offer benefits, but it would be sensible if this was a possibility that was considered.

True, it means we can't use gravitational triangulation, but the detector is nothing like close enough to being sensitive enough to be useful there.

Either way, between radio astronomy, optical astronony, and gravitational astronomy now being largely defunct on Earth due to humans messing things up, we really need detectors on the moon or on Mars before we can do anything significantly beyond what we've already done. Space telescopes are just too small and although you could precisely measure 3D positions with sufficient precision to do interferometry, it would not be easy.

Basically, each space telescope would need to measure acceleration with incredible sensitivity and time with incredible precision, record over a very long time, then have a means of collecting the data on physical media and bring it back to Earth for combining with the other recordings. Real-time interferometry wouldn't be possible.

You're much much better off building your telescopes on the surface of a solid planetary mass like the moon or Mars.