If they plan to actually generate movies in Saudi Arabia, their morality police are going to restrict them heavily. I doubt most of the rest of the world would be interested for long.

If their plan is only to make the software, will those contracts ban anything forbidden by the Saudi morality police? Will the software have hidden restraints? It would be easy to detect forbidden scenes. It might not be so easy to detect more subtle restraints, such as ideological bias.

I'm convinced of it. You'll supply a script, cast, and style and it will generate the movie. At some point, you will also be able to interact with the movie, talking to the characters ("your other left"), talking to the generator ("skip this scene").

Famous actors will sell their personas, famous writers will sell scripts, famous directors and producers will sell styles, but I think most people will pay less for B-list and C-list and Z-list content that they can tweak to get something different every time.

You will also be able to add your overlays to scripts ("more cowbells"), personas ("more witty") and styles ("fewer explosions"), and you will be able to add random variations.

It's going to be fantastic. Hollywood democratization will be like a breath of fresh air.

The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.

I've been using a TCL NXTPAPER for reading for a couple of years, and haven't used my kindles since. The screen has no glare at all, none. It's night right now, can't tell you about reading in bright sunlight. I haven't found a phone yet which is any fun in bright sun, so this NXTPAPER is probably not great either. But none of my house lights drown it out.

I have one, #11 I believe, which I use instead of Kindles. Zero glare, zero lag while paging. Works OK for general use too, but it beats the pants off Kindles and all other tablets I've tried for readability. Had it for a couple of years now.

One of the most fascinating aspects of H2O is the sheer number of forms it can take under different conditions.

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.