Makes me glad I gave up on TV. (OTOH, it makes me worry about the next time I need to replace a monitor.)

It's a combination of training data and rewards. Chatbots are trained to never admit that they don't know, and to always be willing to be convinced that the person talking to them is correct. This makes them more popular, and enchances engagement, but at the cost of accuracy.

I think that if they're actually generating feature length films, they'll probably be decent...well, not much worse than what they've been doing. Films are expensive not just to shoot, but also to make, so I expect there'll be lots of steps where "editorial judgement" is applied.

OTOH, I'm not a movie goer. I don't know the current quality. And Ed Wood is a level it's pretty hard to go below.

No. The scam callers speak English. Perhaps not well, but it's English that they are speaking.

To repeat a point I made earlier, information is not knowledge. Knowledge may be either true or false (i.e. it's a signed quantity). Information is most densely contained in (at least apparently) random noise.

IIUC, the chinese ideograph system is common between all those languages, and therefore would count as one common language...until the computers started audio processing. (FWIW, it's my understanding that many of the Chinese ideographs even have approximately the same meaning in one of the Japanese writing systems.)

A point, but (and this is admittedly a quibble) I wouldn't call languages a "vast body of human knowledge". The data encoded within that language might qualify, but not the language itself. Unfortunately, without understanding the language there's no way of reasonably estimating the size of the contained "human knowledge" that isn't contained in sources already covered.

FWIW, I think treating "the internet" as a body of human knowledge is foolish. Parts of it are, but much of it is negative-knowledge (i.e. learning it makes you stupider). The internet *is* a body of human information...but some information is garbage.

Now I admit that, say, Tamil may contain encoded large amounts of history and large amounts of myth. Whether they are clearly enough separated to be called knowledge isn't something I can tell. (Actually, Tamil should contain much of the history of the development of math...but it's not clear to me that this would be readily distinguishable from the related myths even by a careful historian, much less by a current LLM.)

Loans always have such vile terms that I do my best to avoid them. I've been pretty successful, but sometimes there is no real choice. But whenever I bought a car it was cash down, no interest.

As far as I am concerned, the importance of this law is that the person writing the contract has to make the terms clear to the person accepting it. "fine print" has always been a despicable legal tradition.

This isn't something they can't read. This is something that requires a trivial conversion. But you got the message correctly.

It's been reported that the conversion is trivial. So this is purely symbolic + nuisance.

The FOSS crowd is known for avoiding likely law suits. IIUC, the WPS format would be likely found to be a copyright violation if one didn't have a powerful government on ones side. (Or at least a firm of powerful lawyers and deep pockets.)

...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.

Three of my computers. I update them usually with CDRom disks that I build from one of my computers which IS connected to the internet...but the data only flows in one direction.