If you're hired specifically to develop a good AI, then you *should* push back against folks that want you do act in ways that would cause you to create an inferior one.

OTOH, for Meta to fail at this is devoutly to be wished for. I'd prefer almost anyone else.

A lot depends on how much you believe their explanation. I don't. In fact, I suspect the person making the explanation didn't know the reason, and either invented what they thought would sound good, or just read something someone else handed them.

Corporations don't have a "central mind" that knows all the things they are doing and why they do them. To get a reasoned answer takes a long time, and usually isn't what they want to deliver anyway.

Since China was already trying to get local chips used rather than NVIDIA, they'll probably be in favor of this move.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

Bitcoin does have some small intrinsic value. But it would be around the value of a ticket to the 1933 world's fair. Or an old newspaper with the headline "Dewey Wins".

Communism is not a workable system for more than Dunbar's number of people, and no country on earth uses it.
I really don't think it would work as an economic system, either, for the same reasons.

For groups smaller than Dunbar's number, that also have a charismatic leader, it can work quite well. But when that leader fails or retires, they tend to adopt a different system...or just fall apart.

That's not quite true. Occasionally some people in government do want to reduce the power of the government. For some reason they never end up making the decisions. This is because "power" is an instrumental goal that even an anarchist would desire if they wished to further their belief.

Every one dimensional metric oversimplifies things. But "fascism" is not well defined enough to use as a metric. And "statism" is the wrong term, if you're going to contrast against "individual freedom" the opposite pole should be "authoritarianism". E.g. many small communities traditionally didn't have any central government (i.e. no state), but they insisted on strict conformance to their rules via social pressure. (In that case the "authority" wouldn't be a person, but a set of social rules.)

Read my post again. You didn't understand it.

Last I checked Ruby execution was slow compared to Python. That, however, tells you where you shouldn't use it, not *that* you shouldn't use it. And Ruby can easily call C routines (with the usual caveats).

OTOH, in some task spaces, design in Ruby is fast compared to design in Python, and in almost all it's fast compared to design in C. (That said, I generally prefer to design in Python and then re-implement in C++.)

Whether it's serious or not depends on what you're doing. For me it fails only because I require Doxygen compatibility. (Mind you, I would rarely choose to use *only* ruby, but for some things it would be the superior choice.)

OTOH, Ruby is not a low level choice. It's a slightly higher level than Python. And I often design things in Python and then convert them to C++ (with, of course, minor rewrites).

So, "What do you mean by 'serious'?".

The real question is "Will they re-release the roadrunner cartoons?".

Do you really think fiction is a reasonable source of facts?

Remember that models used from a decade or more ago always make simplifying assumptions, and that those tend to be unquestioned until data shows that they must be. Even now climate models can't handle all the variables known to be needed. Turbulence is *extremely* difficult to handle. And there probably is some "butterfly effect". The way that's normally handled it to run an ensemble of models with slightly different conditions, but they may all make some of the same simplifying assumptions.

Well, panspermia is possible, but not extremely likely. OTOH, if life started on Mars, it could well have spread to Earth on impact debris. The further away, the less likely. But remember that yeast have survived in space conditions for months, perhaps years...and that wasn't in extreme cold (though it was in inactive form).

OTOH, years is different from centuries. And for interstellar trips in a comet, centuries wouldn't be enough.