Are you saying that these distros are easier to install than Windows?

I'd suggest that in that oh-so-comfortable fairy-tale past, decisions were arbitrary and not based on factual or consistently applied rules. If the loan officer liked you, you got a loan, if he didn't, you didn't. That doesn't seem better to me. FICO might not be perfect, but it at least consistently applies the same set of rules to everyone.

There is a wide gap between borrowers with very high credit scores (the kind I described) and very low credit scores (the kind you described). In between, is a large group of people who borrow regularly, carry a balance, but also pay their bills. Banks indeed do make a lot of money from interest payments from these people, especially credit card balances, as the interest rates for credit cards is usually above 20%.

I don't think credit scores are Orwellian. They are just one tool a lender has to help them with their research. One way or another, a lender has to have information about a borrower, in order to decide whether to give that person a loan. Credit scoring agencies give them an important piece of information about whether that person is likely to repay.

Having worked for a mortgage company for 3 years, I know that loans are granted or denied at the discretion of the lender. They use the credit score as one input, but far from the only input. Under US regulations, they do have to use and disclose metrics that they use to grant or deny credit, but it's not all credit score. They use other pieces of information like debt-to-income ratio, income sufficient to make regular payments, among others.

"Never" is a long time, granted. But there's certainly nothing in today's technology, or in any foreseeable technology, that could be defined as "conscious."

The fact that LLMs can pass Turing tests is more of a reflection on the limitations of Turing tests, and not at all on the humanness of machines.

Good point. I've been to the NORAD bunker inside Cheyenne Mountain, it's designed to withstand a direct hit by a nuclear explosion. Maybe that will work. On the other hand, it only has a few months-worth of food and water, so eventually I'd have to come out. So in the meantime, I'll just enjoy riding in a Waymo (when it finally, one day, comes to my city) until the world disintegrates.

"Make a Coca-Cola commercial with a semi truck, polar bears, rabbits, etc."

And...out popped the finished commercial?

Nope.

That seems about right. For all you AI doomers, AI still needs a lot of human supervision.

We should all just go hide in a cave and die! I mean, really, the world is ending because of Waymo, right?

Waymo now operates in 5 cities, and is adding 3. There are about 350 cities in the US over 100,000 population. They've got a LOT of cities to go before they cover all of those. And even longer before they make inroads into smaller towns, where self-driving cars can't even dare to go.

In San Francisco, it's home base, Waymo has made it to 27% market share, still leaving room for a lot of Uber drivers.

It's going to be a while before the world of gig jobs evaporates.

Yep, me. I'd rather ride in a Waymo than with most taxi or Uber drivers. Better yet, when the roads are filled with robotaxis, I'm anticipating fewer obscene gestures, fewer honking horns, fewer people cutting me off, and generally, fewer accidents. So yes, I wish I were in one of those cities.

Despite the name, I'm no relation to Earl Isaac of Fair Isaac.

Had a mortgage, paid it off. The payoff did not ding my credit in any way, even though that was 12 years ago.

Linux has been running within the browser for years already. https://bellard.org/jslinux/

It's no closer to the hardware than JavaScript itself. It's just byte-coded JavaScript. https://blog.purestorage.com/p... It's kind of like how .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Lisp, and Smalltalk aren't really compiled, they're byte-coded.

The good news is, as soon as the browser tab closes, the universe ends, and the vulnerability with it.

Already done... https://bellard.org/jslinux/

Here's the GitHub project: https://github.com/cloudflare/...

DOOM has also been ported to JS to run locally in a browser tab: https://dos.zone/doom-dec-1993

They probably fixed the part about it ending in a shutdown state. But my question is, after Update and Shut Down, will it actually be fully updated the next time you turn it on? Or will it continue to sit at "100% (still working on a few things)"? And when you log in to Windows, will it still make you jump through a bunch of hoops to say you don't want to switch to Edge and Bing? Probably so.

No, just decade. The Update and Shut Down feature was first introduced in 2015, exactly 10 years ago. It hasn't ever worked right.

Many of us didn't notice it too much because usually just Update and Restart all the time. But there certainly were times over the years that I was surprised to find the machine still running, even though I had told it to shut down.