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Comment Re:What's old is new again (Score 1) 16

Here's where the summary goes wrong:

Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs.

Artificial Intelligence is in fact many kinds of technologies. People conflate LLMs with the whole thing because its the first kind of AI that an average person with no technical knowledge could use after a fashion.

But nobody is going to design a new rocket engine in ChatGPT. They're going to use some other kind of AI that work on problems on processes that the average person can't even conceive of -- like design optimization where there are potentially hundreds of parameters to tweak. Some of the underlying technology may have similarities -- like "neural nets" , which are just collections of mathematical matrices that encoded likelihoods underneath, not realistic models of biological neural systems. It shouldn't be surprising that a collection of matrices containing parameters describing weighted relations between features should have a wide variety of applications. That's just math; it's just sexier to call it "AI".

Comment Re:Crazy (Score 1) 112

Too bad Australia's court hold zero sway over these social media companies and their fines mean nothing.

If they do business here, they have an office here, servers here and have legal liabilities here. Just like any business.

All the major social media companies dont just have offices here, they have datacenters, or major presences in data centers, here. More than that, they have clients here, and like any company that gets fined, if they dont pay those fines, the courts just *take* the money.

Don't be naive.

Comment Re:Not a Problem, an Opportunity (Score 1) 112

You speak with the bias of a person who has experienced a life of multiple hobbies and multiple possibilities and dismiss very legitimate concerns. For people who are actually addicted to shit like social media things can get very nasty indeed.

Thats who the legislation is for. Break the damn screen addiction.

Submission + - The internet works thanks to a shared infrastructure that nobody owns (elpais.com) 1

alternative_right writes: In the 21st century, every government should understand that ensuring software sovereignty and security is part of its job, not only for themselves but also for businesses, society, and researchers. In the 21st century, software is the invisible infrastructure of our everyday life, like roads and bridges. Everything runs on software, and a significant portion of this is made possible by open source, which is maintained by people selflessly. If this open source breaks down, it’s as if a road or bridge collapses: everything else becomes much more complicated and dangerous.

Comment For anyone from the UK who likes this stuff... (Score 3, Insightful) 16

...consider listening to One Person Found This Helpful", a BBC radio comedy show about absurd reviews for often even more absurd products. Surprisingly good show.

For anyone not from the UK...not sure if you can access it, but even if you can you're going to need to make your way through a full-on Birmingham accent. Godspeed, you brave intrepid souls.

Comment Re:They're really aiming for that Ig-Nobel Prize (Score 1) 55

As whacky as the research sounds, theres precedents, albeit less funny ones.

Back in the 1980s where I lived, supermarkets used to always stick cardboard cutouts of policemen around the shop, cross-armed and staring. Apparently those where really effective.

Nobody actually thought it was a real policeman staring, but the psychological effect was enough that people felt too *observed* to actually go and do the crimes. I can only assume what this shows is it doesnt really matter what the authoritarian figure is , be he commissioner gordon, or batman, its enough to make people feel anxious about wanting to do good, or rather to be SEEN as doing good.

As the philosopher foucault observed, panopticon doesnt work by the prison guards doing the discipline, but the discontinuous sense of being observed made the prisoners discipline themselves.

Comment Re:Australia never cared about reducing emmisions (Score 1) 31

The uranium has never been the expensive part of nucllear.

its building the bloody thing. The reality is nuclear is stil one of the most expensive forms of power out there whilst solar and wind (Especially in australia) are by far the cheapest. Its kind of weird to ignore the obvious solution to go for a plan that wont even come online until a decade after the solution is due.

Comment Re:An important aspect (Score 2, Insightful) 179

It's interesting that when pushed the degree-mongers always come back to 'well, a degree isn't training you to do a job, it's teaching you to think and, uh, you have fun and shit.'

And you're going to pay $100,000+ for that? For $100,000 you could travel the world for years and meet a whole lot of interesting people and do a whole lot of interesting things.

Comment Re:really need to have the banks and schools take (Score 3, Interesting) 179

Yes. Every loan should have to be co-signed by the school because they're the ones saying it will benefit the kids.

If Trump had any sense he would forgive all student loans and pay them off with a windfall tax on the schools who've been raking in the money from the loans. They know they're selling a defective product and shouldn't be treated any differently to any other business that's doing so.

Comment Re:Wrong question. (Score 2) 179

Very few degrees are actually useful and the people who take those would often be better off getting a job first and then deciding that, say, they need a degree in engineering to progress further in that job than paying to get the degree up front and then discovering there are no jobs (as a friend of ours recently has). The whole degree system has been turning into a huge scam where kids borrow vast sums of money to keep pampered academics in nice jobs.

Comment Well, duh (Score 2) 179

This is what happens when people see a generation of kids borrowing lots of money to get a 'good degree' and then ending up struggling to find a job in

And elite overproduction is a common sign of a society that's approaching collapse. Those kids believe--quite rightly given what they were told--that they deserve a much better life than they will have and won't be very happy with the existing elite telling them to retrain in making burgers.

Comment Re:If only a certain OS didn't end support (Score 2) 75

Yeah, all my games were running fine on my 10-year-old Windows 7 box that I'd upgraded with a GTX-1080 until Steam stopped running on it. The only thing it couldn't run OK was new games that needed ray-tracing, though the CPU was starting to limit it (e.g. the Borderlands 3 benchmark on my new system shows 25% CPU usage at 60fps vs 100% on the old one).

Crazy amounts of money have been spent on forced computer upgrades in the last few years.

Comment Re:Music is made by musicians, playing live (Score 0) 27

I'm a huge fan of AI. I predict that it will help us solve previously intractable problems in science, engineering, medicine and maybe even politics.

Presumably you mean LLMs. LLMs cannot think; cannot synthesize new ideas; thus cannot solve unsolved problems. LLMs are not the path to AGI.

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