That's not correct about the electronic calculator. There are inherent limitations on floating point calculations which a calculator cannot do anything about. Few people beyond numerical analysts are aware of them.

I don't quibble with your statements about LLM, I even agree with them, but the electronic calculator has exactly the same issues in the numerical domain, mutatis mutandis. The answers spat out by a handheld electronic calculator come with very weak guarantees of accuracy which simply don't survive moderately complex calculations. And the calculator never produces a confidence estimate.

The subtext here is that copyright is a meatspace concept which cannot work in the wild-west-anything-goes universe of the web?

I think that's wrong, the internet is not inherently lawless, it only is so by a deliberate political choice going back to the early Al Gore/Bill Clinton days.

Corporations exist in meatspace, and must follow the laws where they are based. As the liberal world is slowly disappearing and gets replaced by lots of authoritarian states, you can expect each and every meatspace restriction to become the norm on the Internet.

Because all that is needed is to send in the police into a corporation's headquarters, or a startup student's dormroom, and they will fall in line. And don't think this will cause the authoritarians to lose any sleep over it.

I never trust self proclaimed industry "standards". They are just a bunch of lies designed to increase the company share price. I for one will wait until NIST creates a real set of comprehensive standards, backed by this new thing I heard about called "Science".

I don't get the fuss about Rust. Java was designed to solve those problems and more 30 years ago. We have two generations of programmers who are way beyond understanding and using pointers, because they simply never had to worry about such things in Java.

There are way more interesting and advanced safety questions out there. Even Perl had the concept of tainted variables.

Maybe Rust is a case of NIH syndrome?

This should not be marked informative. The electronic calculator actually does not give you the correct answer. So the distinction you are trying to make with AI is only a matter of degree.

Your last point is quite agreeable though. In all such cases, it is necessary to write the actual answer down first, if you want to assess if the computer answer is within tolerance. The trick is to find a way to write the actual answer which doesn't require writing the actual answer explicitly. That way the comparison between the real answer and the computer answer can be implied.

Pluto.

I've used this concept on the desktop for the last 20 years, it's great. I tend to open a lot of small terminals for one liners, which fills up the desktop real quick when I leave them there. I've got a special hotkey to open the terms so there's no time wasting with mouse and icons. To declutter automatically, I set the bash timeout to 2 minutes by default, which closes the terminal after a period of inactivity and reclaims some much needed desktop real-estate. Of course in some cases, when I know I'd like the terminal to stick around, I have a bash alias which turns the timeout off.

Some would say the Diamond Age was just before the Eternal September...

N nd fr vwls ! mch wstfl !

that looks pretty cool. I didn't read the full description, but do you know if there are security implications in using rump?

Yup, I've used bing rarely over the years but I'm using it more now. Don't like the layout with all the junk, but it does give better results than google

We've already used a male nude test image for about 2000 years now to measure technological progress in the visual arts. I'd rather see us use a cat image from now on.

Advanced search engines will not help you. The AIs are already writing junk into the very web pages that your search engine will read. This will not get better until we humans start creating and enforcing information pollution laws.

FYI the technical term is "stochastic parrot".

The argument was that Windows is (even now) a monoculture. That means when you find one exploit for Windows then you get free access to hundreds of millions of Windows boxes without any extra work. Perfect for script kiddies who don't know shit but like to use simple GUI hacking tools with not too many options because time is short and mom is calling them for supper. Linux wasn't a monoculture. Even if an exploit was found, you couldn't apply it to all Linuxes out there. Even if you hacked into one box, the next box you tried had completely different software services, the paths and directory layouts were all different, etc. Cookie cutter recipes wouldn't work. Not good for script kiddies, not good for worms.

On top of that, Linux didn't have Microsoft Office or Outlook, whereas Windows also had Outlook Express and a web browser that was literally baked into the operating system. The world's easiest door to crack open, and it was, constantly, millions of times a day, causing untold damage to systems everywhere quite literally. With those kinds of odds, why would any competent hacker bother to trespass laboriously on Linux systems one at a time unless they were professional spearphishing?