I strongly agree.

What is a problem is that you think anyone is "building artificial brains". They aren't; they can't; and possibly no one ever will be able to. LLMs and their infrastructure differ fundamentally from any kind of brain. To start with, all brains arise from the needs of survival and reproduction, whereas computers - no matter how programmed or trained - have no instincts or emotions to motivate them.

A vast amount of money and effort is being spent creating huge collections of computer hardware to scoop up almost everything that everyone has said on the Web and elsewhere, and use that "data" to "train" other computers to extrapolate text and sentence fragments.

As a result they can produce lots of text (and other things) that very closely imitate what humans have produced - and even mimic closely what they might produce if they chose to (although they do not). Inasmuch as they are mimicking, they are bound to be error-prone; and this is a feature, not a bug.

All this at almost unbelievable expense in resource consumption, pollution, opportunity cost, and - believe it or not - greenhouse gas production. It's just as destructive and pointless, and almost as useless, as Bitcoin and other such types of modern potlatch.

Whether Yale is a good enough source depends entirely on the topic and the people who created the report. From a leading US university, one might expect some bias towards Western nations and institutions - such as typically characterises Wikipedia, for instance.

Passages like this do not inspire great confidence:

" An adequate water source must be easily accessible and unlikely to be contaminated, particularly by fecal matter".

"...the industry body Water UK... said: “The UK’s tap water is rated as the safest in the world..."

Those weasel words fail the taste test. "[I]s rated" by whom? The industry body Water UK, no doubt - or someone it paid to have such an opinion. And how would anyone know how safe water is in other countries?

"Water is then treated or blended with clean water to ensure it does not reach taps at this level".

If they have "clean water", why not supply only that? (Obviously because it would cost them more). How much "clean" water must be mixed with a gallon of polluted water to make the whole amount clean? Obviously a whole lot more - so, again, why not supply the clean water only?

"If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel full of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel full of wine, you get sewage".

- Schopenhauer's Law of Entropy

That bids fair to be the most wrongheaded comment I have seen on Slashdot, and I have seen a lot.

"Multiply one of the numbers by the density in the appropriate unit system. Or divide the other one. Then add" might be just what the user wanted. Or it might be completely different.

That's why we have language. So people can say exactly what they mean, rather than spraying a cloud of words and expecting others to grasp what - if anything - you think you mean.

"We don't care about professional coders anymore".

Yeah.That's what such people said when Cobol was announced.

Put fuzzy-brained PHBs in harness with hallucinating computers, and stand well back.

It would certainly be fair, as the citizens pay for the US federal government (and their state governments, and others). And if the US federal government had the citizens' interests at heart, it might well share the money among them. Admittedly it would only buy a cheap meal, a short evening at a bar, or the cheapest item of clothing. Or maybe a book or two, or some music. But if shared within a family it could do some genuine good.

Not going to happen in a nation that worships wealth, and believes that as much money as possible should be extracted from the poor and middling and given to the super-rich.

Apparently, the US govenment can simply help istelf to whatever assets it feels like. A few billion dollars of someone else's bitcoin; any cash the police find while rummaging through a law-abiding US citizen's car after a probably illegal stop and search; $300 billion or so in Russian assets, foolishly entrusted to Western financial institutions... and on and on and on. I suppose that when a government is over $30 trillion in debt, it grabs whatever it can.

"Take what you can; give nothing back". - "Pirates of the Caribbean"

I fear you have suffered a Class 1 Irony Failure.

Ironically, he was probably defying or ignoring laws or regulations that forbid dumping electronic devices in common waste. He should have put in in the designated area of the dump. Of course, in that case it would have been taken apart and disposed of more thoroughly.

I'm lazy, but even I would do a daily backup if hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. That's more than most sysops get in a lifetime.

Which is legally part of China - as all governments including the US government acknowledge.

And now the first deeply relevant, very much to the point comment. Thanks!

Oooh, and now a comment that's not only on topic but right-headed...

What next?

Congratulations on posting the first relevant comment.

"I went to Wiki to check this and lo and behold... they changed the WiKi page of this clown..."

https://smoothiex12.blogspot.c...