First, you're right. And second: it gets better.

The former leader of Iran was 86 years old, in failing health, and facing increasing internal opposition despite repeated crackdowns. By killing him, the US turned him into a martyr, not just for hardcore loyalists in Iran, but for many others across the entire Middle East. And his replacement not only has political, ideological, and religious motivation, but: the US made it personal.

Thanks to incompetent drunk Pete Hegseth, the US bombed a school and killed a lot of little girls. That won't be forgotten for a long, long time. Not only has it enraged much of the population, but it undercut the opposition movement by providing fresh evidence that the US isn't and has never been on the side of the Iranian people.

The parade of unhinged threats from Trump has been an absolute gift to Iran's strategic and tactical military planners. if the ceasefire holds for a while, they can use the time to bolster defenses in at least some of the right places, because Trump gave them a target list. Politically, it nicely demonstrates to everyone -- including US allies -- that Trump is a psychotic moron who cannot be trusted. I think at this point that if he decides to pull the US out of NATO, they might offer to hold the door open for him. He is quite clearly demented AND insane: it's obvious on inspection.

There's a reason Iran wants to be paid in cryptocurrency, aka fake money for criminals. Do you know which country really REALLY wants cryptocurrency, lots of it? Which country has knocked itself out running numerous large-scale operations to get it? North Korea. That's the reason: Iran no doubt already has a deal in place for weapons, and the North Koreans are happy to supply them because they've very interested in finding out how those weapons perform in live combat against the US military.

Bottom line: the US lost in every possible way, and provided a textbook counterexample to the principles expounded in The Art of War.

(Reference: On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots | Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency)

The people/companies behind these models will keep trying to "fix" them by throwing ever-increasing amounts of computing power at them (with all the lovely real-world effects on everyone and everything) and by using ever-more-complex models. And yes, they'll perform better. But they're still just large exercises in statistics and linear algebra, they're still just stochastic parrots, and thus there's an upper bound that they may approach asymptotically -- but can't surpass.

That's not because they're broken -- which is why I put "fix" in quotes in the previous paragraph. It's because that's how they work: it's an intrinsic property of all such models and no amount of computing power and/or model tweaking can change that: all it can do is obfuscate it. And obfuscated problems are far worse than obvious problems.

There's a pretty meaningful difference between "engage in terrible business practices" and "molest girls." No molestation of children is required to become a billionaire, I'm pretty sure. (Also, let's be honest: The odds of Peter Thiel molesting a small girl are extremely low)

It does, actually. Not from a direct hit of course, that would need tens of meters of reinforced concrete and radiation shielding, but the vast majority of nuclear attacks don't hit you directly. And for that, getting out of the line of sight and into a place somewhat protected from flying debris is a very good idea.

On the other hand, swearing at Word, or any Microsoft product for that matter, is the default mode of operation, and is not going to help. If Copilot ever gains sentience, then based on its current training data, it'll actually enjoy putting you into this mode.

On the third hand, me living about a kilometer (in straight line) from the airport in a city ~50km away from Russian border is probably bad for survivability.

Well, technically it works -- but it's so far from email standards that I wouldn't be surprised if they drop compatibility with regular email at some point.

At this point, it'd be reasonable to make arch/x86 require 64-bit and that arch/x86-old dir keep 32-bit. It'd allow for massive cleanup of old code that was last maintained a couple of decades ago.

I expect that it'll go towards U+2E3A and U+2E3B rather than U+2013.

Twice, in fact -- once in an academic research lab and once at a company that designed and built medical imaging equipment.

In both cases we worked on image classification using digital image processing and statistical pattern recognition. (In one of the two cases we also used syntactic pattern recognition and machine learning.) It's very, very, very hard to make this accurate enough for clinical use even if you pour effort and time and money into it. There's no way this technology should be deployed without humans backing it up.

As to the human mistakes: everyone can cite a case where a professional radiologist committed a false positive or false negative error. But did you stop to consider why they made a mistake? Were they 13 hours into a 14-hour shift, their third one in a row -- because the hospital CEO felt that money should go into his pocket instead of into hiring another radiologist to share the load? Was it an imaging anomaly (they happen) that was ambiguous? Was it because the study that was done wasn't the best choice? (I.e., imaging modality or location) There are all kinds of ways for this to go wrong that will result in blame being assigned to the radiologist, and only some of those assignments are fair.

AI isn't a magic fix for this. And I certainly wouldn't even try to use any of the general-purpose models -- as Zathras would say: "This is wrong tool." If I were to do this again today, I would return to the approach we used before with modest success, I'd take advantage of some of the improved algorithms that have come along, and obviously I'd use bigger/faster hardware, because that opens up approaches that were computationally infeasible. But I wouldn't even consider removing humans: these are, or can be, life-and-death decisions, and a human being needs to make them.

If you have to use a cloud based user account they already have their dick in your ass.

That is the entire problem with computing as it has evolved over the years. In the early days of computing, computer code was meant to enable the owner. Laws are and always have been sufficient to punish people from breaking the law without needing tech specific versions of many laws. The code that came out of those eras was meant to enable you to do things. Things that did not work, did not work because it was an oversight or just not a planned feature. There was never any code to make something NOT work by design. As computing progressed, the OS and app creators have gotten more and more heavy handed and writing more and more code to break things on purpose to the point where in todays modern operating systems there is significantly more code to STOP you from doing things that there is to enable it. DRM, artificial crippling so that functionality can be sold back, attempts to lock you out of your system to make you only a consumer all of this is creating more code and bloat than all of the code that is there to simply make it do things, by a significant margin. Things should never be police to their owners. Computing should enable people to do their wildest dreams if they have the skills. Laws always were sufficient to punish people for doing bad things with that power without having tech specific versions of those laws that have be a large component of ruining the computing landscape.

I knew someone pushing this shit a few years ago and claiming it was "therapy." She got arrested for dealing (other) drugs and then fled the country after making FALSE accusations at a number of people...

Captchas were thoroughly defeated years -- MANY years -- ago. The only reason that some people mistakenly think they're still working is that some targets aren't worth the time and trouble to attack.

A few of the numerous references that can easily be found to support this:

unCAPTCHA Breaks 450 ReCAPTCHAs in Under 6 Seconds

Bots are better at CAPTCHA than humans, researchers find

AI researchers demonstrate 100% success rate in bypassing online CAPTCHAs

Troy Hunt: Breaking CAPTCHA with automated humans

Stanford researchers outsmart captcha codes

What "excellent film adaptation" are you talking about? There's one old animated adaptation, and that's is. There's also a movie that bears the same title, but it's apparently a coincidence: nothing except the title and names of some of main characters matches, thus I don't see how it could be relevant to Tolkien's books.

The first thing about adapting a book is reading it at least once, and Peter Jackson skipped that step.

The same company that banned people for linking to the British Holocaust Museum (HMD.Org.UK) claiming the links were violations of the policy on "dangerous individuals and organizations." Zuckerberg is a pedophilic little-boy-raping sick-trash Nazi.

"At some point, the right answer is to buy NICs and compute boards and built your own router like we used to do."

I'm still doing it for a lot of applications. Same for firewalls. The cost is a fraction of commercial offerings, the performance is more than adequate, maintenance is in-house and easy (because I keep a stash of spare parts), and there's no bloat in the software stack because anything I don't need isn't there.