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Comment Re:Not just robots (Score 1) 293

What it also highlights is how poor Russia's technology is, despite being a country previously famous for it's scientists and mathematicians

Part of this is a myth perpetuated by Russia. The old scientific fame Russia claims is typically the old Soviet scientific fame, of which Ukraine was a significant, if not the most significant contributor

Under Putin, Russia lost a lot of that brain power. Ukraine never did, and despite being poorer per capita than Russia, it saw its old Soviet Ukraine science intelligentsia pivot into IT (which was one of Ukraine's few thriving sectors before the war)

This is a big lesson for the ages: human capital matters.

Comment Re:The key is China (Score 1) 293

The key is that China is not passing its key AI technology to Russia...

Keeping the war going on is in China's interest as it weakens both Europe and Russia but probably it is not worth as much as giving its technology to Russia...

Even if China were to pass its AI tech to Russia, Russia no longer has the industrial base, nor the liquid assets to take advantage of it. And that's not counting the massive brain drain Russia experienced when almost 2 million men (many of them in tech) left at the start of the war.

Ukraine, OTH, hasn't suffered that type of brain drain and, thanks to Western support, it can carry a war economy and build AI-powered drone tech at scale.

This was a war for Russia to win if it hadn't become so incompetent and corrupt under Putin (and thank God for that).

Leadership matters.

Comment Re:Insert Neocon war propaganda (Score 3, Insightful) 293

Do you really have to give a platform to this kind of Neocon war propaganda on your tech forum?

News you don't like == propaganda?

Shit is happening on the tech front in the Russo-Ukrainian war with spillovers in the Middle East. We are witnessing a battleshift paradigm shift not unlike the widespread adoption of gunpowder, airpower and/or information technology....

... both sides have been heavily invested in this shit, not just Ukraine...

... and it's tilted the war in Ukraine's favor...

... and Hezbollah has embraced that 100%, giving a technically superior force (the IDF) more headaches than it can handle...

... and it's shaping how technology is going to be developed...

... and you think this shouldn't be covered in a technology-oriented website?

Oh my sweet summer child.

Comment Re:D.o.g.e. (Score 1) 174

You know, as opposed to the inconvenient truth that maybe, just maybe a government program spending tens of millions of dollars every year, is a complete waste of time and money regardless of the political party involved?

This reminds me of every single management moron that dismantled IT systems monitoring to save money because nothing happens anyway , ignoring that it's not that nothing happens but that the monitoring provides a way to see trends and take preemptive actions before SHTF.

Comment Do not rely on untracked/out-of-band documentation (Score 1) 27

Canonical should pay the Internet Archive to keep a read only copy available.

Better, yet, it seems that projects that rely on paste.bin discussions should have been using a source control repository to keep them.

People need to treat discussions as the "live" part of technical documentation (which opens another can of worms, obviously.) But, if it is not source-controlled, assume it is ephemeral, or that it doesn't exist.

This also applies to stuff we cite in Stack Overflow. It's handy to cite a finding when documenting a code change, hack, or design decision based on an answer found in SO. But for very important stuff, additional documentation must exist somewhere, preferably source-controlled.

Comment Re:anthropomorphizing (Score 1) 403

Define consciousness; give 7 examples.

Why should I define it when there are already textbook definitions in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, medicine, and AI research?

This is at the root of the problem. I don't know what Dawkins was referring to. The onus is/was on him to define it before allowing himself to be quoted this way.

And if I am pushed to define, I will decline. I will simply offer the mainstream definitions in the disciplines I've already mentioned.

Comment Contribution to society? (Score 1) 62

"Your contribution towards polluting LLM training data will surely benefit society!"

No, it won't. Yes, there are ethical and copyright issues regarding LLM training data, but this is sabotage of something that is also quite useful to society.

We need to have a conversation about the ethical and social implications of AI. This ain't it. This is just edgelord shit hurling.

Comment anthropomorphizing (Score 2) 403

Richard Dawkins has said chatbots should be considered conscious (source paywalled; alternative source) after spending two days interacting with the Claude AI engine.

I can't believe someone like Dawkins would fall for anthropomorphizing AI chatbots... unless he's using a different definition of consciousness, which is fair.

So, we have to start there: what does "being conscious" mean, for this scenario, and for Dawkins while evaluating this scenario?

The evolutionary biologist said he had the "overwhelming feeling" of talking to a human during conversations with Claude, and said it was hard not to treat the program as "a genuine friend.

Seems like a rather subjective and emotionally charged perspective. Nothing wrong with that so long as we recognize (and he recognizes) it for what it is.

With that said, this is a conversation worth having... within certain parameters (tbd)

Comment Re:So what? (Score 1) 90

1. Was the legal request made appropriately? If no, bash the agency that issued it.

I tend to agree with the spirit of such comments, but in this case, Apple makes it clear in the TOS that it retains the right to disclose that information if it deems it appropriate. People pay for an anonymity service without reading the fine print :/

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