So then - all these AI generated adverts and film sections...we're saying those can't be copyrighted? I can just take them and do what I want? Sounds too good to be true so I'm assuming I'm missing a restriction somewhere.

Deterministic Siri, or any voice assistant, is useful. AI wibbly thing may or may not be depending on the task.

For me Siri has been a way to send and read messages, to control smart devices in the house (bulbs, sockets etc.), play music in the car, navigate and set alarms/timers. Within the last couple of years it also became a way to run shortcuts and control my car. All of these are deterministic tasks - I'm completely happy learning set phrases that make them work, and I truly hope they don't drop this level of certainty in favour of AI 'deduction' all the time. They need to improve it certainly, but at its heart these commands remain deterministic.


The freestyle AI wibbly bit I don't dismiss, but am much more cautious about. I was researching solar panels and had a quite long and 'detailed' conversation with an AI assistant about them, quite informative. But you always have to remember that what it's doing is reading out other people's articles and search results, then paraphrasing them to sound conversational. In itself it doesn't know, and if you treat the information accordingly then it's good to get rough to medium level impressions. If had to sacrifice one for the other though - I'd pick improving the deterministic side every time.

You mention "70 percent", but the numbers can't be related that way from that statement. It does NOT say "70 of the wombs successfully produced babies, and 30 of the wombs had complications."
There's no way to derive a percent number from "number of operations" and "number of babies", so perhaps avoid trying to draw any conclusions in that direction until other/more numbers are available.

1) one womb can have multiple pregnancies.
2) Each pregnancy may or may not result in a healthy baby.
    2a) because of the issues with the transplanted womb
    2b) because of issues unrelated to the transplanted womb (e.g. genetics of the mother/father, environmental conditions, etc.)
3) as stated, some wombs may never experience a pregnancy
    3a) because there is something wrong with the transplant and it's incapable of doing so
    3b) the owner of the womb hasn't had an opportunity to (for whatever reason)

Because of that, it could be that only a handful of the 100 wombs are fully functional (and they are pumping out tons of babies) or nearly all of them are fully functional (but haven't gotten around to be used yet.) Or, or it's a mixed bag where the good transplants can carry 100% of pregnancies to term, while some of the bad transplant only can carry 10% of pregnancies to term, and everything in between.

tl;dr #babies =/= #good wombs.

     

Eeeeew. Something hit a nerve for sure! How dare anyone insult MiKr0zopht's AI?

Sorry - mistake. Have driven an EV since 2018, in the interests of accuracy. It was a 2014 EV that I bought second hand in 2018.

I mean - I live just out to the west of London, have driven an EV since 2014, do the commuting distance and times you're describing and the use case is absolutely perfect for an EV. I'd be surprised if they're doing 100 each way and then 50 when at home on the same day, but even if they are that's doable. Charge up overnight on cheap rates - all good.

Have saved hugely by doing this.

It's already there for iOS. On iOS: Settings->->Personal information then Date of birth and Age Range for Apps.

For family, it's Settings->Family->->Apple Account->'Age range for apps'

I started lurking in 4K enthusiast groups to see if they were all cracked up to be. The arguments about relative quality of various BD/4K releases isn't even the most interesting part.

It turns out that there are a lot of issues with set top boxes playing particular disks. The disks themselves also seem terribly fussy.

The problem here is that developers can take responsibility for the action while AI can not. Humans do make mistakes and that's ok; best practice is not to just can employees for messing up. Once is a mistake. Twice is an HR event. When someone does something dumb we forgive but we also insist that meaningful steps are taken to prevent that problem in the future. AI can't really take those steps because AI can't be accountable for "don't do it again." Taking down production because you dropped a table once is forgivable. Taking it down twice for the same reason is a different matter.

The developer can be accountable. And if HR fails to hold them to account for it, HR is accountable. And if HR isn't held accountable, leadership is. And if leadership isn't held accountable, the board is. And if the board isn't held accountable, the stockholders have some hard decisions to make. And if they choose not to make them than it wasn't really that big a deal, was it?

But with an AI the option is "we stop using AI" or "we live with the result."

The Economist's Babbage podcast has done several episodes on lab-grown meat. One of the ones that makes most sense to me is there was a company targeting fish, not beef or pork. Their reasoning was that fish is a more homogeneous meat than the other two, and also it would have a larger environmental impact since popular fish species can be heavily overfished and become endangered.

This always made complete sense to me, yet I've only ever seen plant-based steak and burger alternatives. Lab-grown fish meat seems absolutely perfect since it doesn't have to reproduce the marbled texture of land-based meat, something that the process struggles with today.

As an aside I'd love to switch to lab-grown if it were widely available and similarly priced. I'm never going to become a vegetarian, and if there's a way of supporting that without affecting actual animals...yep, sign me up please.

I didn't see anyone give the true reasons, talking about population this and that. I spoke with a pub owner - they said it literally cost more to keep the lights on than they were making in profit.

It's not demographics or 'young people drinking less' - I've heard that every generation. It's purely cost driven - high energy, high rates (property tax), increases in national insurance (employers tax) and wages, to a lesser extent increases in duty vs buying at a supermarket...all leads to high drink cost at a time of low disposable income. That's the driver.
br. Many of the pubs closing are rural pubs too. These had already declined due to drink driving laws and accessibility (and to be clear - I'm in favour of such laws). The attendance is the same as when they were profitable, it's the cost base that has increased not the customer interest dropping away.

Further resources here. The original argument suggests that British authors were paid but without copyright, This is mostly incorrect, as some authors with sufficient clout were paid a little but the vast majority got nothing.

That's absolutely incorrect, and US 'piracy' of publishing rights in the 19th century is well documented.

Everyone is so excited about not having to pay software engineers to write code that they've forgotten what engineers actually do. It's less common in the software world but go find a civil engineer or an electrical engineer or an aerospace engineer and follow them around for a week.

At some point, there's going to be a document in front of them laying out how something is going to be built and they're going to be asked to approve it. And when they do that they're taking responsibility for the design. If it falls down, if it catches on fire, or if it crashes into the mountains and kills people, they're the name on the form saying that won't happen. They're responsible.

Claude 4.5 Opus is very impressive, but if it writes a software application that kills people it can't take responsibility. It can't be punished. It can't even really be sued.

I just don't see how we, as a society, can trust fundamentally unaccountable entities to build systems that can do real harm if they go wrong. I suppose the alternative is that Anthropic accepts full legal liability for everything its models do. Their unwillingness to make that move tells you all you probably need to know about their own internal confidence in those models.

I've put out a couple of albums and a few tracks in the past. They haven't shaken the earth and neither should they - they're ok, some tracks less ok and some tracks more.

Then suddenly one week I started getting played a lot. I had no idea why - hadn't released anything, I don't really promote...it's all just a hobby for fun. Turned out another track with the same name as mine had gone super-popular, and I was picking up the results of bad searches. (Annoyingly, it was also one of my tracks that..err...'could potential improve from a remaster'. ). Covers get you heard. Soundalikes get you on playlists. If you actually do want to promote yourself and you're an unknown bedroom writer, you need to do some covers and ideally create playlists of popular tracks that also have your own tracks intermingled. This is how you get started in a purely online world, leaving aside the obvious let's all pay for fake views and votes route.