Yeah. There have been productive uses of AI, like that protein folding project, but those generally are limited to very specific datasets, very specific objectives, and professionals who already know what the end goal is, they're using it as a tool and have the capability to discern quickly if what they're getting back is plausible and accurate.

But that said, there are still cases where professionals within a limited field have tried and failed to use AI. The most visible of these is the practice of law, where lawyers who don't understand how AI works used it to draft filings that were 'hallucinated' garbage full of fake citations and other things that the lawyer should have researched. I suspect that the lawyer didn't use a law-oriented AI though, just a general purpose LLM, and thus the AI was full of crap that had nothing to do with actual law. Hell, it might not have even had an index of topics specific to law and was consulting youtube comments or internet forums full of opinions that weren't based on actual law at all.

For AI to work it would have to be tailored, even siloed to specific subjects. It would need researchers maintaining its dataset. It would even need the skilled professionals using it as a timesaver to go through what it spits back at them to confirm that it's right. Recalling that law example, there's a whole lot of caselaw out there, lawyers and firms have typically had to employ armies of paralegals to do all of the research for precedent and interpretation. A law AI could help do that job if it sticks to real, actual law as-passed by legislatures and as-interpreted by courts, but even if the use of AI could reduce the labor needed to do all that research, it would still be necessary to review what the AI provided and to confirm that those citations really exist and really say what the AI thought they said.

That's about the only thing that such a centrally-managed setup gives, it forces a shift in the bureaucracy to make the oligarchy's mandate happen. The problem is that this may not account for things like environmental degradation, harm to the general population and other issues surrounding personal rights, etc.

Something of a compromise approach can be reached in democratic countries, but it requires all of the stakeholders from the federal officials down to the local building code inspectors during the construction process to be onboard.

What China does for 'the people' may well not be good for individual Chinese persons. Similarly to what the Soviet Union did for 'the people' was often quite harmful to individual persons.

The same goes for the size. It's pretty clear that scientists were ballparking its size in metric units, and converting the fractional units with that much precision was stupid. Calling it "about a hundred feet or thirty meters" would have been a lot better.

And this sort of thing happened long before AI was in the picture. People don't understand significant digits, and it's worse when it comes to estimates.

As for distance away, it would have been better to include something like its closest approach puts it around 3/4 of the distance to the Moon.

So there are two schools of thought on a premium product. One takes the mid-market product and cobbles-on a bunch of bells and whistles. The other designs the basic product itself to be of better quality even without bells and whistles.

I much prefer the latter. We bought a SubZero because the 40 year old SubZero that was installed when the house was built finally had enough rust developing in the housing itself that it was time to replace it when it had a cooling loop issue. If the new SubZero manages to go even twenty years I'll be quite happy with it. It's just a fridge. The only 'port' is an 8P8C tech/management port for troubleshooting, it doesn't do Ethernet, it doesn't do Wifi, it doesn't connect to anything in order to work, it just functions and lets a service tech get extended diagnostics while on site.

The trouble with the mid-market product that is turned into a premium product by cobbling on a bunch of crap is that it's ultimately still just a mid-market product underneath it all. When the stuff that was designed to the price-point for that middle-market position wears out due to those design decisions, it doesn't matter if all of the ancillary bolt-on crap is still working or not. It may well be due for the scrap heap because it's not worth the costs to repair it at that point.

So my advice would be to skip on the fridge with the screen and Internet connection. There's no point in buying durable goods loaded with commodity hardware and software.

So... Brazil ?

I guess that'd be more 1984 than Brave New World though.

The golden age of TV ended when the scripted age of TV gave way to low-effort 'reality' TV.

Yes, they could try to locate everyone that manages to use banned technology like this, but as commodity-level technology designed to be used by even unskilled individuals, they're not going to be able to stop people from using technology. All they'll be able to do is to punish them after finding them.

Don't misunderstand me, my wife has a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from MIT and has worked in the aerospace and defense industries for her whole career, and through her alumni club I've been friends with a bunch of other engineers and materials scientists. They have just about all done very well.

On the other hand I know two people with masters' degrees that are basically doing white-collar clerical work. I have no college degree, most of the people on my team don't have degrees, and I'm on the same team and at a roughly comparable role with those that do have college degrees. And I have a technical job too.

My point is that having a degree can be lucrative, but it can also provide nothing of additional value. If it provides nothing of additional value then it's an expense that isn't providing a return, so it's actually a detriment, not an advantage, and the degree of detriment is based on how much it's saddling the individual with debt.

I was rather impressed when someone got DOOM to run on a color printer.

And of course the frame-rate jokes were pretty damn funny even though it wasn't running by printing a frame at a time on paper, amusing as that would have been.

But can it play Crysis?

I didn't need more tchotchkes. Putting a CD in the microwave for a few seconds is amusing the first time, possibly even the second or third, but the novelty wears off very quickly.

It's not just that, it's a problem of too many students compared to the positions in the workplace. For some occupations there are more graduates annually than there are jobs in the whole profession. Communications and Journalism immediately springs to mind.

For a lot of college students, they go to college because due to societal pressure they're supposed to go to college. That doesn't mean that they'll end up any better off in the workforce after college though. And more insidiously it causes employers to place requirements or preferences for college graduates on jobs that are not served by that educational experience.

...when many of the most over-exposed techbro billionaires didn't finish college?

What do they expect when the narrative that people have gone into deep debt in order to pay for college tuition for degrees that get them the same positions as those without college degrees have is so widespread and frankly, true?

What do they expect when so many states are basically violating their own public institution charters for affordable education and allowing tuition, or add-on fees in lieu of tuition hikes they aren't able to make, cause the cost of even a supposedly merit-based, public education has gotten to the point that someone can't earn enough to pay for school?

What do they expect when even having a college education doesn't provide a living wage to let one afford to buy a house or to have a decent apartment without requiring roommates in order to get by?

What do they expect when even with a degree and with experience, employers treat them only like liabilities and look to shed workers whenever possible, regardless of what sorts of ongoing contributions they make exceeding their salaries?

AOL was the catalyst but since the etiquette pre-Eternal-September was not codified and only enforced through browbeating new users into feeling uncomfortable to get them to comply shunning them if they did not, it was going to happen regardless of what service provider expanded offerings to the general public. It was just that AOL got there first.

I've moderated on forums before. It's a pain. It's thankless at-best, and at-worst one has to respond to schmucks that won't accept that they're out of line and will try to evade bans. And that's with moderation tools that make it possible, on a forum that's privately owned and tightly controlled.

I remember attempts to moderate on Usenet, and it really didn't work. It was too decentralized, there was insufficient central authority to enforce or to delegate to moderators, and then the volume of garbage got so bad that it simply wasn't worth it anymore.

yeah. I'm having a difficult time believing that, but then again I don't know what products or services are offered under the AOL brand either.

Last time I paid attention to AOL, it was being annoyed when they switched from 3.5" floppies to CDs for distributing software for their service, because the new medium was no longer reformattable for reuse for whatever I needed it for.