Maybe Iran could start up their own AI farm and create an appropriate LLM that understands that custom. Of course, that would limit the overall knowledge base and usefulness of it for anything outside of cultural interactions...

... everyone who has an account there went in and disallowed use of their accounts for this. But as others have noted, it's Microsoft... so who knows if they will actually honor it or not.

AI is mostly a toy, but it can also be a useful tool. Unfortunately it's becoming a crutch and something that's taking away critical thinking and research skills. Remember this one from about 6 weeks ago? Anything AI gives you as a result must be verified.

Eating too much sugar is just as bad and can cause problems as well. Try looking at the nutrition labels on packages... compare a "fat free" version of a product to its regular counterpart. Fats bring a lot of flavor to food... so making it "fat free" means they make it bland. The only way to bring flavor back is to add sugar, so that nutrition and ingredients label will reflect that sugar was added. Sugar is addictive too. I refuse to drink "diet" or "no sugar" drinks. I'd rather get 100% fruit juice and dilute it with some sparkling water.

Always!

... hire a few young people for these soon-to-be retirees to mentor and pass on some of this institutional knowledge?

Going through German as a refresher, what I find very wrong about the way they teach it is when it comes to nouns... you would never learn it as Hund, Katze, or Kind (dog, cat, child)... you would learn der Hund, die Katze, or das Kind (the dog, the cat, the child) because you need to learn whether it's masculine, feminine, or neuter, otherwise you'll pick the wrong definite or indefinite articles in different situations.

Beyond a local neighborhood-maintained book or some kind of advertisement from my county of residence in a "Best of X County" type thing, I haven't seen an actual newly updated phone directory in a couple of decades. I remember delivering them as part of a Boy Scouts fundraiser back in the day too. White pages, yellow pages, and "Let your fingers do the walking"... it wasn't difficult... but then again, we also used to go to that big wall of tiny drawers to search for a book, author, or subject. :)

We have AI making up court rulings that sound completely legitimate but a simple Westlaw or Lexis-Nexis search would tell you that there was no such case... AI will gladly spew drivel about one side of a political argument, but when asked to spew similar drivel about the other side it will say, "I'm sorry but I cannot delve into politics"... and now they want ads in there? In baseball that would be your three strikes and you're out.

AI is a toy. Treat it like one.

This is fine and dandy... but who controls the accreditation agency? We have seen plenty of times in the past where junk science was pushed as part of the dictatorial takeover of Russia, Germany, China, and North Korea. At first, it's to help swing the populace to the side of the rising dictator... but once in power, it's about "the official story" to keep them there. Go against that official story and you could end up in a lot more than hot water.

What needs to be fixed is the lackadaisical peer review process. Once upon a time, you had to rigorously document your methodologies... how you collected and analyzed the data, and how you came to your conclusions. These days, too many peer reviews are glossed over and an insufficient number of attempts are made to repeat any part of the process, actually go through the data and analysis process to see if those conclusions are correct, etc. It leads into some of the stuff others posting here have said: "publish or perish" mantra.

Considering that BRICS was so named in the late 1990s (it was first called BRIC), that means it cannot be second world unless the definition has been updated to make China the central point of second world. Basically, Second World is largely an obsolete term otherwise.

BRICS

It goes back to Cold War days... First World was US-allied, Second World was Soviet and Soviet-allied, Third World was those not actively allied with either side. Why Are Countries Classified as First, Second, or Third World?

Bingo. The real trouble is with failure to confirm what's been assembled. Just ask that one lawyer who got his rump roast chewed out by a judge for submitting six cases in support of his position... that were produced by AI... and never actually existed... which could have been confirmed by a Lexis-Nexis search. My overall problem with AI is that it is still controlled by humans... with political leanings/preferences/outright slants... who will adjust AI filters to match their ideas. It doesn't matter the direction of the slant. The fact that the slants exist are the real problem. Those slants can be in the AI response filters or the choice of material to use as the source of the LLM.

The problem with all of this has much to do with the ad networks themselves. If the ads weren't intrusive and didn't screw up the page layout (meaning they obeyed the size restrictions and placement of the ad spaces by developers), it wouldn't be as much of a problem. Couple that with the ads sometimes containing some form of malware and the inability to dismiss popups easily, and you have a recipe for disaster: I visit example.com and it pops up an ad that I dismiss, but by sheer coincidence it's got scripting in it and it installs some kind of malware. I get the computer disinfected, and I go blame example.com because that's how I got it. The people who run example.com will come back and say that they buy their ads from GenericAdNetwork, so you need to talk to them. I then contact GenericAdNetwork, and they say that it's not their fault because they're just a distributor. It turns into a finger-pointing and red herring-chasing session, and you never learn who actually created the malicious ad. Someone needs to be responsible for these things... I don't care if it's example.com or GenericAdNetwork... one of them has to do some kind of filtering and/or vetting of the ads. Until then, browsers like Brave and a pi-Hole are my friends.

I remember when the space shuttle Enterprise was there. They swapped it out for Discovery and did a whole ceremony around having the two shuttles touch noses. Somewhere in my collection of photos, I have a couple of shots of Discovery on its way in to Dulles riding piggy-back on that 747. Enterprise now resides at the Intrepid Museum in NYC, Atlantis is at the Kennedy Space Center, and Endeavour is at the California Science Center. Leave them where they are... or possibly move Enterprise... one of the shuttles absolutely belongs in the Smithsonian Institute along with other historic aircraft.

As much as 20 years ago, I was hearing from a friend who worked in an HR department that they were given instructions to not consider any person who was not currently employed. I've told a friend of mine this recently... that if he really wants a better job (he's currently unemployed and on disability due to a chronic medical condition), he needs to be employed even if it is just a simple call center job.