It's honestly pretty sloppy. The maze has a bunch of smeared lines on it. I think the only "doubt" is coming from journalists using cliche phrasing.

We found the switch from M$ Office to LibreOffice extremely easy.

The biggest burden was migrating some VBA Macros - which turned out to be a high value project anyway. We eliminated a heap of unprofessionally written code, removed dozens of bugs and standardised future macro development.

Overall, the switch was a positive budget project - which is pretty rare for something that is done for regulatory reasons.

Agreed.

A lot of people don't understand why I support Trump. His existence strengthens every other country and weakens the American stranglehold on the global economy.

And there's nothing mundane about acknowledging the legal reality that doing business with the US is a privacy and security risk.

So... we're now crossing over between denial and anger?

I am sad for the artists who are now rapidly losing their jobs to AI. I'm sorry for the code monkeys. I expect to lose my job (systems engineer) in the next 2-5 years.

This is a freight train that no one is going to stop. If you regulate it in the US, they'll just lose more ground to China.

The real question is how you're going to change the world's economic model so that the benefits from AI are not being distilled into the hands of the top 1%.

If they overpower the humanity trying to stop them from doing those things, yes.

There doesn't seem to be any indication whether the server infrastructure will be maintained to ensure continued operation of units already in the field.

This challenge is a healthy example of 'making' laws vs 'implementing' laws. The lawmakers don't iron out all the nitty gritty of who's in and who's out. They define policy and rely heavily on the court system to weed out the sheep from the goats.

Every policy should have a robust administrative appeals process, and pushing that responsibility over to the high court is often better than creating some government department to do it.

Any website that registers users and lets them chat with each other, and label each other as friends or enemies could be defined as social media. If there is capacity for people to bully each other, groom each other, or otherwise manipulate each other, then it is a risk to minors. There is a strong argument that /. is a social media service - and Australia is doing the right thing by allowing its peak legal body establish the answer.

Arguably Reddit is falling for the trap by accelerating the process and opening the door for a swathe of 'maybe websites' to be included in the list. I will watch this process with great anticipation - whichever way it goes.

I post every now and then, but there isn't much to talk about with the old folks 'round here these days. Eventually every comments section looks like a Thanksgiving dinner! Most of my rambles are now on Reddit now.

Keep sharp!

Yup. It's pretty hard to do the right thing when the oil cartel that has invaded Alberta keeps threatening to shit itself and is actively trying to engineer a separatist movement entirely for its own benefit. Here's hoping Carney eventually finds a way to disembowel them.

The last game Sweeney did the artwork for was ZZT. As much as I love playing around with AI art generation for fun, he's really not an expert on this.

I happen to dislike Douglas Hofstadter, actually. He isn't nearly smug enough.

The halting problem isn't unsolved at all; there are simple programs that can be fed into the testing framework for which the behavior is impossible to analyze, i.e., undecidable. Perhaps you got "unsolvable" and "undecidable" mixed up.

The original formulation of Pascal's wager is actually quite interesting—it's a game-theoretic probability analysis, described long before game theory was devised and when probability was in its infancy. Pascal's mugging targets the assumptions of the wager rather than its logic: in his writing, the nature of the divine is regarded as immutable, certain, and consistent with church doctrine.

To judge Pascal's intellect we really have to look at the context in which he was writing—the middle of Europe and the height of the witchcraft scare—and observe that he seems to have omitted the possibility of a demon (the sort that witches were alleged to commune with!) posing as a fake god, an idea that was explored extensively in early Christian heresies such as Gnosticism and Marcionism. Moreover the seventeenth century, Huguenots (protestants) were all over France, and so all of his readers would have been intimately familiar with questions of which doctrine was more authentic.

A lot of authors in this period heavily self-censored in order to avoid conflict with the state. Although the Inquisition was no longer active in France, the church had an immense amount of power, and running afoul of it could cost one's livelihood or worse. (Not to mention the sensibilities of patrons.) In some cases we only know an author's real position on occult subjects because of texts that were published posthumously or barely circulated; Isaac Newton, for example, wrote way more on magic and alchemy than on gravitation, calculus, or optics.

It's possible Pascal was not the theological bootlicker we've remembered him as, and, frankly, it's hard to imagine he never considered the flaws of the Wager, considering the messy world he lived in. Unfortunately there's no room for nuance when it comes to the popular narrative of, "child prodigy mathematician drinks too much communion wine and tragically starts spouting nonsense upon reaching adulthood."

Then breathing is animal abuse, and we're all humongous jerks for existing.