These countries already have that database. Spain launched its digital personal identity card a month or two ago. The only thing that's new is the obligation for social media companies to use it.

My wife worked extensively with Michelin-starred chefs in the Bay Area for a decade. I've been lucky enough to get to know some of them and their mentality.

The best of the best are always trying to be, well, better. Food is only one of the aspects that they think about- they also want you to feel welcome and respected. As the article mentions, some chefs have kept notebooks of guest preferences in the past. If they can use someone's Instagram account to get a sense of who they are before they come in, they can make sure that the waitstaff are treating them in a manner they would like. For example, if someone seems like they are introverted, then maybe they back off on the social interactions with them. If they seem to be someone more extroverted, then they get more attention.

Chefs want anyone that comes in to feel like they are special. This is just a new innovation in that direction, and it's not something that you're going to find happening at Chili's anytime soon.

IIUC, all the journals require payment for the article to be published. Some of them are *only* in it for the money, but all of them *are* in it for the money.

People already pay to have scientific papers published, so that would have at most minor effect.

When I said "I'm not sure AGI is possible" I intended the implication that people don't have "general intelligence". I agree that they don't.

The pascals that I was familiar with allowed you to concatenate two strings if different lengths and compare the result with either of the original components. It wasn't the same problem at all.

One use case for a VPN is allowing incoming connections to a home PC that is behind an ISP's firewall and/or NAT. Such a PC might be running a game server or a low-traffic web server. Another is connecting to the IPv6 Internet from an IPv4-only home ISP such as Frontier.

Not really. Super-intelligent in a narrow area is a lot easier than ordinary intelligence over all fields. We've already got it in a few areas, like protein folding.

The kicker is AGI. I'm not sure that with a definition that matches the acronym that it's even possible, yet some companies claim to be attempting it. Usually, when you check, they've got a bunch of limitations in what they mean. A real AGI would be able to learn anything. This probably implies an infinite "stack depth". (It's not actually a stack, but functionally it serves the same purpose.)

"Pledges" is just a synonym for "promises". You don't need to read anything extra into it. It's probably just a bit of a shorter headline.

And of all the AI companies I know of, they're the one I'm least desirous for the success of. I literally would prefer China. Altman's no prize, but Zuckerberg...

This guy jumps from one buzzword tech du jour to the next with nothing to show for the previous massive investment. If I was a shareholder, I'd sell-sell-sell.

it's people who work at a small business looking at the social media YOU chose to make public

Or the social media that someone with a similar name chose to make public. Whether or not it's Orwellian for a company to process personal data about me which I didn't provide directly to that company, it's objectionable because receiving the data from the subject is the strongest guarantee that it's actually data about that subject, and searches based on nothing more than the name can be a strong guarantee of error.

Unreasonable is right, because unless they ask you for your usernames when you make the reservation there's no guarantee that they're even researching the right person.

IIRC, the DoD has pretty much moved away from Ada. They couldn't find enough good programmers.

The design was picked by a committee, and subsequent changes have been made by committee.

FWIW, the main reason Ada didn't succeed was that it was too expensive. Even Gnat required a more powerful computer than most folks had access to. And it was also the most complicated language around. But the REAL problem was that the length of the string was part of the type, and different types couldn't be the same argument in a function. There was a work around, but it was clumsy. The default string should have been UNBOUNDED, and the specific length string optimization choices.