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Comment Re:It's hard to imagine (Score 1) 54

Well, I can think of some uses if it were actually up to the job. I'd often like to have it read something to me, but it would need to be able to understand the emotional background.
E.g.:
Strange thing are done neath the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold,
The arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold,
(etc.)

Or possibly have it read me The Lord of the Rings. And I have some fond memories of the radio program "X minus one".

But I *really* doubt that current AIs are up to that.

Comment Re:Zorin or Mint? (Score 1) 100

Yeah but you're a greybeard Slashdotter, hardly a representation of a normal person ;-)

Valid! (Including the gray and the beard, though my hair is still mostly black. Mostly.)

The point, though is that there are lots of grandmas with varying levels of computer knowledge, many of whom can and should be moved to a Linux system that is harder to screw up. Or, honestly even better, a good Chromebook.

On that topic, I did that for my father-in-law around 2010. I got tired of cleaning up the mess he made on his Windows laptop, so (with his permission) I upgraded him to Debian. It was hugely lower-maintenance for me.

The really funny thing about that particular case is that my father-in-law was a retired Full Professor of Computer Science! His problem wasn't that he didn't have the background or ability to manage a system himself, it was that he didn't want to. At his life-stage, the computer was a tool that he used, mostly as a web browser to buy parts for the farming and antique furniture refinishing that were his passions. Also, he had very thick fingers and constantly fat-fingered stuff, literally. What he really needed was a Chromebook with a full-sized laptop keyboard (a bigger-than-normal keyboard would have been even better), but Chromebooks didn't exist yet.

Comment Re:Why do you hate yourself? (Score 1) 100

I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.

Comment Re:For Insiders on the Experimental channel (Score 1) 100

I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.

Comment I wonder (Score 2) 100

At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.

I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.

I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.

Comment Re:Known this for our Solar system since the 1980i (Score 1) 41

Actually, we're pretty sure it CAN happen by random chance. The argument is about how small that chance is...and what environmental conditions give the highest probability. And in what order things happened. (Currently I, not really knowledgeable in the field, think metabolism probably came before centralized information storage.)

Comment Re:That's the easy part (Score 1) 141

YES!!
And *part* of the reason it's tricky is that we've got no real idea of what current AIs are going to develop into. Projections are all over the map.

FWIW, I tend to consider the AI2027 projections as identifying the most probably sequence, but there are lots of others, and none of them have any chance of being more than approximately correct. (The AI2027 people say it isn't moving quite as fast as they projected, but when I compare what they said against the news I'm not sure I believe them.)

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