Whether we like it or not, whether we use Windows or not, Microsoft is going to insist on adding the tax whether the PC comes shipped with Windows or not. This is illegal bundling, Microsoft has essentially ignored prior rulings, and it's pretty much a certainty the courts will be fine with this.

MIT does this.

A-C are pass, D and F are no credit for the fall semester.

Then for spring you get A-C as a letter or no credit for D-F.

They (MIT) doesn't pass the Ds.

Hasn't MIT been doing this for decades?

It's not a new concept and is used by some of the best schools in the world (well MIT at least).

Have you seen who owns Apple?

Still doesn't invalidate his point.

Pixels are google's flagship devices, so naturally they'll have flagship prices. Fortunately, unlike the Apple cago-o-system you've a choice. If you just want a cheap, quality phone I'd suggest a Motorola as they seem to have the best cheap hardware at the moment. Other brands are available.

"How did you get hired?"
"I was top at Fortnite. You?"
"Combat flight sims."

"Damn, two Boeings just crashed over an oil refinery on city limits and took out half the city."
"Did you remember to save your position beforehand?"
"Yeah."
"The reload and continue from there. No-one will notice."

I love computer games. I have XPlane 12 and many scenery packs. I rank well on Elite:Dangerous. From the sounds of it, the FAA would see me as over-qualified. In reality? There's no way in hell I'd be taking those kinds of risks with real lives. There's a huge difference between having good reflexes and a good eye, versus having the complex 4D spacetime relationship mental models needed for robust air traffic control.

Replace former English colonies with former French colonies. Much of West Africa is French speaking.

I get almost no spam calls... Last one I got was to a number I use exclusively for data on overseas travel (free data roaming in 72 countries for just £10 PAYG/Prepaid so I only put money on there when I'm travelling). My main UK number gets nothing any more, it's been years since I even got a "so we's heard you was in an accident" call. So you can do something about it.

That something is punishing telcos that allow spammers/scammers to operate. It's relatively cheap to set up a VOIP/PABX setup however if you want to phone people on a phone number you still need to link to a network which means the telco's can be gate keepers and should be. They can easily spot someone making a dozen phone calls a minute and just as easily cross reference that with a legitimate business like a well known insurance company. Totally Legit Call Company PLC with one director listed in Companies House should set off a huge red alarm bell.

I'm guessing you're American... the problem you've got is that the telcos are making money off that and none of your spineless leaders have the stones to tell them to stop. It's not that they cant, it's not impossible to action against, it's just that they wont.

Which means the calls are originating inside the country. This means someone is paying for a connection even if it's a VOIP/PABX that connects to a foreign site... this means the Telcos can be held responsible for activities that are now illegal.

You might not be able to fine or imprison people in another country but you can do that to telcos operating in your country and you can bet your arse that the telcos can tell who is making dozens of calls per minute on their networks (clue... they'll be taking money from them).

I cant imagine it would be cheap to dial in internationally and caller ID would put the country code in front of it. Definitely not profitable on the return you get from spam/scam calls.

Doesn't practically every google search use gemni for ai overview?

Right.

So the value probably isn't the 500 billion investment, but it's likely 50 billion at least.

That's kinda my point.

Have we compared this with other major groups of bigots to see if strong opinions on Immigration are a contributing factor?

Identify is precisely what security guards are hired to do, the big issue with CCTV is unless you know when and where an event took place, you're looking through a mountain of footage for a needle. This is likely the same problem with robot guards, they cant tell when or where something untoward is happening.

Arrest, probably not as, in most civilised countries guards are instructed not to put themselves in danger. However the article mentions places in the US so that doesn't really apply.

The other thing they're there to do is deter, which a physical presence tends to do a lot better than any camera or robot. Even a cardboard cutout of a police officer has resulted in noticeable reductions in petty crime. Humans are wired to respond to human features (notably eyes) in that way. A liveried police patrol car will slow down far more drivers than 100 speed cameras.

You see, Linus has embraced transhumanism and is testing out the new kernel as a supplementary brain function, using MOSIX to offload all of the irritable comment generation at yet more nonsense on the mailing list to an Elizabot that he has written specifically to do this. This saves his actual brain for real work.

AI is not currently capable of performing any meaningful conceptual abstraction, it is only capable of very basic mechanical abstraction. Abstraction is itself multi-dimensional. Nor is there any indication that AI could ever perform multi-dimensional abstraction or multi-dimensional decomposition. Precious few humans are capable of it either, but some can.

No, AI would need humans because the best system is not a pure system but a hybrid system, and that means transhumanism with AI operating as an additional brain function rather than as a replacement for a brain.

Tool calling is, yes, but the current approach to it is (a) overt not transparent to the user, (b) not designed for the purpose I've outlined, and (c) not remotely good enough for the AI to be able to manage data through such tools.

Yes, you can connect an AI to a PostgreSQL database. Whoopee. Not even close to an AI detecting via classifiers that some of the data is relational in nature, transparently setting up its own PostgreSQL database in response, and using that proactively as an additional way to examine the data. You would need to explicitly set up the constructs, explicitly set up the databases, explicitly tell it when, where, and how to use the database, and if that particular usage conflicted with a way the AI actually worked, the AI would not be able to use it effectively. That's not remotely close to what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is much, much deeper than that. AIs lose focus when there is too much information currently in the system. Absolutely nothing stops an AI from using a document database as a virtual memory in which it can page in and out conceptual spaces so that the focus on any given step of a problem concerns just the problem. Other than such a concept not existing yet, which is kind of a limiting factor. But you need to know what connects to what. The AI could use an ontology reasoner for that, or a relational database, or an external graph. But you cannot provide those tools and you cannot configure them, for the simple reason that the AI is the only entity with any detailed map of how the underlying neural net is connecting those ideas up.

The AI itself has to select the tools, has to configure the tools, has to do all the work. Which means YOU cannot use any sort of API. YOU should have no involvement in the underlying mechanisms needed for the internal NN housekeeping.

And that's your other error. You're assuming this is about user data. No. It's about housekeeping operations within the NN itself to maximise functionality, it has nothing to do with the user side of things at all. If the user was capable of setting up dynamically structured databases that mutated with each step of a decomposed analysis, you'd have done everything the AI would be doing and you wouldn't need the AI to begin with.

You cannot do this work, you cannot even assist in this work, it has to be dynamic and it has to be utterly invisible to the operator.