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Comment Re:Fiber to all homes is too unrealistic ... (Score 1) 61

Wireless has failure modes that wired communications don't. They probably can't avoid some of the failure modes, like jamming. And there are places where wireless just doesn't reach...which aren't the same as the places where wired can't reach. I used to live in a ... large gully or small canyon. Wired had no problem, but it was essentially radio dead.

Comment Re:"Leading China"... really? (Score 1) 50

The question is more "Will we be leading in anything by 2035?".

That we stopped leading by the end of the 21st century would just be normal. Leading countries don't remain leading forever. I'm not sure Britain managed to be the leading country for 150 years. In the 1800's it was contesting with France for the title, and by around 1950 the US was the acknowledged leader. So 1950-2100 would be about the same span of time.

Comment Re:The researchers concluded... Hmmm. (Score 1) 45

IIUC (I'm no specialist in the field!!):

No, but one of the possible meanings of "dark matter" is "black holes created during the big bang". It's tricky to make it work, and it requires some adjustment in how stable black holes are, but it's possible. The problem is that it would require that they evaporate more quickly and quietly than theory says that they should.

Note that these would be relatively small black holes. Possibly the larger ones became the nuclei around which the first generation of stars collected.

Comment Re:Rent-seeking (Score 5, Informative) 465

That design assumed a dispersed network. The networks have gotten increasingly concentrated. If there's only one connection, you can't route around it.

OTOH, SpaceX might reap large increases in business, because they would be the only route that wasn't broken. (I don't think Iran has orbital capability.)

Comment Re:Everyone knows these are bad news right? (Score 1) 61

You're assuming that everyone is one extreme or the other. And not only is this wrong, there aren't only two sides, no matter what the news says.

OTOH, Flock *seems* to be an example of the "benefits of the surveillance state". I.e., we only hear about the generally approved of uses. If you were to believe that those were the only uses, I'd think you a simpleton. And it's impossible for me to make a decision that they're a good thing without knowing what those other uses are.

Comment Re:Training data (Score 2) 109

Your post was quite reasonable, and probably true, until you wrote "AIs aren't capable of reasoning". There *are* definitions of reasoning for which that it true, but they aren't the ones in common use. Cicero would use that kind of definition in his "school of rhetoric", where he taught people how to win arguments". Socrates would not. He was trying to find truth.

Clearly AIs have limited reason. They can (at least in principle) do perfect logic, but the difference between that an reason is not well defined. (And logic can prove that you can't prove algebra to be self-consistent.) To me reason is evaluating a set of data and a goal, and using logic to plot a nearly-optimal path to achieve the goal. I think where AIs are generally most deficient is in their goals, though obviously they also have an imperfect understanding of the current state. (Well, so do people.)

That said, there are many areas where current AIs seem deficient when compared with people. This doesn't mean or imply that they don't have a modest amount of the features that they are deficient in, but merely that we expect them to have more. Think of capabilities as being gradients rather than boolean variables. This is commonly called "jagged capabilities". They're better at some things than most people are, and worse at other things than most people are.

Comment Re:Synthetic (Score 1) 109

How do you know?
I will grant that there are definitions of "feelings" that would make your statement true by definition, but I will guarantee that most people don't use those definitions.

If you want to claim "it's synthetic, therefore it can't be a feeling", you've deprived your mind of a tool for thinking in this space. Submarines don't swim, but airplanes fly. Perhaps it's not useful to think of submarines as swimming, and perhaps it's useful to think of airplanes as flying. And perhaps it's useful to think of LLMs as having feelings. (Also perhaps it isn't, but just asserting that isn't useful, you need to demonstate it. My wife found it useful to attribute feelings to her car. The model didn't work for me, but it worked for her.)

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 65

A quick search didn't provide an answer, but the indications were that the cosmic voids are much of the universe. The search of turned up things like https://link.springer.com/arti... , but didn't actually reveal the proportion of the volume of the universe that is contained within cosmic voids, but did *indicate* that it sure wasn't trivial.

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