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Comment Re:Rent-seeking (Score 5, Informative) 399

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:Public square is a complete lie (Score 1) 169

Maybe itâ(TM)s time we demand an actual online public square for discourse, one thatâ(TM)s free at the point of service and that ideally has the same overhead to value our public roads provide.

And what do you think /. is? Anybody can come here, create an account and post whatever they want, either using their account name or as Anonymous Coward if they want an extra level of obscurity to hide behind. Not only that, the only equivalent of censorship available if you don't like what somebody says is downmodding them, which is the equivalent of booing.

Comment Re:Everyone knows these are bad news right? (Score 1) 59

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: Phonics (Score 1) 131

Hebrew (at least historically, no idea about right now) and Thai for instance have no spaces between words.

I don't know about Thai, but I can assure you from personal experience that even in a Sefer Torah, there are spaces between the words although there aren't vowels. And as far as sounding words out when you've only been taught whole words, I'd imagine that figuring out how to do it on the fly can be rather intimidating if you've never even encountered the idea before, especially if you're not a very good reader, but I'm willing to be proven wrong on that point.

Comment Re: Phonics (Score 1, Troll) 131

and if you're stuck the teacher will tell you to sound it out.

And if you've never been exposed to phonics how are you going to know how to sound words out? I learned to read back in the '50s, when teaching phonics was at its peak, and it's served me well ever since. Being Jewish, I went to Hebrew School and learned to read Hebrew but not, alas, to speak it. Up through my 20s and into my 30s I could sight read it during religious services, but gradually stopped going and lost the ability. Now, I can still read Hebrew out loud, but slowly, sounding it out one word at a time except for the occasional word that I recognize. I very seriously doubt that I could do that if I only knew whole word reading because once you've forgotten what a word looks like, it's gone for good. My older sister can also read Hebrew the same way: she knows the letters and grew up with phonics just like I did. How many people do you think that can learn to read out loud in a strange language and a different alphabet by using whole word reading? Doing it with phonics takes time and practice, but once you know that alphabet, it's just a matter of practice.

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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