This is horrifying, terrifying, and sadly well-known even to those who superficially monitor such things.
Popular media: More than one US film/tv studio has "lost" or "suffered a mysterious fire" in un-digitised archives, destroying the lot, during battles to preserve. The BBC sued Bob Monkhhouse for preserving material it destroyed. In Britain, it has been no better. Fans of the British TV series "The Avengers" can only see old episodes because armies of previous fans descended on rubbish tips and, at great risk to themselves, collected as much film as possible.
General history: Places like the John Ryland's Library and the British Library have suffered with rescuing archives at risk of becoming submerged or destroyed by mould. The Archimedes Palimpsest was partially destroyed by one collector filling in the pictures with coloured pens and by another collector allowing the book to be severely damaged by mould.
The National Archives have mysteriously "lost" a great many files over the years and are only digitising those they've retained at an incredibly slow rate. I know because I've personally forked out several hundred to get just two scanned, all because politicians far prefer frippery to archiving. We've absolutely no idea how many of the manuscripts held in other archives are still in usable condition because nobody bothers to check.
It's not just limited to archives, of course. The US has, over the last couple of decades, demolished numerous buildings within the US that are over 300 years old because malls produce profit and ancient structures don't. (They also then complain they have no history...) The Space Shuttle is to be taken to Texas for a PR stunt, which will require it being dismantled and those things aren't designed for that. There is no guarantee any of it will survive the journey. All because PR matters and preservation does not. Other countries? The Louvre... well... probably best not to talk about that utter disgrace. In Egypt, 3000 year old gold artefacts are routinely melted down so the conservators can pocket some extra cash.
It's at times like this that Kenny Everett's general comes to mind.
"academia works"?
You think Academia ever accomplished anything at all?
Good. You're finally getting the picture that American crony Capitalism sucks rocks and considers immigrants to be barely better than slaves.
With millions of citizen tech workers laid off in the last 3 years, fewer foreign workers is only good news.
PLEASE avoid the United States. We're going through an existential cultural identity crisis right now, and don't need your third world kleptocracies, we have enough kleptocracy here.
I just watched 'Marty Supreme'. I give it a thumbs down. Said to be loosely based on table tennis player Marty Reisman, but only if by 'loosely' you mean very little in common. For example, Reisman was a champion table tennis player in the era of hard rubber bats but in the movie he isn't even a champion yet when he is defeated by a Japanese player with the new sponge rubber bat. I know I'm prejudiced because I used to play the game, but I would have preferred a movie more closely aligned with Reismans' real life,
So, like Dungeons and Dragons and Judas Priest before them, AI models are now blamed for underlying mental health issues that they have nothing to do with.
Bring on the AI moral panic. As if we didn't have enough of those these days.
I've been here before.
as assholes use AI to shit on everyone.
Well, the obvious ones:
No built-in instruction-level or block-level parallelism
Array/vector operations are highly inefficient
Multiprocessing is pretty feeble
No CSP, you have to use OS primitives which are often unsafe
No formal contract system, best you can do is show statements don't do anything bad, you can't show functions do what you intend
Heavy software verification is difficult to impossible
Can't wait for the groovy A flat, Asus4-G sharp-sus5, F sharp add11 song, with the C minor dim7 root for the bridge.
The French have an interesting record with tyranny, including lopping off the head of a tyrant, and then lopping off the head of one of the tyrants that was instrumental in the first tyrant's head getting lopped off. The French Revolution makes that puny American War of Independence seem like a stroll in the park.
And perhaps we can also mention how there wouldn't even be a United States if France hadn't given the Continental Congress significant financial and military (particularly naval) aid.
The beer-cooled computer does not harm the ozone layer. -- John M. Ford, a.k.a. Dr. Mike
