Heh. You reminded me that something I ordered got mis-delivered to some random unknown house, and since they don't provide delivery coordinates, there's no way to know where. So thanks for reminding me that I needed to reorder and reach out to Amazon Custom Service for a refund on that. :-)

This matches with my experience. Amazon has a wider selection than Walmart, but often slightly worse prices.

And yeah, Amazon's search engine is absolute trash, designed to promote what will make Amazon the most money over what you're asking for. Alexa shopping (on Amazon's website) is often better, and doing a Google search with site:Amazon.com is also often better. As another poster pointed out, odds are the seller on Amazon was just buying it at Walmart and selling it on Amazon at a markup. :-/

You missed the point. Small enough pieces are already understandable. But... Well... It's like the problem with global variables, a few are really useful, but when they multiply the code becomes unintelligible. There are too many interactions.

Whether we know how they work or not depends on how closely you look. If you look closely enough, every single decision is understandable. But it's so complex that nobody understands the ensemble. Even ordinary programs are sort of this way. The Obfuscated C Contest is just an extreme outlier, but any really large chunk of code written by somebody else (or by you over the last few years ... and not all at once) can be difficult to understand. As it gets bigger, and has more patches, the problem gets worse. These things are at an extreme edge of this problem. But every small enough piece of them can be understood...at least by somebody.

They didn't. The GP is very, very incorrect.

When a remote operator takes control of the vehicle, you'll know it, because it will mean that the vehicle has already been stuck for a minute or so without being able to figure out how to proceed, and will be sitting there for additional minutes while the remote operator looks at camera/LIDAR data and draws a proposed path through the problem area on a map.

It is not physically possible, for any amount of money, to do what the GP is claiming. Sending a signal over a cellular network from the Bay Area to the Philippines and back takes a quarter of a second on average. That's up to a 33% increase in response time compared with a driver in the vehicle. If you tried to fake self-driving with a remote operator in that way, they would crash into things constantly.

Even if the remote operator were in the same city, the latency spikes would still likely cause the cars to crash into things constantly.

LEO satellites also won't work, because these things mostly run in cities, where tall buildings would block the signals, so again, the cars would crash into things constantly.

Maybe if you had a dedicated cellular network running in parallel with the public one on a private frequency band AND dedicated trunk lines to a control center, you might be able to get something that worked most of the time, but at a cost that would be mind-blowing.

I finally dropped service a couple of years ago because the service had crept up to something like $70 a month for a basic landline phone with Caller ID. I kind of feel like they're laughing all the way to the bank either way.

In this context inappropriate use of AI is a use that gets unchecked erroneous outputs that you care about or it more expensive than you want to pay.

OK, many people don't know how to use it yet.

AI is such a versatile tool that people keep trying to use it in inappropriate ways/places. Again, like computers in the 1960's & 1970's. I suspect that we're still at the point where most attempts will fail (some horribly), but some will be REALLY successful.

N.B.: Computers didn't become largely successful until structured programming and commodity software took over large parts of the market. That greatly reduced the errors. What's the equivalent for AI? We won't know until after robots become common. (LLMs are just touching the edge of what AIs can do.)

Caffeine is a vasoconstrictor. It could well be the case that narrowing blood vessels causes blood to flow more rapidly through them, increasing its ability to wear away plaques that are attached to the walls of arteries, or that the flexing associated with the constriction and later relaxation helps these plaques break away in microscopic amounts rather than building up where they become a clog risk.

It is (or at least can be), among other things, a good search engine.

The problem is that people don't know how to use it yet. EXPECT most attempts to fail. Most early attempts to use computers failed.

Of course, with AI the problem's a bit worse because it keeps changing so rapidly. Currently the rule of thumb is "You can train an AI do do a good job if it's easy to verify that a proposed solution is correct.",

You already acknowledged the catch when you said "Or, at least, any new ones.". Small groups are really much more interested in the kind that were useful in WW I, because those are easier to make. Doing development for new weapons is dangerous to the developer.

If IQ were valid, it wouldn't be particularly low. Unfortunately, it's sensitive to culture and education, so you are probably right. But don't confuse it with potential intelligence. IQ is basically a measure of how well you could do in school with reasonable effort, so if you didn't pay attention last year, your IQ is lower.

That said, intelligence *is* real. It's just that IQ is a really bad measure of it.

Called standard by who? I guess we shouldn't call the Imperial units, though. But I've *never* heard them called "standard" before.

I really doubt that it's the largest single market. I suspect that's China. The US and India are probably up there in the running too.

I'm not sure. I can imagine software displaying ads that I would not consider malware. E,g, Firefox displays many ads on Slashdot, and only the ones that hide parts that I'm trying to read to I really consider malware.