Well, and FWIW, there has been a huge increase in the number of
"security fixes" Debian has been downloading recently. I assume the same is true of other Linux distros and probably for Apple, though I don't think those are made public. Perhaps the BSDs haven't seen a large uptick.

I, for one, am glad someone is finally cracking down on explicit images. If you have words to say, post them as actual text! Don't just throw text onto an image and call it a "meme," because that's totally lame.

Once I see it doing what I want, I'll be interested. But in order to do that, it needs to be able to understand the action of the fiction I'm asking it to read. E.g. if it's reading "Alice in Wonderland" it needs to use a proper voice for Alice talking to herself as she falls down the rabbit hole. (And for the editorial comments interspersed.)

O,. and it needs to be able to do this without an internet connection.

I would expect that our backward-ass leaders will instead get all nationalistic and prideful of the "homegrown" Microsoft monopoly

Then we must lead them down a better path.

"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space, or on some alien world. Men can live, and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. You can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it!" -- Blacula

In other words, the "gap" you describe is considered to be good news for the humans who have to do those jobs.

I say this jokingly, but I really did drink the Kool Aide, and I think it's just Kool Aide without any additional harmful ingredients. I'm seriously all for us at least striving to live a completely hedonistic lifestyle, where we never toil because our robots slaves do everything tedious for us.

I want to die in an Orion whorehouse, looking like a character from WALL-E. Only in my final moments do I want to learn the awful truth, when one of the green-skinned ladies' faceplate falls off, revealing a robot.

Ok, maybe it wasn't pure Kool Aide.

The premise is that you would understand how it works. Once we've glossed over the story of finding that holy grail, then you can build minds with different amounts of spite. (e.g. doubly-infinite for a TortureBot, or decreased for most other uses.)

Wait, are you suggesting I can simply hire humans, to design and manufacture these intelligent computers for me?!

Oh, duh, I get it! You're taking Bezos' own point of view, rather than the point of view of his engineers.

But how do the engineers create the intelligent computer? It's not hiring-people all the way down, is it?

What do you think is the right age for Carousel? As someone over 30, I think 30 is too young. ;-) But what age might we all agree isn't too young?

It hasn't produced anything yet, but somehow it's already Too Big to Fail? Sanders and Trump can go fuck themselves.

I think that would be a fair exchange for the resulting LLMs also having no copyright protection.

While your points are good, this looks like negligence to me. So, yeah, our "justice" system needs reform, but that facility should be made to change it's practices. (Not that I'm sure this decision will cause them to do that.)

I guess you didn't read very carefully. They found a marker that appears 5 years before a diagnosis and also part of the mechanism of smoking and other things causing lung cancer AND potentially how to interrupt it. That's a good bit more than simply finding a well known correlation.

The problem is that TMI was NOT a really bad disaster. It was frightening, and could have been bad. Actually, though, it was quite contained. But the more reactors you have, the greater the chance of a really bad disaster. If one of these is small enough to be thrown around by a tornado, you have new possibilities of a really bad disaster. (I didn't check. I assume it's too heavy. But perhaps it could be broken open.)

OTOH, smaller reactors have a smaller "worst possible case". I'm not really convinced that they're a good idea, but I could be. (If it's intended for use in space, what happens if there's a catastrophic launch explosion? That might be a good use, if they can handle the heat, but I'd prefer that the fuel be mined on the moon.) Low probability accidents that are possible WILL eventually happen. (Or at least one should plan that way.)

It's a new model, so the only way to really know whether it's safe or not is to try. But modelling gives VERY useful indications.

WHY is it wonderful news? The reports I've seen say that small reactors are less efficient than larger reactors and have increased chance of dangerous results (though the size of the danger is smaller).

Just asserting that it *is* wonderful gives me no reason to believe you.