IIUC, all the journals require payment for the article to be published. Some of them are *only* in it for the money, but all of them *are* in it for the money.

People already pay to have scientific papers published, so that would have at most minor effect.

When I said "I'm not sure AGI is possible" I intended the implication that people don't have "general intelligence". I agree that they don't.

The pascals that I was familiar with allowed you to concatenate two strings if different lengths and compare the result with either of the original components. It wasn't the same problem at all.

this is moronic. the bit you're quoting says that vaccines so far do not provide lifetime immunity as infections by the viruses themselves don't provide lifetime immunity. that doesn't mean the vaccines aren't effective, it just means they don't last forever so it's difficult to establish durable herd immunity with them.

the jews of hebron were a community that had been there for centuries. but yeah i could see how you'd think that's totes entitlement, i guess

Not really. Super-intelligent in a narrow area is a lot easier than ordinary intelligence over all fields. We've already got it in a few areas, like protein folding.

The kicker is AGI. I'm not sure that with a definition that matches the acronym that it's even possible, yet some companies claim to be attempting it. Usually, when you check, they've got a bunch of limitations in what they mean. A real AGI would be able to learn anything. This probably implies an infinite "stack depth". (It's not actually a stack, but functionally it serves the same purpose.)

"Pledges" is just a synonym for "promises". You don't need to read anything extra into it. It's probably just a bit of a shorter headline.

And of all the AI companies I know of, they're the one I'm least desirous for the success of. I literally would prefer China. Altman's no prize, but Zuckerberg...

IIRC, the DoD has pretty much moved away from Ada. They couldn't find enough good programmers.

The design was picked by a committee, and subsequent changes have been made by committee.

FWIW, the main reason Ada didn't succeed was that it was too expensive. Even Gnat required a more powerful computer than most folks had access to. And it was also the most complicated language around. But the REAL problem was that the length of the string was part of the type, and different types couldn't be the same argument in a function. There was a work around, but it was clumsy. The default string should have been UNBOUNDED, and the specific length string optimization choices.

Currently have a project going using Python scripting in Blender using scipy.optimize.differential_evolution and Cycles rendering to optimize the shape of a reflector to match a desired light distribution pattern. It's not a perfect tool for the job, but it seems to be pretty accurate.

Well, it definitely fits into "news for nerds". As for "Stuff that matters"...that depends on your use case. I no longer have access to any 32 bit computers. (I may still have a 16 bit computer somewhere.)

I *did* come to that conclusion...but I also wonder what systems this would put limits on. So far nobody's mentioned any, but they probably exist.

OTOH, for any full system you should be able to compile it in 32bit mode...at least I think so. Possibly only an older version, but GParted is a special purpose tool, so that shouldn't be too limiting. (But perhaps it depends on libraries that are also only available in 64 bit mode. That would make building it more challenging.

That said, I'd probably just keep an old copy of bookworm around. Possibly even the LiveCD version. (That does have gparted doesn't it?)

My FB feed is full of anti-solar, pro-petroleum memes. "Wind Turbines use oil, that somehow means they're worse than gas-cars!", "Solar panels give babies cancer!", "Mining vehicles destroy entire mountains to produce a sugar-cube's worth of rare earths!"...that sort of thing. A lot of the memes are fairly obvious trolls, but lots of dum dums fall for them anyway. I wouldn't go as far as to say these are protestors like you're thinking of, but are there those that oppose anything? Yep, just like you said. I'm pretty certain this is the sort of thing that has affected how people vote.

My favorite troll-meme on this topic features an EV on the side of the road being recharged by a gas-powered generator. Sure enough people come along, pointing and laughing at the EV needing gas to proceed. Then the trolls come out asking those peeps if their car is diesel, like the generator. Heh. I'm not saying it's never happened, but I personally haven't seen anybody go "yes, my car is diesel" yet. Again, this is FB, not the best-of-the-best at attracting reasoned debate.