It is more likely that Canada has 10 new reactors on-line in 14 years than Slashdot having Unicode support by then.

"Guaranteed income helps people leaving jail and prison, and that helps everyone"
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/b...
      "Upon coming home from prison, people face the same â" and rising â" costs of living as the rest of us. But they have to bear additional costs imposed by the criminal legal system as well, all while navigating additional and unique barriers to employment. The resulting financial insecurity makes it harder to succeed at reentry. Cash assistance (often called âoeguaranteed incomeâ) makes reentry easier by providing people with a monetary safety net, helping them get jobs, housing, and food, and fulfill any remaining court or parole obligations.
      In this piece, we explain how guaranteed income reduces recidivism and results in taxpayer savings. We highlight the work of the Just Income program in Alachua County (Gainesville), Florida as a concrete example that demonstrates cash assistance with no strings attached is a smart policy choice for supporting people in reentry. ..."

"Omega-3 and vitamin D supplementation to reduce recidivism: a pilot study"
https://link.springer.com/arti...
"These pilot data suggest that omega-3 and vitamin D supplementation, a simple and relatively cheap health intervention, could reduce 3-year recidivism by 16.6%."

In the data centre business this newly-invented Megapod(tm) is called a module. My company probably has 30 or more of them, and I've seen this "data centre in a can" concept around for the past 15 years. Doing it in shipping containers was all the rage for a while.

Of course the old ones were not direct-to-chip liquid cooled, but I'm sure the providers of these modules already have that. In any case, this is in no way a new concept -- just, as you say, some shiny branding.

You wrote: "Isn't it funny how the Republican Party always gets very concerned about spending and the reach of government when the Republican Party doesn't control government; but just as soon as they do have control they start spending like crypto bros and use government to interfere in literally everything that doesn't fit their questionable narratives?"

See also: "The GOP used a Two Santa Clauses tactic to con America for nearly 40 years; This scam has been killing wages and enriching billionaires for decades"
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/...
        "The Republican Party has been running a long con on America since Reagan's inauguration, and somehow our nation's media has missed it - even though it was announced in The Wall Street Journal in the 1970s and the GOP has clung tenaciously to it ever since.
        In fact, Republican strategist Jude Wanniski's 1974 "Two Santa Clauses Theory" has been the main reason why the GOP has succeeded in producing our last two Republican presidents, Bush and Trump (despite losing the popular vote both times). It's also why Reagan's economy seemed to be "good."
        Here's how it works, laid it out in simple summary:
        First, when Republicans control the federal government, and particularly the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor and run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. This produces three results - it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy, it raises the debt dramatically, and it makes people think that Republicans are the "tax-cut Santa Claus."
        Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how "our children will have to pay for it!" and "we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!" This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus. ..."

So it is not hypocrisy so much as a precisely-thought-out effective political strategy. Whether the majority of voters in the USA like the results or realize where those results come from is a different issue.

I just wanted to add that whatever the truth there, this idea that LLMs are not (by themselves) the way forward is increasingly appearing in various places. One recent example on Slashdot:
https://slashdot.org/story/25/...
"Project Prometheus is building AI systems that learn from physical experiments rather than just analyzing digital text."

Humans learn to speak usefully with just a few years of immersion in a social world and without reading the entire internet. My college advisor back in the 1980s (George A. Miller) though this suggested language had a partially genetically-wired component in the brain even as much was also learned.

Beyond reading Asimov robot stories as a kid, I first learned more formally about AI taking an independent study course in High School in the late 1970s based around Patrick Winston's first edition Artificial Intelligence textbook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Then in the 1980s, some of my college work was also related to AI as cognitive science and exploring triplestores and so on (which very indirectly helped inspire George to create WordNet as I was graduating, where WordNet lead to Simpli and Google AdSense). I spent about a year hanging around the CMU Robotics Institute after graduation (where I got to ride in the first "Autonomous Land Vehicle" or "ALVAN"). And then I was a research assistant co-managing a robotics and expert system lab for a time. I also made one of the first simulations on a Symbolics of kinematic self-replicating robots (presenting that work at a conference on AI and simulation, where I commented on the total surprise to me when I saw emergent behavior of unexpected cannibalism of offspring in it until I kludged in a virtual sense of smell to avoid eating creatures that smelled the same). As a grad student later I learned a bit about neural networks related to self-driving vehicles.

I later worked for a time in IBM's speech research group in the late 1990s (mainly using existing tools to build implementations, aspects of which were forerunner to Apple's Siri as IBM's "Personal Speech Assistant" and also an interactive speech-operated display wall I built mostly for fun which was intended to in-theory eventually support advanced design and also patent writing).

Anyway, with that for context, I think LLMs are pretty amazing, but they just don't seem like how humans learn to think and speak. Not saying they can't be useful as part of a larger system though. But fundamentally, even if neural networks are involved, humans think in concepts (or word senses, as in WordNet) which they mostly learn by inference from just a relatively few examples. And that learning tends to have a precise aspect to it related to the actual experience and some notion of "truth" (as in actual experience even if the experience is hearing or reading about what someone else experienced or said they experiences).

So the idea proposed here by "Cringely" makes some sense (as part of this trend to seeing the limits of LLMs) -- although whether or not he can pull it off is a different issues.

But there remains a concern of whether or not such a thing (making powerful self-taught AIs) is worth doing right now given a competitive economic system and also the existential risk of creating essentially a new intelligent species (one without all the evolved safeguards humans have as a social species, limited as they may be as demonstrated by various tech-bro behavior). Anyway, such concerns is why I mostly left the AI research field in the 1980s (other than to kibitz about it from the outside).

This YouTube comment was not posted by me but it almost could have been in some ways:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
      "@Jenkkimie 2 weeks ago
      Former AI developer here. Hear Mo Gawdat's message to heart. I regret my past, regret that I helped companies to build AI's at all. I can't undo history but I left the AI industry when I saw companies were starting to plan on using AI in unethical ways that I could not stand by. I've lost a lot of money over the years but as far as I am concerned that is the sacrifice I made because I don't want to be part of the destruction of humanity and the world.
      There has got to be better ways to use AI than pure greed, and we need to do better than this. To remember ethics, not just our bank accounts. So I've joined among many other former and current AI developers in advocating for regulations, change of how we think about economies and the role of money in our world and what is our place in it. Maybe we are fighting a losing battle but all of us should do what we can to steer and orient this world to a better tomorrow rather than submit to the will of the oligarchs evil desires. The fight is not over yet, we can still change the direction of it all."

Mo Gawdat (interviewed in the video that comment is posted on) is the only major AI executive who so far I see seems to get the main idea my sig in relation to AI: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Whatever AIs we build, unless we (or they) understand that irony, it seems unlikely that there will be a happy result for humanity of such work.

Wow. Thanks for posting this, A.C.. In trying to verify any of what you posted (which was all news to me), I found this:
"The cost of lies: A Mineserver story" by Jeremy Reimer
https://jeremyreimer.com/rocke...
      "Creating and shipping a brand new product is insanely difficult. It takes a ton of money, sweat, and time. Even people with tons of experience can underestimate timelines and encounter unexpected difficulties. So telling the story of a failed Kickstarter is not especially interesting.
      This is not that story.
      This is a story about what happens when someone builds up a reputation over decades of work and then destroys it in a couple of years. Not because they failed, but because they lied about it. Over and over again. Until the lies got too much to handle, and they had to create newer, even larger lies to cover them up.
      Why would anyone do this? We'll get into that at the end. But first, the story. ..."

I can still wonder on the use of the word "lie" in that article by Jeremy Reimer versus, say, "irrational exuberance" especially if his kids were involved in making the Minecraft server project happen? But the article does make it sounds like a larger pattern. Ironically, the behavior even sounds a bit like an overly-people-pleasing LLM hallucination?

Having read many Robert X. Cringely articles in InfoWorld and so on way back when, I would be sad if this was all true. Kind of like losing faith in a celebrity of computing from my younger days.

Related (although in general I have not found it that true about most computing people):
"Never Meet Your Heroes: What It Means & If You Should Meet Them"
https://www.wikihow.com/Never-...
        "Itâ(TM)s a proverb that suggests meeting your idols can lead to disappointment. âoeNever meet your heroesâ is a piece of advice that means people shouldnâ(TM)t meet their heroes because they may be disappointed by the heroâ(TM)s true personality. This happens because people tend to idealize people they look up to instead of viewing them as multifaceted humans with flaws, and they may have unrealistic expectations about what will happen when they meet their hero.
        The hero might not have the time, energy, or interest in meeting their expectations, destroying the perfect image that person has built in their head.
        The logic behind this proverb is that many celebrities craft public personas, and the image they portray online or on camera may be vastly different from how they act in real life.
        With that being said, some people say that meeting your heroes can be a positive experience and serve as a reminder that heroes are no different than normal people. ..."

Related by me from over two decades ago: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society"
https://pdfernhout.net/open-le...
        "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. ...
          Consider this way of looking at the situation. A 501(c)3 non-profit creates a digital work which is potentially of great value to the public and of great value to others who would build on that product. They could put it on the internet at basically zero cost and let everyone have it effectively for free. Or instead, they could restrict access to that work to create an artificial scarcity by requiring people to pay for licenses before accessing the content or making derived works.
      If they do the latter and require money for access, the non-profit can perhaps create revenue to pay the employees of the non-profit. But since the staff probably participate in the decision making about such licensing (granted, under a board who may be all volunteer), isn't that latter choice still in a way really a form of "self-dealing" -- taking public property (the content) and using it for private gain? From that point of view, perhaps restricting access is not even legal?
        Self-dealing might be clearer if the non-profit just got a grant, made the product, and then directly sold the work for a million dollars to Microsoft and put the money directly in the staff's pockets (who are also sometimes board members). Certainly if it was a piece of land being sold such a transaction might put people in jail. But because the content or software sales are small and generally to their mission's audience they are somehow deemed OK. ...."

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In the US, SMPTE is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization."

This seems like a situation where it's very hard to get excited about the idea that it's the regulator's problem. Did some Canadian fed technically have the authority to inspect? Quite possibly. Is there some sort of justification for even the cost of performing the inspection, much less any undesired knock-on effects of the notion that literally all vessels must be inspected no matter what, in a case like this? Seems harder to make that case.

There are a lot of situations where large portions of the public have no choice but to use products and services that they have no reasonable ability to be "informed" about. Either it's simply not possible if you aren't in a position to legally compel honesty from the vendor or it's a case where "informed" is PhD-level work in the area, or a combination of the two; but some rando's aggressively contrarian submarine that loudly and proudly skips all industry certifications and is available on boutique scale for very wealthy customers doesn't seem like one of those cases.

From NYS Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto: https://www.informationliberat...
        "Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license I hold certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn't what I do at all. I don't teach English, I teach school -- and I win awards doing it.
        Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will. ...
          How did these awful places, these "schools", come about? Well, casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of forms, a mildly useful adjunct to growing up. But "modern schooling" as we know it is a by-product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our own industrial poor. Partly, too, total schooling came about because old-line American families were appauled by the native cultures of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigrants of the 1840s and felt repugnance towards the Catholic religion they brought with them. Certainly a third contributing factor in creating a jail for children called school must have been the consternation with which these same "Americans" regarded the movement of African-Americans through the society in the wake of the Civil War.
        Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well. ..."

Not only do we have the concept of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement; the current level of disagreement between the agreeing parties suggests that we actually have at least three distinct concepts of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement! Where a lesser leader might myopically interpret having a single agreed-upon set of terms as essential to a treaty; Great Leader understands that American Greatness requires more.

Is that really a bad thing? There are certainly plenty of examples of old things that suck; either because genuine improvements became available after they had already solidified or because they were always broken and are now running purely on denial-fueled risk tolerance; but, in principle, it seems like it should be a bad thing that age is seen as a bad thing. Especially when software is more like math than like civil engineering in terms of the tendency of its materials toward corrosion, embrittlement, and fatigue. (and when so many 'modernization' projects turn into expensive failures or go way behind schedule and over budget to eventually death march toward feature parity, sometimes even achieving it in time to be declared legacy themselves.)

I'm not calling for a crusade against 'fast fashion' software; if people want to bang out an app on the fast and cheap to catch the moment when people care they can do that; fine, whatever; but it seems like software built on real long term service timescales should get a lot more credit than it does. Absent specific criticisms; it's not "eww, there are people who weren't even born then", it's "the software has been in service for a generation".

All the more if there are a lot of outfits doing the same thing: having some unique oddball legacy thing means having potentially crushing maintenance requirements unless everything was gloriously secure from day 1, which it probably wasn't; but if there is some big mass of enterprise Java 8 why should we call it all eol and scramble rather than just maintaining java 8? Especially when we can do so in software, without some of the vendor and hardware inflexibility you see with things like old school mainframe applications where there's an implied commitment to a single old school mainframe vendor in perpetuity.

It's not elegant; but realistically we are far enough both into the history of computer science and the history of computers-as-hardware-you-can-buy that there's a lot less obvious, low-hanging, progress to be had by going 'modern' relative to the amount of fashion and fad chasing. Especially if (as is the case for a great many people and organizations) the scale of your problem has grown at or below the rate at which hardware advances have made systems not particularly well designed for scalability faster.

Obviously this would require coordinated action, and some people likely have other reasons to want to either poke at or kill legacy applications; but(since all those java versions are solidly post openjdk) I'd be very curious to know how the cost and risk associated with "modernize because java 18 is going eol!" would compare to just...not...having java 18 go eol. Unsexy maintenance project that you'd need to pay to have done, sure; but very plausibly better characterized and lower risk than trying to deal with a lot of the oddball internal accretions that would otherwise need updating; and, depending on how much people have running on java 18, certainly possible that they'll individually spend a fair bit more running the treadmill than it would cost to just keep kicking java 18 down the road until (almost) nobody cares.

My response was specifically to the original poster who, for some reason, was taking a "we are losing the class wars; breed faster!" position rather than the "if you are already losing the class war why would you even think about putting in that much effort and cost so your children can deal with a bad or worse outcome?" position.

It would honestly not surprise me if that is a nontrivial contributing factor: If you aren't emotionally invested in children as an end in themselves the wage and cost of living numbers have done very little to encourage you to see them as affordable since roughly the late 70s(with a combination of substantial stagnation for anyone who is primarily wages rather than capital gains; and such good news as there is mostly confined to people who complete at least undergraduate education and remain in a career track full time) and people who are emotionally invested in children are often willing to go to considerable lengths to try to improve their children's outcomes; but are presumably discouraged by the prospect that they will most likely be downwardly mobile instead.

It's not a surprise that people who want labor, cannon fodder, or taxpayers to be abundant for them are fretting about it; but it's hard to see why most of us should care. Why do things that are good for society when society is pretty overtly disinterested in being good for you? You may be able to squeeze the current labor market a bit; because people who already exist tend to take the "or starve" possibility pretty seriously when deciding what they will put up with; but if you offer nothing but the demand for a toiling underclass to encourage people to have children that's not terribly compelling, either for those who aren't interested in sacrificing for children and see hitting education and career hard as increasingly existential or for people who would sacrifice a lot to better things for their children but are more or less accurate in seeing it as highly unlikely that they will be able to.

I'm rather doubtful of the plan's viability; but if they are willing to justify the company name by chaining Bezos to a rock so a bird can eat his liver repeatedly I could be persuaded.

I'm not sure what confuses you here: everybody has an EoL, age related if nothing else, and they don't live on either through their class or their descendants. What do you gain by throwing more poor bastards into a sucker's game when you could just not?