Given that hiring locally is the rule, how do engineers end up choosing, and affording to move to, a city in which to find their first job after university?

Flying around the country to apply in person costs a lot of money, and I'd be surprised if most recent graduates can afford that plus the minimum student payment on Walmart wages.

"In-person"? How do most companies afford to fly candidates in for an in-person interview?

Welcome to the same story with AI since its inception. The same nonsense spouted since the 60's and before then, even.

"If only we had more processing/storage/nodes/money/training data/time/scale, I'm *sure* this statistical blackbox will magically become intelligent through some unexplained mechanism never once observed in all of existence."

It's always been the same. It's literally a superstition that has dogged AI and hindered AI research for decades. That there's some kind of "intelligence critical mass" beyond which a system collapses unavoidably into intelligence.

Well... now we know that's bollocks, finally.

Because we've never thrown so much money and resources at it, we've never had the whole of the planet using it and funding it and training it, we've never hit a point before where we'd RUN OUT of training data and now all potential new training data is actually corrupted by... AI output.

All that nonsense might FINALLY be laid to rest within the next few years and people would be so much more reluctant to try this same bullshit again, having cost us TRILLIONS this time around.

Now, maybe, just maybe, academics in the AI field can actually start to study... intelligence. With a view to developing... an artificial analogue to it. Rather than just bashing on statistical black boxes as if they're going to become the next messiah.

It's also been the same way, but with any luck this generation of AI will kill all that bullshit once and for all.

No, that's infraintelligence.

Literally "below" / "beneath".

Containers are for lazy developers who can't be bothered to actually make software that works without a shed load of libraries sucked in.

It makes their lives easy, and the sysadmin's life far more difficult (especially given the range of potential docker formats).

Hey, the sysadmin won't let us spin up virtual machines, so we'll create fake miniature virtual machines that all include massive amounts of out-of-date dependencies in an independent manner so that they're obfuscated, locked into older version that we're "not allowed to run", and which become a management nightmare the second one of them needs updating globally.

But, hey, at least we don't have to comply with "IT" and their ridiculous security protocols.

It'd have to support full-text search by default. Mastodon, last I checked, was still in practice stuck with tags-only search that fails unless both the poster and searcher manage to correctly #GuessTheHashtag. I've read that Mastodon added in version 4.2.0, but I've never got it to work because it's not the default: the posting user has to deliberately seek out how to opt into full-text search before sending posts, and the administrator of the searcher's instance has to spend a lot more money for a much larger VPS with the RAM for Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.

"No DRM" isn't about the legal purchaser.

It means that your book will end up on a thousand torrent / ebook sites by that afternoon.

And, yes, "This move may actually incentivize authors to apply DRM to their ebooks." is nonsense. They're introducing an option to turn it off... by default it's already on.

Of course we *COULD* do it.

But we're absolutely not even trying.

Biosphere 2 (failure) was the last significant attempt, and everything else is "growing cress on the ISS". Given that we've had humans constantly in orbit for decades, and been to the moon, you'd think we'd have SOMETHING working by now. But we don't.

And you missed off oxygen. Pretty important. And do you know how much green matter you need to generate net oxygen with humans around? We're talking lab-based forests of the stuff, something that it would take some time to get up and running reliably (e.g. Biosphere!). How many small logistics issues like that (e.g. generating oxygen rather than just taking it with us like we did on Apollo) are actually viably tested for long-term reliable usage on another planet sufficient to sustain any kind of research population, even? One vent accident and you're in trouble and you better hope you have the CO2 scrubbers (95% of Mars atmosphere) to regenerate it quickly enough.

Let's learn to walk before we announce that we're participating in a worldwide ultra-marathon every day for the next few years.

I keep saying it:

We have not fed one human for one entire day using food produced independently of Earth.

Not one day. Sure, we've played and grown cress on the ISS and all sorts of other nonsense but we've never made FOOD in FOOD quantities to FEED even a single human for a single day.

If you go to Mars, you have to send a regular, consistent, constant stream of food up to them. As well as all the other materials and any experiments you want to do... like soils and hydroponics.

But even with all the kit, we've never fed a human for a day.

And not only does that mean sending resources wherever the planets are in orbit (and Mars suddenly becomes MULTIPLES of its closest distance away from Earth or even the entire other side of the Sun), but you have to coordinate them all to launch, survive MONTHS in space, land near the humans on Mars, in order, and if you MISS even one... people could starve to death.

It could well be that things launched even every month aren't sufficient for any sizeable small "Arctic research station" size population.

We can't even arrange a fucking sandwich on Mars, and you want to talk about colonising it and having scientists roaming around on it?

I get the impression that a company like ADP requires that an employer employ at least some minimum number of employees in an area. Otherwise, ADP appears to fall back to printing paper checks for the employer to mail. I don't know the specifics; I just know that I got ADP paper at one job after a bunch of layoffs, and I got ADP paper when I was the only remote worker in a particular state.

In my experience at my last three jobs (in the midwestern USA), small businesses that don't have enough employees in an area have to print and mail paper payroll checks instead of paying their employees through direct deposit.

It seems Warner can't catch a break. Time Warner's financials were in dire straits in 2004 as well with a load of debt from the AOL merger. That time, they paid their debt by selling Dire Straits and the rest of Warner Music Group to Edgar Bronfman Jr.

I had 64Gb in my last laptop and 24Gb in the laptop before that. That's over 10 years of laptops.

Not once have I ever "run out of RAM".

People talk utter shit about this kind of thing. Sure, it's STUPENDOUS resources compared to my 48K ZX Spectrum had, and I have a screenshot of an "about:blank" tab taking up 24Mb just for the tab alone.

But it's really not that affecting of anyone using a computer, even a power user.

And it still pisses me off that people still sell 8Gb machines in this day and age. Ridiculous. I had THREE TIMES THAT over 10 years ago, and that only because it was the literal motherboard limit.

Buy sensible fucking amounts of RAM, and then you don't care if Chrome takes up 10Gb, it really won't matter at all.

(All numbers in bytes, because the other stuff is a bollocks measurement)

Among widely available fonts under OFL, GNU GPL for Fonts, or other free licenses, not many of them cover the 2,100-odd Jouyou (regularly used) kanji and 1,000 name kanji that BadDreamer mentioned. It's a lot easier to make a font that covers 100-200 characters from two alphabets, such as Chilanka that covers the Latin and Malayalam scripts in a distinctive and dyslexia-friendly handwritten style, than one that covers 3,000 different kanji made of 600 radicals (as iggymanz mentioned) with manually-tuned slight variations to their shapes to make them fit next to each other in a character.