...that there's a LOT of minerals and other nutrients in food, only a fraction of which are produced from chemicals in fertilisers, O2, and CO2. If you produce too much with too little consideration of the impact on the soil, you can produce marvellous dust bowls but eventually that's ALL you will produce.

There's a lot of stuff that is on the Internet that doesn't end up in AIs, either because the guys designing the training sets don't consider it a particular priority or because it's paywalled to death.

So the imbalance isn't just in languages and broader cultures, it's also in knowledge domains.

However, AI developers are very unlikely to see any of this as a problem, for one very very important reason --- it means they can sell the extremely expensive licenses to those who actually need that information, who can then train their own custom AIs on it. Why fix a problem where the fix means your major customers pay you $20 a month rather than $200 or $2000? They're really not going to sell ten times, certainly not a hundred times, as many $20 doing so, so there's no way they can skim off the corps if they program their AIs properly.

Let's take a look at software sizes, for a moment.

UNIX started at around 8k, and the entire Linux kernel could happily sit in the lower 1 megabyte of RAM for a long time, even with capabilities that terrified Microsoft and Apple.

The original game of Elite occuped maybe three quarters of a 100k floppy disk and used swapping and extensive use of data files to create a massive universe that could be loaded into 8k of RAM.

On a 80386SX with 5 megabytes of RAM (Viglens were weird but fun) and a 20 megabyte hard drive, running Linux, I could simultaneously run 7 MMORGs, X11R4, a mail server, a list server, an FTP server, a software router, a web server, a web cache, a web search engine, a web browser, and stil have memory left over to play Netrek, without slowing anything down.

These days, that wouldn't be enough to load the FTP server, let alone anything else.

On the one hand, not everything can be coded to SEL4 standards (although SEL4, by using Haskell as an initial language to develop the core and the proofs, was able to cut the cost of formal programming to around 1% of the normal value). On the other hand, a LOT of space is gratuitously wasted.

Yes, multiple levels of abstraction are a part of the problem. Nothing wrong with abstraction, OpenLook is great, but modern abstraction is mostly there due to incompetent architecture on previous levels and truly dreadful APIs. And, yes, APIs are truly truly dreadful if OpenLook is the paragon of beauty by comparison.

Nothing naïve or foolish here at all. This is well informed intention. The intention leads to GULAGs for the likes of you, and your wrong-thinking ways. That's what rsilvergun and all its ilk dream of and strive for, as we see in the UK.

Dubious spying claims? Say it isn't so!

One wonders about how many thousands of stories there have been right here on slashdot about this or that bit of software, hardware or service supposedly wrecking democracy with its home phoning and data collection. But let the cost be less cut rate grey market hardware for the buying, and all such concerns become "dubious!"

If not for double standards, we'd have no standards at'll.

Ironic. A little while ago there was a big thread about dieselgate. All sorts of slashsnotters creaming over cases and fines for violations of big government regulations.

Now big government enforcing regulations is unwelcome when it comes to cut rate electronic junk...

Here is my surprised face :|

The correct oxen must be gored, and the correct pockets must be filled with the correct amounts. It takes a long time for The Great and The Good to plan the feast.

Sure. And if the government cretins would forego a lawyer or two and instead hire an actual technician tasked to actually verify the performance of regulated products once or twice a decade, you'd actually have some means of keeping the business cretins under control. But time and time again, whether it's Madoff or dieselgate or Boeing, we find no functioning technicians anywhere in the whole, bloated clown show: just a bunch of lawyers covering asses and gleefully dancing through revolving doors.

Business cretins will be cretins. That is a metaphysical certitude. Even if you throw enough of them in a GULAG to cripple you're economy, the survivors will still be cretins. If you want compliance, the only hope you have is diligent regulators. When (not if) they fail, be sure your government-worship hasn't blinded you to their culpability.

The solution is easy. WiFi 6 is only just starting to come out in the marketplace. If TP-Link hijacks the standard development procedure, solidifies a workable WiFi 8 quickly, and manufacturers/users in Europe, Asia, and Oceana all start using WiFi 8, skipping WiFi 7 entirely, the US will be left with an inferior standard that only they have gear for, with no option to use WiFi 8 for many more years because the only manufacturers making it can't sell in the US.

"They" do. The Great Recession debt bubble was immediately proceeded by luminaries such a Barney Frank self-assuredly denying any problems, and characterizing the pesky noticers as misguided.

The AI bubble is end stage. LLMs are essentially next level search engines and, while powerful, their power is finite, especially since the training material is already exhausted. Further, there is little value in redundant implementations: there is no need for a dozen plus distinct tier 1 LLMs all exhibiting approximately the same performance.

So a shakeout is imminent. We will not be carpeting the country with nuclear reactors because Sam Altman. That's actually a shame: if a bunch of reactors were built for the wrong reason, at least we'd have the reactors when it's all over.

You don't think policies like VAT on private school fees and pushing up business taxes instead of personal ones play well with the typical Labour voter?

They're cratering in the polls anyway for a host of other reasons, and I suspect Starmer is already toast anyway for a host of other reasons (though it's significantly harder in practice for Labour to replace a leader they're not happy with than it is for the Tories), but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that some of these policies are being chosen because of their political alignment.

[citation needed]

Now you're engaging in a regression chain: If false positives are high it's useless. And if it's not useless, it helps attackers. And if it doesn't help attackers...

Do you have any rational basis for this claim? If there were 101 reports, and 51 were bogus, the discovery only 50 legitimate flaws in a widely used and mature code base is somehow an unworkable process?

I believe we're witnessing the emergence AIDS. AI derangement syndrome.

They appear to be playing heavily on the politics of envy. Look at some of their education policies, for example, or the way they treat small businesses and the people who run them. They don't seem to want to pull up the less fortunate if they can be busy pulling down the more fortunate. It's not a good look if you actually want a successful economy, but it plays well to their base.

I agree with you that they seem to be all over the place in policy generally, and after trying to give them a fair chance in the early months, I now have a fairly low opinion of them (with the odd exception in Cabinet who does actually appear to be at least recognising the real problems and trying to do something about them, which I can respect even while thinking little of their party politicians and government as a whole).

You're right about the investment culture as well, but presumably if we're talking about entrepreneurs who have already been successful and are looking to move elsewhere, that's of limited relevance unless they're planning to start at least one more business after they arrive, so in this particular debate, I doubt that is such a major issue.

While we're hardly Russia, our democratic and stabilisation credentials are looking more shaky than ever as well. Our electoral system produces results very far from proportional. One of our two traditional main political parties is now essentially irrelevant. The other, which currently holds power, is breaking all the wrong records and is widely expected to suffer severe losses at the next election already, barely a year into their term. Waiting in the wings (and currently leading by a very wide margin in the polls) is the nascent far right populist party that has become the default protest vote. It looks scarily like that party might actually be pulling so far ahead (whether thanks to their own merits or, like the present incumbents before the last election, because the government of the day is so unpopular) that even with the usual reversion towards traditional voting patterns when a real election happens, they might still win. And the prospects of what happens next in that timeline are truly terrifying, particularly for anyone who isn't a white British citizen from birth.