All good questions, and I would kind of expect Moxie Marlinspike to not be surprised by them... For example, knowing who pays for the service and uses it is quite different from knowing what information they feed the service and what replies they are getting. I would not mind the first, I would mind the second. And yes, if you do not know what people are doing with your service, they can do illegal things - kind of like Signal does not prevent "right wingers" from using it.

What seems interesting is the desire to create an architecture that keeps the processing truly private.

Good question, I wanted to ask the same... and this being Slashdot, I am hoping for a nice trustworthy answer :)

I come from a European country where every child has been required to learn cursive writing for the last 70 years. We have homeschooled our kids and one of them really suffered while learning to write. Thankfully, we could do what schools typically can't - we just have him another year before trying again, and a year later he learned to write in two weeks. My takeaway? Some children that have below average motor control do not need cursive writing, they just need another year.

Switzerland?

Yes, most of the numbers companies report are available automatically from the accounting software, at least monthly if not more real-time. However, financial statements contain items that aim to give a more relevant picture but are subject to judgment. Examples include likely losses from ongoing court cases, estimates of bad debts, degree of completion for ongoing projects (and therefore items not yet invoiced but already happening) or an updated list of substantial risks. So yes, internal reporting does happen monthly but the numbers are not as precise or solid as required by accounting rules for the "proper" quarterly reports that go out to the public.

Good use case: =COPILOT("These cells contain fulltext feedback we collected about the new coffee machine",A1:A100,"Assign one of these categories next to each comment",D1:D5)

Bad use case: =COPILOT("Take this export from our sales system",A1:AK1000,"give me three names of people who should be promoted. Be careful. Good luck.")

My scientific heart reads: (blah blah) ...Mechanical Turk... (blah blah) and thinks - a representative sample is where good research starts, not big words in the abstract... Wasn't there a recent post about most of these "respondents" actually being AI bots?

You seem to use very strong language when you say "That's called fascism. When the government and business (corporations) are one and the same." Where does that definition originate from? It seems quite simplified and Wikipedia, for example, seems to disagree.

I am not sure it could be done any other way. "AI, write a novel about a proud princess" -> no copyright. "AI, make my new handwritten novel 30 % shorter" -> work is still copyrightable. And yes, it means that lawyers will still need to be involved because there is a million cases in between these extremes.

Correction: regarding the word for homosexuality, you are criticizing human scholars by linking to an Imgur image of a post that complains about how a Greek word was wrongly translated and how that changes the meaning of a verse from Leviticus that was actually written in Hebrew. Also, "arseno-koitai" means literally "male-bed" - the meaning has nothing to do with a child.

While a discussion may be had about the nuances of translating that particular word, I would not use it to show the stupidity of Bible translators.

This. Why does the Slashdot crowd so often fall for headings like "cheese consumption last year was the highest on record" or "Google shares hit a new high" or "warmest year yet" or "never before have so many domestic cats died in a year"? We are still living in a growing world that has inflation - big news :)

Thank you for mentioning this - why, in a tech community such as Slashdot, does everyone assume that age verification assumes that people's identity will be made public?

This 189% increase to the number of AI generated articles (or rougly tripling) actually seems really low as a result of the launch of ChatGPT, no? Perhaps the interesting point is that so many articles were written by AI before the launch of ChatGPT?

How can the value of a business change so quickly? For example when investors assumed that a successful business will grow at 13% per year for 5 years, but then the assumption changes to 10% growth. This may be due to a small change in expected demand, due to new information released about its product, due to a change in interest rates... Small changes in future projections of how much cash the business will generate will accumulate quite a bit to a large change in current business value (today's value of those future cash flows). There are large numbers of large investors who do their homework because that have a lot at stake.

Czech Republic here. Our rail network has one of the highest densities in the world, together with Switzerland. Trains are safe, clean and cheap. High quality apps allow you to find connections (across all providers and modes of public transport) and easily buy tickets that you can cancel for free 15 minutes before departure. Then the apps shows you not just the platform, but a map, real time train delay and any irregularities. Buffet cars have rotating menus by well known chefs but on some trains you get some drinks and food for free, or order over an app and have it brought to your seat. Yes it is true, no showers on sleeper trains, but it still beats driving to the airport, parking there, waiting in various queues for 1.5 hours, arriving to the hotel too late in the night to really enjoy them, and don't get me started on comparing the price of flight + hotel to the price of a train. But hey - loved your joke about cheap station food, that would be me as well :)