Well, it's a survey so I'll add my YES to the headline question. I got fed-up with ChatGPT but quite like Gemini. I mostly use it for things I could probably do myself but just don't want to invest the time getting it close to right. Last night it was comparing the output signal level on two RF transmitters that should have the same designed output power but one is reported received better than the other. Seeing a 10dBm difference between their output on a Spectrum analyzer I knew the well received one has more power output than the less well received one. So I just asked Gemini to give me a number of Watts from dBm. I know how to do the math but it was just quicker to see the approximately 10dBm difference expressed using the actual peak dBm values from the spectrum analyzer as 3 Watts versus 26 Watts for the transmitters. I'll probably do two tone PEP measurements in a similar way today to verify it. Gemini has also been good when asking for an example developing with something like Qt and an object or feature of an object I've not used before, or even being more confident about basic C/C++ assumptions, CPU behavior: For linux, in c++ with Qt 6.8 show me an example of layered drawing on a QGraphicsScene (I have to convet it for my use case but it saves me hours of reading just to get started, and I do turn to the docs but with a better undersdtanding than NULL of what I'm reading); or reminding (re-assuring) myself that no element of a for() loop is executed if the conditional expression is false at the start of the loop; what allignment is required for the destination of the Intel x86_64 movaps instruction (the cause of the customer's random SIGSEGV verified from the answer and the registers seen in gdb at the point of failure). I have asked Gemini to write a loan contract between me as the lender and a couple I loaned some money to but I read it in full, it was basic but functional, so used it because it set limits in my favor I wouldn't have thought of. I have epilepsy and and have asked many times for what I'd call starting information on very detailed topics of interest to me (what are sodium channels; and what are potassium channels) which gave me enough starter information to use when reading search results that are published medical papers and improved my understanding, so that I know at my next neurology visit I'll be asking if it's most likely I have an untreatable (probably genetic) EAAT-2 protein disfunction that results in periodic (28 day) EAAT-1 protein build up that becomes easier to trigger into seizures as it builds up. I liked the beautifully hedged answer to does playing soduko rugularly reduce loss of mential function with age and opted to play crosswords as well based on the hedge. Yes, I have asked why the sky is blue a few times on ChatGPT and Gemini, but I already knew the reason. Alexa probably isn't really AI by it's own admission in answers but I haven't been able to resist asking "Alexa, what's that smell" a few times.

Well said, the sole thing I used to feel I was missing from the Windows arena was MSFS until I tried FlightGear on my linux systems earlier this year. I ordered a USB joystick and throttle lever the same day and have never looked back. The Airbus A320 simulation in FlightGear seems a thing of beauty to me. Believe it or not the only thing Windows has that my sole use platforms of linux, Android and iPod don't have is the Android/Wear Watch Face Studio program for making watch faces for Wear based smart watches, but I really must try it on WINE before calling that a failure. Winwhat? I never use it and don't feel I'm missing out on anything. /SingleUseCase

AI is in dire need of a bot that speaks at once to groups of people together with shared problems, has a welcome prompt that is the text "this machine kills fascists" and instead of telling each person how easily they can be the winner over all others helps the group use their combined capacity because it's greater than the sum of their individual capacities. openFolk AI, it's got to happen or we will all just retreat further into our own corners dying assured that we beat over everyone else. It's easy to do because the answer my friends is "blowing in the wind". Hippocrates is probably turning in his grave at the headline news story for this and it can only get worse in medicine (and other life necessities) unless we work to put it away somewhere in it's own corner of irrelevance and find an AI model that more brings us together as communities instead of isolating each individual of us. /Offered seriously with intentional sardonicism and satire.

Agreed, I did claim the tax rebates for installing my rooftop solar, garage battery system and high UV reflective windows but the tax rebates were never a consideration when deciding to install any of them. I had the available savings to pay cash, wanted to stop paying up to an unknown few hundred dollars per-month for grid power, i.e. I simply re-position existing savings into my property, raising it's resale value and it permits me to deposit more to savings per-month thereafter from reduced power bills. My background usage is 0.5kWh (1706.07 BTU) and peaks at about 2kWh (6824.28 BTU) for minutes long periods based on home appliance usage. I admit I now use all the data from the IOT parts and schedule appliance usage to minimize grid consumption. I have a dual-flow electricity meter and submit a varying amount into the grid up-to about 4kWh (13648.6 BTU) that obviously varies all daylight hours. I run off the battery for most of the night and get about 97% self-sufficiency from April to October with regular electricity bills of around $10 per-month (cost of having the meter) even running my air-conditioner in the hottest days. The new windows should reduce that usage and seem to help reduce winter gas bills as well, the final few should be installed in the next month, they were also paid cash from savings with an assumed improvement in my home value (though probably not the whole cost of the windows) but reduced monthly costs meaning more avaailable for me to save per-month thereafter. The peak winter electricity bills are about $40 because the heating source is LNG and electricity just runs the fan on short, lower light days (winter heating runs mostly at night anyway). The power company chooses to pay a lot less for received energy from my solar system than it charges for delivered energy I use from the grid. I'll probably double the size of my battery system and maybe add a few more solar panels some time after the last of the high UV reflecttive windows. I'll do it regardless of tax rebates, aiming to hit 100% self-sufficiency for electricity usage at least.

Add creator/owner/intended-audience identity as a property of the entry in the file-system directory and that isn't necesarrilly true, a single English/Western language speaker would more sensibly tend to use Temp1, Temp2, Temp3, Temp4; or tempA, tempB, tempC, tempD; etc. Add multiple user access to the directory with no restriction on the language spoken by any user and your point isn't necessarilly true. A better approach is that those properties exist outside of the filename itself, though still as directory properties for the file (filename metadata) but we are effectively shuttered by the idea of a fopen() function taking only one argument that specifies the file's entire identity as a filespec or filename. Why shouldn't it be possible to open file "Temp", "English", "UK"; then open "tEmp", "German" "CH"; then open "teMp", "German", "DE"; then open "temP"; "Lemerig", "VU". Where each of the four filenames means something in it's native language/country/audience combination while appearing nonsense text in the other three language/country cases. All the time having a desktop file manager that shows the four files as paired icons, one representing the content type and another being an icon of the flag for the country of the creator/owner. I should have no care that the Lemerig language has a meaningful word spelled temP (which isn't a true example of Lemerig, but illustrates a big part of what the problem really is). At the tty console it would require a dir/ls command to show the language/country information as part of the output in order for each filename to be properly understood. Obviously, I agree you are probably correct about the four names you used but the problem doesn't end at such a concise set and there will be combinations that come very close to having meaning in other language/country combinations, perhaps differing and even opposing meanings. Who am I to say that Temp is not the exact line representation of a very personally directed abusive swear word in the Lemerig language on the island of Vanatu.

Isn't the proper terminology for this known as "circling the drain"?

Amen! Just one example, a few years ago I bought a scientific calculator noting the package description of the "lifetime software license" it came with and quite decent software that requires the calculator firmware be maintained if it developed, "tear here to accept the license terms and access the installation CD/DVD". I noted they recently upgraded to python for user coding on the calculator and upgraded. The manufacturer just dumped using the lifetime license with no regard for anyone that had already purchased and agreed to the existing terms. They switched every user to a four year plan with no negotiation, "we don't use a lifetime license any longer". I called to negotiate and they gave me an extra four years...at least I expect to retire in 8 years.

Yes, that's the point of the OP and I agree with you. My points were only about the presumption of guilt in a case where it could be shown that the accused had used an AI system to gain sufficient knowledge to commit a crime. Which is a different matter from the OP's point but the OP and my point raise substantial questions that will have to be answered in court regarding whether an AI system can found liable in a crime (defamation in the OP's point) but aiding and abbetting in my point.

I love Hubert Dreyfus... I only discovered him after Googling for examples of philosophiical research into artificial intelligence. There's a greap wikipedia article specifically on his views on artificial intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Goog luck to all AI research but I suspect it wiill utilmately fail as a concept if it doesn't heavily use actual critical philosophers during design.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the following is tested in multiple courts. The question being whose mind is guilty? If you take a large pot, pour in all the world's published content without verifying any of it in a qualitative manner; stir it for a while using your own dedicated recipe then, offer someone a spoonfull on demand and what they get is the result of a source with mens rea that enables the user to commit a crime then what party is the guilty one: The original source; the user of the AI generated result; the chefs who made the AI soup; or the AI system itself? I suspect a final judgement will fall partly against the user committing the crime and partly against the AI system itself. It was plainly "influenced" into giving a particular answer using the word of a guilty mind; therefore it "believed" the guilty mind as the correct answer to the user's question even if the user had a guilty mind with intent in the question asked, thus AI enabled the AI user much as a human mentor might. I imagine it would require some epansion of legal interpretation for terms like "mind", "influence" and "belief". Or, maybe to put it a better way, there needs to be a lot of study of AI systems performed by university departments of Philosophy before we can trust assurances provided by university departments of Computer Science (where we can infer AI business implementations are generally constructed by computer scientists or similar technology experts and product designs have little or no philosophical input).

1768 actually I believe. However, the point about testing for proof the decimal digits of pi are or are not randomly distributed is one of the major reasons for doing this work (behind testing the performane of supercomputers and the arithmetic operations, particularly multiplication, on them).

The purpose is not to simply to get as many digits of pi as possibe for any calculation purpose. It's also intended to discover if pi is truly irrational, i.e. is not the ratio of any two integers. Also, I believe to prove pi is also a transcendental number, from Wkipedia: "In mathematics, a transcendental number is a real or complex number that is not algebraic – that is, not the root of a non-zero polynomial of finite degree with rational coefficients. The best-known transcendental numbers are and e" I think "known" in that statement is truly "assumed" at least case of pi and the purpose of calculating it to more and more digits is to discover if the assumption is correct: i.e. proof. Performing such poofs for pi on paper is really slow in comparison to the reported experiment. One use of an irrational number today is that any block of digits or sequence generated by exression (e.g. digitsm 3rd, 9th, 81st...) within it and of suitable length makes a useful cryptographic key since no other block of the same length contains the same digits in the same order. It's alredy been posted that a block of a few digits repeats three times, that's not sufficient to make it irrational and ony requires one extra digit to be a pattern that doen't repeat. So you can't just test if chunks of pi as keys will de-crypt data because your likelihood of guessing the key takes up to the same time as the reported experiment for any sequence and infinitely longer for a sequence of digit positions created by expression. As understand it. Take a simple example, you want an 8 digit cryptographic key. Generate the sha256 checksum of two word you can remember (already the sha256 numbers will probably never be guessed). First sum the digits in the first sha256 and use it as a "base". Now take the square of each (or evey other) digit in the other sha256 as a "position" and use the digit of pi at at the base plus that position in pi 8 times to get your final key. Using pi to a few hundred digits you will get a key that no-one could hope to guess in any useful time other than by pure luck. But if pi is not irrational, multiple guesses would return the key by pure luck.

...go on strike if you are worried by the idea of repeating the same idea but asking for TV show script lines in the style of named person when that named person is yourself and you work as a TV writer. Currently the overhead is lower to ask the writer for the lines but it will get easier to the point where you can give it text documents with multiple questions and drive the authoring from there without much real invention involved beyond the broadest definition of the scenario involved. Which suggests to me one of the biggest AI problems, the model used is limited to current knowledge so there has to be a space for true human invention or we will just rot in AI results. Although I note you can ask the following of ChatGPT and get a sensible result even though Google finds no results for "Zangam Zamoophsky": Using the writing style of Zangam Zamoophsky write four rhyming lines of verse about sunrise?

what about asking "Please provide a paragraph of text in the style of __author__ about a child's feelings toward a good father". Repeat for the style of __author2__ and an abusive father. I just tried the following successfully on ChatGPT: Write a four line poem in the style of Bob Dylan's acoustic period about the hard life of a teenage boy trying to find a job after high school? If you repeat the same four more times giving slightly different conditions for the content (finding a wife, raising a child, growing old, dying) and put it to folk style music. Have you infringed Bob Dylan's copyright? It's fairly an open legal question for now. If you know the work of both songwriters give the single case of finding a job as above. The repeat but change the songwriter details to Billy Bragg... the difference in the results is striking when the only difference between the two questions is the given identity of the songwriter! If you don't know the songwriters I tried pick any two whose work you are familiar with (spell their names correctly). Now pick a book author and repeat similar questions several thousand times asking for a paragraph of text each time all asked for in the style of a single published author and compile the results, perhaps with a little editing, then publish as a book in your own name... It's an undecided but legitimate question and the answer isn't on /. I have t say I side with the thinking that there is some infingement of copyright for the models I've just described.

Thus by our own actions we create the tools to limit human intellectual capacity to a peak that can't be surpassed. The rising of a process of recycling what is already known has begun and will eventually answer all questions... These tools and process are named artificial intelligence (AI). Seriously, I just hope decent news agencies stick to reporting what's actually happening in the world, universities stick to experimenting as part of the course and the places on the web that truly are references continue to be updated by those with actual knowledge. Otherwise the first paragraph is true. AI ends human intellectual progress.