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Comment It certainly has that capacity (Score 5, Insightful) 191

I gave it two prompts this morning on topics in my field, and it gave me 1000 words each.
Mostly accurate with a few small errors. Since it was my field, I caught them.
If I were a student looking for a fast way out of an assignment, I likely would not know enough to catch them.
And if I were a student looking for a fast way out, I probably would also not bother to do the critical thinking needed to vet the results.
It probably makes low effort learners march in place.
It probably does nothing to people who bank on their own originality and abilities to analyze, evaluate and synthesize.
Seems to have some value in asking here is my work, did I miss anything? And further evaluating.
As you might with a colleague or editor.
But take everything with a grain of salt.

Comment being first does not always mean being best. (Score 1) 68

They were *late* to make a phone, and look how it turned out.
They were *late* to make a tablet and look how it turned out.
Siri is still more Knowledge Navigator than HAL.
Personally, Iâ(TM)d so far rather be handed a known reference by Siri than the synthetic stuff that pops out at the top of Google these days.
It may turn out to take an Apple amount of time to get everyday AI right. The current headline players still seem to be shaking everything out. Expert systems and machine learning is helping greatly. The rest seems not exactly ready for prime time or for a typical user to depend on.

Comment Re: Simple... (Score 1) 199

"Weather alerts, flood, tornado, etc. should be able to wake people up."

They're already *able* to wake people up. What do you do about people not wanting to be woken up who silence their phones? Do you pass legislation making it illegal for phones to be able to silence certain alerts? Okay, some people will put their phones somewhere other than their bedside so they can't be woken up. Do you make that illegal, or at some point do you just say "Okay, you know what, this is on you"?

Comment Re: Simple... (Score 1) 199

Okay, all those alerts saved one life.

And all those alerts convinced a bunch of people to silence their alerts, and resulted in lives lost.

Have you bothered to compare the two numbers to see whether the alerts are, in fact, justified? Or do you always only look at a benefit and ignore any associated costs?

Comment Re: So, it has had this much before w/o humans (Score 4, Insightful) 136

Thatâ(TM)s great. But in case youâ(TM)re not joking, Less than 1,000 people have ever gone into space and all of them simply come back when theyâ(TM)re done in months. We have forgotten how to land things on the moon, and in fact when we were good at it, we only managed to land two people six times for three days or less. Mars? Only one person wants to live there. Fine. Let him. Moving to currently uninhabited places on earth means recreating nearly all of the infrastructure of all the existing cities. Good luck with that. In the US it took 250 years to create the current infrastructure. Generously 100 years for the current generation. How about maybe we just cut back on some things? Never mind that the people who are A-Ok with the cause of the pollution have a conniption every time they see the bill for a federal space flight.

Comment Re: What did HyperCard even do? (Score 3, Informative) 53

Bill required that Apple bundle it with every Mac. The beauty of it was the language. Stacks were made of cards that were made of fields, objects, each of which had a dozen attributes that could be set and all of it could be directed with a simple and straightforward language. Easy, permissive and forgiving structure, still pretty powerful results. We had an external research site for Apple ATG, testing actual use of Apple IIGS vs Mac SE. Along the way, they ported Hypercard to the GS. It was a four hour port. I still have an archive of teacher and student coding projects done in Hypercard. The results of your code were tangible, graphical, and didnâ(TM)t blow up when there were errors. At the time the other k-12 coding options were BASIC, LOGO, Pascal⦠Hypercard was IMHO better for jumpstarting teaching coding than any of those.

https://cancel.fm/stuff/share/...

Comment Call me skeptical, (Score 1) 183

But starship after nine missions has yet to complete a single orbit of the Earth. They then have to perfect unmanned on orbit fuel, transfers, etc., etc. Musk seems to be good at taking existing established technologies, branding them and scaling them up, not so much on the new things. Which really points to sending robots instead of humans. If he wants a vanity project, let him fund it himself.

Comment I am sure they did the math⦠(Score 1) 76

â¦on the failure rates of storage devices and switches, how many multiples of everything you would need to have enough redundancy to make this thing last long enough to make money on itâ¦. Ok, but your SaaS and cloud storage is 15x the cost of your competitors. Yes, but did you consider that yours will be SPACE DATA?

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