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let us spin up virtual machines, so we'll create fake miniature virtual machines that all include massive amounts of out-of-date dependencies in an independent manner so that they're obfuscated, locked into older version that we're "not allowed to run", and which become a management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.

"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.

It's true, seifs are for ease of reading ... but so is Calibri. However, I believe Calibri was created for ease of reading on screens, while this article talks about documents on letterhead. So it's possible the choice of Calibri was misguided to begin with. Furthermore, according to the article, the number of “accessibility-based document remediation cases” – which I take to mean instances where somebody requests a document be reformatted for accessibility reasons – has not declined. So he's saying that, while this is a purely subjective aesthetic choice, the original change to Calibri never helped anything anyway.

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?

Everything is gambling now.

Meanwhile, the most preventable of diseases are becoming commonplace.

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)

But at no point are you REQUIRED to eat nothing but ultra-processed foods either. It's entirely optional.

Of course some will be cheaper, but that's like saying "Ah well, we can afford to smoke the PREMIUM cigarettes, which are healthier" - it's WORSE.

And the listing of what's in your food is a million times better than what's in your cigarette or your vape, for instance.

Allergies and preferences also don't come into this. If you have an allergy, you can't just force every food to be hypoallergenic to you when most people aren't allergic.

Sure the cheap crap burger isn't as good as the premium steak. Obviously. But this is then trying to sue the burger maker... even though what they are doing is within all the guidelines. And ultimately the result of that is... no burger for you. Can't afford steak? Oh well. You're not eating today then.

But yet cigarettes are still legal?

Sorry, but you have an enormous battle on your hands to prove anything. All FDA-approved ingredients, all approved food-industry practices, the expectation that consumers don't just live off one food item and exercise some common sense in their portioning and overall diet, etc....

It took decades to get close to tobacco bans and that was clear and obvious evidence of not just knowing it caused cancer but that it did so hugely significantly and then the entire thing was surpressed for decades. Good luck proving it to anything like the same standard, and we still haven't banned that yet either!

This is just a way to make the cheapest of available food more expensive, ultimately.

I post every now and then, but there isn't much to talk about with the old folks 'round here these days. Eventually every comments section looks like a Thanksgiving dinner! Most of my rambles are now on Reddit now.

Keep sharp!

And?

*what NOT everyone can afford to do...