A small percentage of a few billion people is a big problem.

Yes, regardless of whether their name is Muhammed or Breivik.

Why not here? Because for starters, humanism isn't a religion (and I say that as a humanist). It's a philosophical stance within atheism. And atheism is the absence of religion** (it's literally right there in the name), not a religion. You can't claim "religious" exemptions as an atheist. What this person actually wants is a philosophical exemption, akin to, say, a vegetarian wanting an exemption from having to cook meat at a restaurant or whatnot.

** - Well, except for those atheists who worship Athe.

Yeah, nothing insular about the Amish.

(Oh wait...)

Quite. Scientists and researchers have been using the term AI to describe this collection of technologies and algorithms since the 1950s. The field has (arguably) made great strides recently. Most of the current scientists and researchers have been perfectly content to continue to call it AI. But no! Now we're going to let somebody who was born stupid, dedicated his life to staying stupid, and now is seemingly in advanced stages of dementia tell us what we should call this field? What a bunch of bootlickers these tech execs are. I hope Trump has the good sense to walk through a cattle field before he asks these losers to get their tongues out.

PowerBook Pismo: Display cable sliced by Airport antenna connector. PowerBook Wallstreet: Hard drive connector board attached by a single screw that didn't hold it in place, causing constant disconnects. The iBook G3 graphics chip disaster. So many mechanical design mistakes, so few column inches to write about them.

You mean 24x7 solar power? Now calculate how many centuries an on-earth data center could go, even with having to use batteries at night, even with replacing the backup batteries every couple of years, before the cost would equal the cost of a single launch. In other words, that's not an actual advantage, at least in practice.

Besides, you can't repair or upgrade the hardware when it is in space, which is such a colossal disadvantage that the advantages would have to be almost unimaginably great to balance that out.

The only theoretical advantage I can think of for a satellite would be that if someone launched one from international waters, if some random government wanted it to stop existing or stop doing something, they'd have to launch something to destroy the satellite, because from a legal perspective, it wouldn't be within their jurisdiction.

But in practice, as far as I know, nobody is launching anything into orbit from international waters, so this is entirely theoretical, at least right now.

Headline from 1845.

Everything is recycled periodically in tech. Broken hinges (and broken wires in hinges) on Mac laptops were a big problem 20 to 25 years ago, so that's just about right on schedule. :-)

My initial reflex, probably like a lot of people, was "I'm going to go rewatch my favorite Picard-centric episodes from TNG", but then I changed my mind. I've been meaning to watch "I, Claudius" for long while now. I'll be doing that. I'll get to watch a Patrick Stewart performance which is totally new to me. Then I'll go find other things he's done that I haven't seen.

Agreed. If you don't know what you're doing it's hard to even ask for the right thing or know what's possible. For example: I'm currently developing a system that uses a local AI to help debug internal issues. The initial incarnations of it were very slow to start up each command; clearly, it wasn't doing proper KV caching and was having to prefill every turn; it required patches on the llama.cpp fork and our API wrapper, and also adjusting the system prompt to keep variable content at the end. But if you have no idea about KV caching issues, how do you even know something is wrong with the backend, let alone what to tell the AI to fix? You'll end up deciding you need to upgrade the GPU instead.

(That said: "lovingly handcrafted" code is a hilarious phrase that should give any developer who's ever worked on a big corporate software project the giggles, and also, these software devs are clearly people angry at knowing they're going to be let go looking for revenge by badmouthing their boss to the press)

I remember the Internet before Eternal September. You need to go back at least that far.

Not a financial person either, but wouldn't writing it down mean that a company no longer considers it to have value? Is there something unique to the hardware they use for search-specific AI that prevents it from being leased out as part of Google Cloud or being used to run other teams' models?

Escape from Pluto is much easier, and the Pluto-Charon distance is 1/20th of the Earth-Moon distance.

Free speech has never been free as in beer, or at least not at any meaningful volume level. Talking to a single person was free, but that's not going to spread your ideas very far or very quickly. In the early days, you paid scribes, but that would cost you money. Later, the printing press brought the costs down, but you still needed money. Radio and TV made it possible to reach even more people more quickly, but at a significantly nonzero cost.

The Internet is no different in that regard. In theory, you can always spin up your own server and post anything you want to. But that won't guarantee that anybody is going to actually visit your site. To get eyes, you'll still have to buy ads, etc.