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Comment A little late. (Score 1) 88

The organisation, after Musk took over, became a cesspit of far-right extremism, in which anything the far-right "disagreed" with (such as facts and other inconveniences) were censored.

The EFF has, by this announcement, basically said that censorship did not bother them at all, that extremism did not bother them at all, that death threats against the left didn't bother them, that the only thing they were bothered by was the fact that the intellectuals had all left.

That does not give me overwhelming confidence in the EFF as being concerned with freedom.

Comment Re:Sounds like a good problem to have (Score 1) 136

I always dislike the nostalgia for the Classic. When brand new, it was already nostalgia bait and seriously under specced for the price. The original 9" Macs I really like, worked with and owned as a retro computer (I owned a contemporary LC). The Classic I always thought was a cash grab.

Colour Classic...yeah maybe, and again as a retro machine I like them. As a contemporary machine though they were way overpriced for what they were.

Comment Google's AI does not impress. (Score 1) 104

When I test the different AI systems, Google's AI system loses track of complex problems incredibly quickly. It's great on simple stuff, but for complex stuff, it's useless.

Unfortunately.... advice, overviews, etc, are very very complex problems indeed, which means that you're hitting the weakspot of their system.

Comment Re:Billionares Using Our Resources to Replace Peop (Score 1) 47

I've designed a few machines - some rather more insane than others - in meticulous detail using AI. What I have not done, so far, is get an engineer to review the designs to see if any of them can be turned into something that would be usable. My suspicion is that a few might be made workable, but that has to be verified.

Having said that, producing the design probably took a significant amount of compute power and a significant amount of water. If I'd fermented that same quantity of water and provided wine to an engineering team that cost the same as the computing resources consumed, I'd probably have better designs.But, that too, is unverified. As before, it's perfectly verifiable, it just hasn't been so far.

If an engineer looks at the design and dies laughing, then I'm probably liable for funeral costs but at least there would be absolutely no question as to how good AI is at challenging engineering concepts. On the other hand, if they pause and say that there's actually a neat idea in a few of the concepts, then it becomes a question of how much of that was ideas I put in and how much is stuff the AI actually put together. Again, though, we'd have a metric.

That, to me, is the crux. It's all fine and well arguing over whether AI is any good or not (and, tbh, I would say that my feeling is that you're absolutely right), but this should be definitively measured and quantified, not assumed. There may be far better benchmarks than the designs I have - I'm good but I'm not one of the greats, so the odds of someone coming up with better measures seems high. But we're not seeing those, we're just seeing toy tests by journalists and that's not a good measure of real-world usability.

If no such benchmark values actually appear, then I think it's fair to argue that it's because nobody believes any AI out there is going to do well at them.

(I can tell you now, Gemini won't. Gemini is next to useless -- but on the Other Side.)

Comment Re:486 seemed magically advanced in the mid 1990s. (Score 2) 129

The 80186 existed, but the problem was the 80186 integrated various components such as the clock generator and interrupt controller directly into the CPU, but did so in a way that was incompatible with how IBM built the IBM PC. So the 80186 found its way into some not-quite-IBM-compatible computers like some Tandy models and a few other oddballs including some early PDAs. Otherwise, it it was used mostly for embedded applications.

Comment The fines are very small. (Score 3, Interesting) 28

The fines should be proportional to actual damage caused (ie: 100% coverage of any interest on loans, any extra spending the person needed to do in consequence, loss of compound interest, damage to credit rating along with any additional spending this resulted in, and any medical costs that can reasonably be attributed to stress/anxiety). It would be difficult to get an exact figure per person, but a rough estimate of probable actual damage would be sufficient. Add that to the total direct loss - not the money that went through any individual involved, and THEN double that total. This becomes the minimum, not the maximum. You then allow the jury to factor in emotional costs on top of that.

In such cases as this, the statutary upper limit on fines should not apply. SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled that laws and the Constitution can have reasonable exceptions and this would seem to qualify.

If a person has died in the meantime, where the death certificate indicates a cause of death that is medically associated with anxiety or depression, each person invovled should also be charged with manslaughter per such case.

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