I don't bother with romance novels (they're usually about abusers being rewarded for being abusers, and not really my cup of tea even when they aren't), but AI is not great at translation, is terrible at metaphor, and is horrific at writing.
If they're going to use AI for auto-translation, then I think the best thing they can do is pay for the first 30 sessions of therapy needed afterwards.
Over-reliance on an unreliable source is stupid.
Britain has plenty of brilliant minds and is more than capable of building services equal, or superior, to those in the US. It honestly isn't hard - I've worked in the US tech sector and their minds are nowhere near up to scratch. Those that are are overworked, underpaid, and essentially beholden to their employer because the US is a "good ol' boy's club" where executives abuse power and authority on a regular basis. This is not a good way to run a reliable, competent, business.
Hell, give me the seed money and I'll set up an damn cloud provider that can beat the carp out of those in the US. I've been in this business longer than most of the techies working on the US cloud infrastructure but I'm also not blinded by the naive assumptions and political intrigues that have defined the sector thus far.
We passed Idiocracy some time back. We're now in a region where satirists and humourists are simply no longer able to function without sounding saner.
True, but to be fair, the scientists, engineers, and scholars are largely fleeing the country, the tech industry is in a massive slump (agriculture is the only sector growing jobs according to the last reliable official figures), and there's a political need to create the impression that the country isn't in a bad way.
I'm reminded of all the BMW cars I've previously owned where it was often said "If there's no oil under it, there's no oil in it"...
Ahh, yes... German cars. If every decent car company does something with 6 parts, the Germans will find a way to make it require 27 parts. All of which are horribly expensive and require specialized tools to install. Or they'll put the timing system at the back of the engine so that a routine service item becomes an engine-out procedure. Garbage cars driven by people who don't know any better.
The space station leak reminds me of an old trick for a leaky cooling system in a car: put pepper into the radiator.
The little flecks of ground pepper get washed around the cooling system and eventually block tiny cracks in the radiator or other places. Putting a raw egg into a *cold* radiator will do the same thing; when the engine gets warm it cooks and blocks the leak. Both of these tricks have saved me on the road, they do work. But they are temporary and you need to thoroughly flush the cooling system after the repair.
I wonder if the Space Station has had the same sort of thing happen - airborne dust blocking a leak?
This is horrifying, terrifying, and sadly well-known even to those who superficially monitor such things.
Popular media: More than one US film/tv studio has "lost" or "suffered a mysterious fire" in un-digitised archives, destroying the lot, during battles to preserve. The BBC sued Bob Monkhhouse for preserving material it destroyed. In Britain, it has been no better. Fans of the British TV series "The Avengers" can only see old episodes because armies of previous fans descended on rubbish tips and, at great risk to themselves, collected as much film as possible.
General history: Places like the John Ryland's Library and the British Library have suffered with rescuing archives at risk of becoming submerged or destroyed by mould. The Archimedes Palimpsest was partially destroyed by one collector filling in the pictures with coloured pens and by another collector allowing the book to be severely damaged by mould.
The National Archives have mysteriously "lost" a great many files over the years and are only digitising those they've retained at an incredibly slow rate. I know because I've personally forked out several hundred to get just two scanned, all because politicians far prefer frippery to archiving. We've absolutely no idea how many of the manuscripts held in other archives are still in usable condition because nobody bothers to check.
It's not just limited to archives, of course. The US has, over the last couple of decades, demolished numerous buildings within the US that are over 300 years old because malls produce profit and ancient structures don't. (They also then complain they have no history...) The Space Shuttle is to be taken to Texas for a PR stunt, which will require it being dismantled and those things aren't designed for that. There is no guarantee any of it will survive the journey. All because PR matters and preservation does not. Other countries? The Louvre... well... probably best not to talk about that utter disgrace. In Egypt, 3000 year old gold artefacts are routinely melted down so the conservators can pocket some extra cash.
It's at times like this that Kenny Everett's general comes to mind.
For 17 years before Oct 7, Gaza lived under an Israeli-imposed land, air, and sea blockade that restricted food, fuel, medicine, movement, and trade, widely described as collective punishment of 2+ million civilians.
Or, maybe because Palestinians keep on attacking Israelis (and everyone else) in the name of their Pedophile Prophet - peace be upon the illiterate 7th-century caravan robber and warlord - so Israelis rightly have no interest in incorporating them into civil society.
clean water became scarce,
...because the Palestinians were digging the water pipes out of the ground and turning them into makeshift rockets...
electricity was limited to hours a day,
...electricity and desalinated water which were both being provided by Israel because the Palestinians are more concerned with appeasing their Pedophile Prophet than with getting their shit together and building power plants and desalination plants...
making Gaza unlivable.
Gaza is unlivable because of the Gazans. Somalia is unlivable because of the Somalis. All of the Muslim world is unlivable because Islam is an evil ideology. The Jewish people (People of Judea) were established in Israel 6,000 years ago and laid the groundwork for the establishment of Western Civilization, approximately 4,500 years before a self-important warlord and pedophile declared himself to be the messenger of something called allah.
And what is allah? God is supposed to be omniscient. So He tells us to call Him yud-hey-vav-hey... but then after meeting the Pedophile Prophet, He changes His mind and wants to be called allah? An omniscient being didn't know in advance what He wants to be called and changes His mind about His own name? This is NOT the God of the Jewish and Christian people.
You're free to believe whatever you want. But when what you believe promotes death for the sake of forcing your beliefs on others, it's time for your ideology to take a long and hard look in the mirror.
This is what Israel is fighting. How to beat your wife - according to Palestinian TV.
There are two kinds of people in the world: there are those who you can negotiate with, and there are those who fly airplanes into buildings. You cannot negotiate with this. You cannot make peace with this. The only thing they understand is being completely and utterly obliterated, and then playing the victim.
I wouldn't wipe my ass with the Palestinian flag. Doing so would be disrespectful to my feces.
Well, the obvious ones:
No built-in instruction-level or block-level parallelism
Array/vector operations are highly inefficient
Multiprocessing is pretty feeble
No CSP, you have to use OS primitives which are often unsafe
No formal contract system, best you can do is show statements don't do anything bad, you can't show functions do what you intend
Heavy software verification is difficult to impossible
That reminds me, I should really invent a language called "browns" so that Microsoft can put a # at the start.
On the other hand, Microsoft trying to write an OS in Rust will reveal absolutely every defect present in the language.
Unless they write their own, which is quite likely as they'd rather have defects they can ignore.
Abandon hope, all ye who press enter here.
Now, yes, there are predictions that you could get a supermassive black hole launched into space, especially during a galaxy merger if the velocity of the smaller black hole exceeds the escape velocity of the combined galaxy.
But I'd be wary of assuming that it's a launched black hole, unless we can find the merger it comes from. There may be ways for such a black hole to form that cause the stars to be launched away rather than the black hole being flung, and if a galaxy isn't rotating fast enough to be stable, one could imagine that a sufficiently small galaxy was simply consumed by its central black hole. Both of these would seem to produce exactly the same outcome, if all we have is the black hole itself and a velocity.
I'm not going to say either of these is likely in this case, or that astronomers haven't examine them (they almost certainly have), but rather that we should be cautious until we've a clearer idea of what the astronomers have actually been able to determine or rule out.
No, the executive tells the civil service what it needs to do, but the civil service is wholly independent.
You do not appear to understand what a republic or a democracy is, so I'll ignore the last sentence.
"Independent" does not mean unaccountable to the people. The President is independent of Congress, and vice versa, but both are accountable to the people. Well, the current president doesn't seem to think so, but legally he is.
The civil service is not a part of the executive but is a co-equal branch.
Innovation is hard to schedule. -- Dan Fylstra
