"and Chai Research's Eliza chatbot"
Eliza? How ... um ... original.
One wonders if they asked it "What is a good name for an AI chatbot?" ... and were too fucking ignorant about the history of the field to realize what ELIZA was.
26667 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"I hear he had a bad day yesterday"
Nah. Yesterday he made millions selling fake mugshot hats, t-shirts, stickers and coffee mugs to idiots suckered into his personality cult, most of whom are stupid enough to think that their ~$100 merch purchase will somehow "help" a billionaire.
The mind absolutely boggles.
"Astronaut is not an English word, it's what the Romans would have called the people in their space program."
The word Astronaut is from the greek.
"Unfortunately, not having a word for zero - their launches never got off the ground"
The Latin for zero was nihil.
Yes, I know, their maths wasn't up to the concept in the modern sense ... but they still had a word for it.
"As for Obama did the backlash against him lead to the election of Trump?"
No. If Obama could have run for a third term, he would have beaten Trump handily. People actually LIKE Obama.
Trump won because the other inelectable candidate chose to play the popular vote card and didn't pay enough attention to the electoral college.Trump didn't so much win, as his opponent lost.
Hopefully We, The People have learned an important lesson. I ain't holding my breath. People as a set are ineducable, and politicians know it.
"Among them are the first woman, the first person of color, and the first Canadian"
The question is, are they the absolute best available options for the mission?
Tokenism is nearly as bad as racism, but unfortunately it seems to be the new black. I'm sure Malcolm X would have had something pithy to say about that. ... maybe something along the lines of “What gains? All you have gotten is tokenism — three or four Negroes in a job, or at a lunch counter, or on the Moon, or as Vice President, so the rest of you will be quiet.”
It's a crying shame that Malcolm didn't live to see a two-term, majority popular vote, black US President.
From the headline, I was hoping I could use ChatGPT to clean out the hog pens and the chicken coops[0] ... and then I realized that it was already full of shit, and thus wouldn't need any of mine.
[0] I hire out septic system work. Specialized equipment, disposal, and etc. Besides, it's icky.
""With approximately 93 percent of citizens not going to the polls, a large majority of Parisians have shown that e-scooters are not an issue," a Tier spokesperson said."
The other way of looking at it, 93% of Parisians care so little about e-scooters that they chose not to vote for them to remain.
I'll pass a link to the article to a few folks who may be interested Ta.
Personally, although I have a few Model Fs attached to old kit, I'm sticking to my Model Ms for day to day use.
Nothing against the F, mind, just personal preference.
In other news, I've seen supposedly functional 122-key "Battleship" keyboards on flea bay for twenty bucks. Not everybody flogging ancient kit knows what they have ... I bought my four at a garage sale in Palo Alto, for ten bucks apiece. The guy who sold them to me knew what they were, he was just happy they were going to a good home. The same guy GAVE me a VS2000 about two years later ... but that's another story.
These things are built and programmed to find and report on one (maybe two or three[0]) potential problems, whereas actual people going over the hull will notice (and hopefully report) all kinds of other problems.
A[so, WTF does the vessel have to be in drydock for these things to work? Shirley if drydock time is an issue, the robotic survey could be done at anchor pretty much anywhere. Unless the company isn't up to making their toys waterproof ...
[0] Hull thickness, paint thickness, perhaps primer thickness.
... that if there is any language family that I will never be nostalgic for, it would be BASIC.
In fact, quite the opposite ... If BASIC had never existed, the world of programming would be a far, far better place. Never has a single language fucked up more neophyte programmers than BASIC. I've been cleaning up after the messes it leaves behind almost my entire career.
"And there's no reliable way as yet to filter AI content out."
Of course there is. Use your wetware and verify your source(s).
Computers and networking are not supposed to take over from human thought, they are supposed to augment it. They will NEVER remove the need to think.
Sadly, religions and politicians are trying to remove the teaching of thinking, so my point is moot ...
"Seems as though he knew more about statistics than he's been given credit for."
Either that, or George didn't give a shit.
He knew full well that he was addressing an audience full of normal people looking for a laugh, not a room full of pedant statisticians who have never laughed in their entire lives.
"More importantly, they are going to stand around unused for how long?"
Actually, most HVOs built from used cooking oil seem to last longer in storage than diesel, although not by much.
However, when they turn gunky[0], they become very, very gunky fairly quickly.
[0] A perfectly cromulant word, which should be used more often in articles like this.
The propane comment was an over-all comment on backup power, not the article specifically, based on my own rather extensive research on the subject.
Using HVO as a diesel substitute doesn't make any useful difference in "carbons" released with this intended use. Worse, as the article makes clear, many commercially produced HVOs use a large percentage of the planet-killing Palm Oil, making it worse than useless.
These generators are for BACKUP power, not primary power.
They will be used how often, exactly, in the lifespan of the data center? So how many "carbons" are really going to be saved?
And how many "carbons" is it going to take to implement the idea?
It seems to me that the greens are incapable of calculating TCO ... as long as it reduces "carbons" it's good, everything else must be bad. Even when reducing "carbons" actually costs more in "carbons" than it reduces.
For backup power, Propane is a far, far better alternative ... and well proven.
“Since starch is the primary constituent of staple foods such as rice, potatoes, and maize, any sustained off-world habitat will likely have the capability to produce starch as food for inhabitants,”
Not just as food. Any permanent settlement will be making drink out of all of those (it's human nature) ... there will be no "leftovers" for pseudo-concrete. Growing any of them in bulk on Mars will not just be exceedingly difficult, I would go as far as to say it'll be nonsensical to even try. In adverse conditions like that, one does not waste food on building.
Instead, use empty fuel tanks for dwellings/labs. Design the entire mission around the concept. Waste not, want not.
"The Design and Implementation of 4.x BSD by McKusick, Marshall et all"
Marshall McKusick is one person, not two. He became one of the top guys in BSD when Bill Joy left to start Sun Microsystems. That was at the tail end of 4.2BSD.
That's not to say Marshal wasn't an important part of the BSDs prior, but Bill Joy was the designer and implementor through 4.2,
I've used all three of those for answers to questions that would otherwise need to be answered"I don't have time to give you a lesson on computer and networking theory" to "it's a Windows thing" to "I haven't the foggiest idea WHY, exactly, but it's bloody obvious that bit of hardware is dead".
Deliver the line with authority and appropriate body English ... "It's sunspots ::looks up::". "The Earth's magnetic field shifted overnight" ::waves hand::. "Probably just a stray cosmic ray." ::shrugs::. This isn't strictly honest, but allows you to get on with the job without spending too much time in explanation to someone who probably wouldn't get it even if they took a four year course on the subject.
In 91, or thereabouts, the Radius Pivot display could be turned between portrait and landscape on the fly, at the whim of the user. I installed several dozen at a design house in Silly Con Valley. Normally, I didn't (and don't) do Apple work, but the hardware-shy Mac using "designers" offered me a lot of money to plug them in for them. Who would say no?
On the other hand, Dr. Wang told a roomful of Silly Con Valley luminaries and hangers-on that he got over the locker-room derived humo(u)r of his name during his first year at Harvard, but we should feel free to snicker at it if we liked. In his opinion, it said more about the person doing the snickering than the owner of the name. He further said this applied to any name.
"Maybe a woman who doesn't like the implication that a random woman can be blamed for any and every problem"
It wasn't a random woman. It was a non-existent woman. Who wasn't being blamed. The word was being used as a handle to indicate a specific problem, it was in no way an indictment on anyone who uses the name "Sue". Especially not a Sue who entered the picture long after the handle was implemented. Anybody who thinks otherwise is probably in need of serious psychological help.