The trouble now is that, more than ever, Autism is a wide umbrella heading. If two people, Alice and Bob, have Autism, then they don't necessarily have the same thing, and the degree of similarity between Alice's Autism and Bob's Autism may be great or little.

There are many common features of Autisms* such as non-verbal, stimming, and so on. Then there are less obvious features, such as those described in books like Pretending To Be Normal.

*(and I think it best to pluralise: Alice has an Autism, and Bob has an Autism, but Alice's Autism may not be the same as Bob's Autism).

Part of the problem is the way the medical people like to apply diagnostic labels, as they do with physical medicine, and then try to reason based on those diagnostic labels. For example one may want to try a randomised controlled trial of treatments for Autism (without even considering the possibility that such a trial may not be comparing like with like).

Mind and brain are complex, and complexity is a bitch.

At some point, the AI bubble will burst. Most AI companies will go under, a few will survive. Those that survive will dominate in future. Investors are trying to back the companies that will survive the bursting of the bubble. Some will get lucky, others will not. That's the game. It's like betting on horses, just with weird horses.

I have (a diagnosis of) autism (aka Aspergers) and a diagnosis of Bipolar.

I often say it is better to say "Alice has an autism" and "Alice has a Bipolar Disorder", with the indefinite article. If "Alice has autism" and "Bob has autism", then it does not follow that "Alice and Bob have the same autism". Same with every psychiatric diagnostic label. If "Alice has a manic episode in 2005" and "Alice has a manic episode in 2006", then it isn't the that "Alice had two of the same thing". That is, Alice's second manic episode is not necessarily the same thing as Alice's first manic episode.

A diagnostic label such as 'manic episode' is as broad as 'has pain in their leg'. To see two things labelled 'manic episode' as two of the same is an error (to me at least). Same with autism, same with everybody else.

The brain is ridiculously complex. The idea that there is only a small number of mental health conditions, small enough to list in a few pages of a diagnostic manual, is frankly silly. So whenever you have a diagnostic label, it does not uniquely identify the problem leading to it, only pain a rough picture of the observable features of the problem.

If you put programmers inside the Rust straitjacket until they understand the nature of it and the reasoning behind it, and then let them use C++, they'll probably be conditioned to be memory safe. Rust forces you to do what you should be doing anyway in a language like C++. And Rust can compile-time check that stuff.

I'm very much a 'do the experiment' person when it comes to C++ vs Rust. There is plenty of will to write stuff in Rust, so the rest of us can grab popcorn, watch, and then observe the outcomes. (Personally, I rarely stray from bash and python most of the time. Except web stuff, where it's then PHP and vanilla Javascript.)

One of these days they'll realise this. Abandoning DST will make a tiny difference compared to what health diet and exercise would achieve. But this would decimate the junk food industry, and treating exercise like a luxury for the middle class and for those with the time for it is going to cost dollars. So obesity it is.

I often term such people "Campaigners for Kicks". People addicted to the hit of winning a campaign for change, regardless of whether that change was good or not.

It turns out that even though you can cover 5 miles quicker in a car, it negatively correlates with health outcomes compared to running or cycling the same distance. Using AI is like taking a taxi.

How much CPU power does a machine have that can't run a 64bit OS and browser? Would such a machine cope with even a single tab of a modern bloated website?

I just stick with what I can write in vanilla PHP that is "simple and disposable and easy to change" to use his phrase. I've tonnes of little things on my LAN, dozens of lines, hundreds at most, to do simple tasks. You can read the entire thing in a few minutes, if necessary just rewrite the whole thing in a few minutes. As soon as you have 10k's or more of lines, you need to do organisational gymnastics. If you want to use a large framework, that starts constraining how you deploy: vs just stick 5 .php files in a folder under htdocs somewhere and done.

You can do a lot with PHP and no framework, and I prefer to stick to that. My solution to the problems of code complexity is simply not to have the complexity if it can be avoided.

Non reproductive sex is basically using somebody else's bodily bits as a masturbation toy to satisfy a biological urge. Not the most hygienic of habits.

Fair use is a defence in court against a copyright infringement lawsuit.

But Youtube is not a court of law. Youtube is like private property that content creators and consumers have an implicit invite to use. Youtube has only those restrictions required by things like non-discrimination law, so far as what Youtube permits. If Youtube says it won't host some kind of video, what right do you have to insist that they do? If Youtube says it will take down your channel, what right do you have to insist that they don't?

Thus, fair use is not a defence against copyright claims on Youtube. Youtube needs to do the least necessary in law to avoid getting sued, but it is up to Youtube what policy it adopts with copyright content. Something may be fair use in the sense of a copyright infringement lawsuit, but Youtube is not legally required to permit such use on Youtube.

I am not a lawyer, but this is how I read it.

It's like a pub being able to bar a customer for whatever reason (except possibly racial or sexual discrimination). If you annoy the management of a pub, they don't have to obtain a court order to prevent you returning: they simply withdraw your invitation, and once that is done, you are trespassing and they can treat you as a trespasser.

This is the problem with the increasing creep of private ownership, whether land or utilities or social media. Such things are, subject to an restrictions in law, entirely controlled by company board and policy. There is no democratic representation on the board of a company. They do whatever they think will bring them profit, and avoid whatever they think will cause them losses. And everybody else has virtually no say in the matter. Even worse, large private corporations can afford to make large donations/bribes to politicians to bend the laws in their favour, and the rest of us can't afford to donate a dime.

What is published on the blockchain can't be redacted later. If what is published is bs, then it is bs and will remain bs. But that bs will be visible, and verifiable in the long term - they can't later deny they wrote it. If the current administration have their grubby hands all over the numbers, and manipulate things to suit their ends, then those manipulations will still be visible in the future, and hard to hide. It's like the thief making a livestream of them in the act, so as to show off.

If people want to develop free and open source AI, it's better than just leaving it to self-interested corporations. Provided it's not forced on people.

I'm hoping governments that like this see the sense in putting resources into development, not just using it. A lot could be achieved if governments invest part of what they save by not paying Microshaft subscription fees.

Paid annually, Duolingo is inexpensive for something I use for a few minutes every day. (Streak at 1400, and that has a powerful effect on making you do at least one lesson per day.) Motivating someone to practise daily is something Duolingo does a good job of. I tried a cheap AI chatbot thing with speech and voice recognition, but it seemed their AI servers were overloaded, so I never got into it. But if Google can make a chatbot I can interact with, especially vocally, I'm sure to give it a good go. Trying to avoid paying around £40 a year is very cheapskaty.