Already exists https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutube.com%2Fshorts%2Fo6X...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... ... despite worries about relocating people (at least 330,000) and environmental impact. For better or worse, the Chinese are still carrying the torch of Soviet ideology, and the result is that they get a lot more done more quickly than anywhere else, because "resistance is futile" when a project gets the green light from on high. At the very least, we can look to China to see the cutting edge of what various experiments in grand-scale infrastructure projects can achieve, or fail to achieve. It's like a real-life simulation of pie-in-the-sky ideas that would never get past the political quagmires in the West.

It's just us old 5-digit Slashdot users, looks like. :D

Just because you didn't use Pocket doesn't mean it wasn't useful.

It was, for me, like an easier-to-use version of Evernote, with the specific use case of "read it later".

Why is this better than just saving bookmarks, you may ask?

1) The pages' contents are saved for posterity, so even if a link degrades or becomes locked behind a paywall, if you could access the page at the time you saved it, you will have saved it for eternity... erm, or until the service is shut down.
2) The UI is much more suitable for leisure reading, with nice previews of the saved pages, and the pages themselves formatted in an easy-to-read style, without ads or other distractions. As others have noted, this is now a standard feature of most browsers, but Pocket lets you skip that extra step of having to wait for the full, noisy version to load first. Bonus: ability to easily send articles to your e-reader.

Now, I must admit that I only ever saved a handful of pages to Pocket (20 or so, over something like 9 years), almost always for the specific reason that I wanted to save articles that were somehow in danger of becoming inaccessible for one reason or another. But I'm still surprised there weren't more people out there who saw its utility and made more use of it -- especially considering that, unlike Evernote, it's completely free.

Why do we even want AGI?

Just because some well-worn sci-fi trope sees it as "inevitable"?

Isn't it more useful to have AI targeted at specific use cases, as tools for humans, rather than some self-aware intelligence that inevitably brings up ethical questions about "machine rights", and ends up being just as unreliable as humans themselves?

I don't think the current crop of AI is necessarily a dead end, although the brute force approach to training does indeed seem to have reached its limits. It very well may be that the current tech gets better and better at passing the Turing test, so that a few years from now, even AI experts have a difficult time telling the difference.

But if we're investing such massive resources in this stuff, let's focus on building in some reliability checks, such as hard-coding it to immediately inform you that it's an AI on the other end of the line, limiting bots' access to potentially dangerous external systems -- i.e. putting strict rules on how much "agency" an AI can have, and on the whole building in some sense of what is right and wrong, i.e. what could cause human harm, rather than just letting it mindlessly imitate all the idiocy that can be found on the internet and attempting to band-aid it by censoring it on a subject-by-subject basis.

These are the kinds of things we should be focused on, not some pipe dream of a new intelligence that acts like a human with an off-the-charts IQ.

As strange as it seems, this isn't the first time I've heard of this kind of thing. I'm assuming enough studies have used this technique already that any influence would be ruled out out at least statistically taken into account.

The word *serious* is the key here. Apparently the people in charge of triaging bugs didn't take it seriously enough, though.

I anticipate this will make my mobile Firefox usage significantly better. Adblockers alone...

What are you talking about? GeForce Now it's a cloud streaming platform, you pay them to host the game on cloud hardware...

The controllers work with USB as is.. Just saying

So you replace your phones every 1-2 years? Why not just get some proper phones that last 4 years apiece instead??

Face ID is super convenient, the chip inside was the fastest until the Pixel 6, camera is boss, and the XL version has tons of battery life to spare. Despite having to get it repaired/replaced twice (at cost, just out of warranty) I am still loving the Pixel 4 XL. The small version had crap battery life to be sure, but to say the 4XL is a "very bad device" is some extreme hyperbole, and actually not even remotely true.

That is not correct. I'm not talking about ivermectin. A quick Google of "existing drugs that treat covid" yields:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.voanews.com%2Fa%2Fcovid-19-researchers-see-hope-in-existing-drugs%2F6432976.html
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.biopath.ph%2Fstudy-identifies-3-existing-drugs-that-may-help-treat-covid-19%2F
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.timesofisrael.com%2F3-existing-drugs-fight-coronavirus-with-almost-100-success-in-jerusalem-lab%2F

There's 8 drugs for you mentioned in those three articles: fluvoxamine (anti-depressant), budesonide (inhaled steroid), amodiaquine (antimalarial), zuclopenthixol (antipsychotic), nebivolol (blood pressure), darapladib (atherosclerosis), Flumatinib (cancer), and an unspecified HIV medication. And that's pretty much the tip of the iceberg.

Your arguments are logical on the surface of it, but they're missing a couple of key points:

1) Drugs, unlike vaccines, can be reused to treat illnesses beyond their original target. This was in fact the case with COVID, and had drug trials been better coordinated, plenty of hospital beds could arguably have been freed up, especially pre-vaccine and in areas of the world where vaccine distribution was behind the curve. Because we're talking about existing drugs, potentially in generic form, they can be more easily/quickly/cheaply manufactured and distributed around the world.

2) Vaccines aren't actually needed if you've recovered from the actual thing. So given an effective treatment, the importance of vaccines is significantly reduced.

3) COVID has more in common with influenza than with polio. It is a rapidly mutating virus that, like the flu, seems to require a new vaccine every year or even every season. There's a reason that to this day most people don't vaccinate against the flu - because available treatments are "good enough" and only really necessary in severe cases. At the moment we are seeing a law of diminishing returns on COVID vaccine boosters, while baseline COVID immunity has become widespread in the population. So we could potentially start treating COVID more like we treat the flu - i.e., drugs and not vaccines as the first line of defense. (Whether this might have been possible from the get-go is an open question.)

IMHO, one reason vaccines were prioritized to the extent they were is because, in the current state of the world, it pays off a lot more to develop a novel vaccine or treatment than to run trials on existing drugs. The pharmaceutical companies succeeded in convincing the government and the media that this was the main/only way forward, to the detriment of funding for trials of existing drugs.

To summarize: Just because vaccines have succeeded in wiping certain viruses off the planet, doesn't prove that they will be able to do so for all viruses. And the reasons for favoring vaccines don't all have to do with logic. When considering how we handle future pandemics, I think the lesson to take from COVID is that trials of treatments, in particular using existing drugs, should be given at least as much emphasis as vaccines, in particular when the target is as fast-moving as COVID is.

I pay just 5.20 euros a month for Google Workspace Starter. Just checked and the price for the basic plan in the U.S. is just 6 Euros - and it even advertises being able to host up to 100 users in Meet, I'm fairly certain with no time limit. So what gives, why would anyone pay more for the "Individual" plan? Couldn't find any direct comparisons of "Business Startet" and "Individual" when I googled it. ðY(TM)