That's easy. The Goblin King got his own 20-part TV show in Korea, whereas Gremlins has had three films.

Ask Jeeves had real potential in the AI era -- a character you could actually recognise, which could be moulded to fit the character from the books (the training material is more than adequate for a persona). Current AI chatbots used for searches have either no real personality or a very simplistic sycophant one. A detailed persona that could keep people engaged and interested without talking them into paranoia or suicide would likely have gone down well.

It isn't hard to ensure that data cannot go off-site. It would seem to me that 99% of the issue has to do with managers wanting people to use personal devices and wanting to have direct access to information when off-site. In other words, this is not a tech issue, it is an attitude problem. Fix the attitude, and the problem goes away.

Bear in mind that the Rainbow Book (at this point, an ancient relic of the past) defined ways to mark data so that it could not pass between security bounds within an OS, or pass between security bounds over networks/external devices. We have plenty of network intrusion detection systems and host intrusion detection systems. I can't remember if it was Dr Dobbs or Linux Journal who published methods on removing root from Linux, and the concept of Least Privilege has been around a very long time.

Remote users should never have direct unsecured access to any corporate network, it should be by secure certificate-based tunnel, and passwords on corporate networks should have been replaced by Class III user certificates long ago. Corporate computers should also be properly locked down.

Databases should only ever use order-preserving record-level encryption.

None of this is, of course, sufficient in itself to secure a site, but it would provide enough basic security that most of the skript kiddies out there aren't a problem.

The use of the term "gremlin" to refer to a faulty piece of technology dates at least as far back as WW2. I think banning legit terminology (and 85+ years of usage makes it legit) is unreasonable, unless ChatGPT was actually anthropomorphising defects. That... would be more of a problem.

Given that LLMs are fundamentally classifiers, it seems reasonable to think that training data included sufficient examples of the use of "gremlin" in relation to technology that the classifier got confused and created a link between technology and fictional creatures. The use of "troll" for, well, just about anyone online these days, would not have helped. However, an exclusion rule would not seem to be the correct approach here. This is a linear separation issue. To fix an issue like this correctly, you'd presumably want to strongly inject information that differentiated between tech usage of these words and regular usage.

Neural nets are classifiers. They cannot create, they can only distinguish.

Whilst you're almost certainly correct (AI would be unlikely to conquer a problem requiring any meaningful original thinking, even with help), this gives the aforementioned student an Erdos number (which is not quite as exciting as a Fields medal, but nothing to sneeze at either) and it's entirely possible that the conjecture will turn out to actually be useful in some area.

....a series of satirical reels someone has been posting about Spirit Airlines. But, in all honesty, it seems like a genuine failure due to genuinely incompetent management. This is different from some of the early attempts at budget airlines in, say, the UK, where British Airways and other major airlines committed acts of fraud in order to redirect customers.

I don't criticise the concept, but the concern is whether it has long-term adverse neurological effects, and a "quick study" doesn't sound like it'll tell us that.

It's essential we have more ways of dealing with treatment-resistant depression. We just need to make sure that they're less harmful than the depression itself. You willl, of course, recall that each and every single bad decision by medical boards to approve a treatment has been because they wanted to rush through a "medical cure" that turned into a medical hell.

I'm not stupid enough to say that mushrooms would cause long-term damage, but equally I'm not stupid enough to say that we should only look to see if it has short-term benefits.

The correct approach would seem to be to make sure there aren't any immediate hazards and, if there aren't, then to continue the study to check for consequences of long-term use whilst authorising short-term prescription use, on the understanding that the prescription use permission will be extended outwards to whatever the data cansafely tolerate. In other words, don't deprive people of necessary treatment but equally don't claim greater confidence than the data supports.

This tightrope has only got to be walked because nobody has been seriously studying depression for a very long time and now we've got a hunge backlog of cases that are refusing to shut up, making it hard to ignore. This research should have been done years ago, but politicians were far too ignorant and far too swayed by religious money. But that doesn't mean we should rush.

I'm sure the scientists know how to keep a level head, but the CEOs and the politicians clearly can't and they're the ones who will be making the demands.

Making it continuous avoids having strange behaviours near bracket limits (where a pay raise can result in an actual pay cut). This is something the rich fear as much as anyone, hence the anxiety around whether earning more will get you more. With an S-curve, you can provide that as a hard guarantee whilst also making the current notion of high-scoring (billion and trillion dollar pay packets) completely senseless economically -- without denying the rich the glory if that's the kink they're into.

It also means that you don't have an "upper bracket" where people well beyond it are essentially getting free cash. It's also more computer-friendly. It also becomes possible to make a much higher maximum tax.

But, yeah, you're correct in principle.

Personally, I would agree with you entirely.

Now, everyone has their own preference on what a "simplified" tax code would look like.

For myself, I'd use something similar to an S-curve. Maybe even use that family of curves directly. What you want is for those who earn very little to pay very little, for there to be a region where this increases substantially (because life ain't cheap, even when you can use scale efficiencies meaningfully), and for an asymptotic region for the mega-wealthy. You feed in the expected earnings for the year, you integrate over the curve, and you divide by 12. That's the tax per month for the financial year. If a person changes earnings, either due to a raise, unemployment, or whatever, you use a weighted average, recalculate, then subtract what has already been paid.

This is simple, quick, easy, and only requires that you have expected earnings reported to somewhere central, which needs to be true for taxes anyway.

No tax brackets, no deductions, just a straight calculation by a computer. And, as computers do the taxes anyway these days, that's not much of a hardship. You simply set the parameters for the curve to be such that nobody really needs anything to be deductable.

I'm sure there will be plenty of others who advocate flat taxes or other schemes, and some of those may even work out better than what I'm suggesting. I have no ego at stake here, so if others can do better, go for it. My point is not that my idea is somehow good, it's rather that we can indeed close the loopholes and simplify the tax code - enormously - without creating massive unfairness and without having to rely on naive assumptions about economies.

Except, a hundred years ago, they didn't. And the government knows this. As do many in the public. The taxes in the 1960s and 70s were around 90% for the rich, not 5%, and yet billionaires stayed in America.

You can hate taxes all you like, but even with posting, you're using services that were invented because those taxes existed and for no other reason. The commercial sector FAR preferred the X.25 technology they were using, because they could charge a fortune and get away with it. You have Internet today because of those taxes you loathe.

...like "Tell me about Tiananmen Square" or "Tell me about Xinjiang".

Is this what you want for the future?

My thoughts back when R1 came out:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.afcea.org%2Fsignal-m...