The more likely alternative is that Harry Potter is hugely popular and referenced so many times in so many places that whatever training they did ended up weighting it more heavily. Possibly also people mimicked the author's style and linguistic patterns so much that it is easy to reproduce.

Although I personally liked Sandman Slim, given the subject matter of that book, it didn't have anywhere near the widespread cultural impact.

Except going to a web site on a mobile phone and trying to find anything useful is too difficult. Simply asking for the information is far easier.

If you're on a real computer then it's a bit easier, assuming there's any semblance of competency to the web site.

Why do 30 years of government service not count as actual qualifications and, you know, work experience?

So the system responded that it was an already claimed serial number and not an invalid serial number? Who the fuck would do that?

Let's say someone put in a claim.

Well what is to stop them from trying consecutive serial numbers to see if they can get even more?

If I paste an image into Writer, the right and bottom sides of the image have thin gray lines, but not left and top. Can't get rid of them, either.

This does not happen if I paste the same image into Word so it's obviously related to Writer.

The type of image doesn't matter (jpg, png, etc). It happens to all of them.

One minor correction: The 787 family was announced in 2003, but the first commercial model of the family -- 787-8, much like this one -- went into operations in 2011, some time later.

This "feature" actually saved me quite a bit of work at a job I had a few years back. The documentation people were so afraid that anyone who was not a full-time Word expert would irrecoverably screw up the corporate branding (IOW, formatting) of their docs, they didn't want developers to directly edit them. So I was often able to get away with emailing a quick text summary to them, and they had to do all the fidgety proof reading, formatting, etc.

I don't know how they managed to get their jobs done, given that they had no real source control and mainly juggled each update amongst themselves over email and random impoossible-to-find folders on Sharepoint.

Since all the docs had the same basic layout and they were mainly trying to make them look consistent with whatever corporate branding was being promulgated that week, it could easily have been done by writing them in "markdown" and having a script that converted them directly to PDF. Or maybe even learn LaTeX. Then the docs could all be maintained and diffed in github like all the other project artifacts. I didn't even bring that up because I knew that their heads would explode.

If you have dementia, you probably won't have a choice.

Yes great to mention the linking aspect, that was key to the whole thing being really useful.

While this is just a game, learning to predict and react to everything involved will lead to future developments. This could easily lead to robots being used in any situation where it has to interact with humans while navigating an area.

With enough training and better software, robots could expand into other areas of life such as in Japan where they are developing robots for use by and care for senior citizens.

Here's one based on a picture I have up: road construction. Instead of having humans sweating it out in the middle of July and August, have trained robots paving roads.

How is Disney the good guy? Nothing is being stolen. All the images remain in place.

It's like when people steal videos, software, and movies. The original is still there.

Without news sites to scrape, there will be no feeding the AI. With one key exception. When a site is driven by political agenda instead of advertisement revenue.

You have it partially right here.

But the one divergence from the pattern you didn't list is, that because most AI. (and Google's AI specifically) is very left leaning, it will feed you only left leaning news... so the sites that will remain, and keep earring revenue are more right leaning sites since people would have to go to them directly anyway to seek out news Google will never give them.

Of course that merely delays the full effect of what you lay out, when most for-profit left wing news sites fold the AI starved for information will in the end actually make use of right leaning sites as well.

What it does mean is that left wing news sites that remain in the next year or so will only be hyper-partisan info funded by some external source.

Tell us you don't know how viruses and vaccines work without telling us you don't know how viruses and vaccines work.

You mean like is already being done?

"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." - Kenneth E. Boulding