I can't tell whether you're being serious or you're joking. Assuming that you're being serious, I'd like to point out that giving a browser provider your phone number and email address - never mind multiples thereof - is kinda like bending over to pick up the soap in a prison shower.

The bottom of the sea, please. That way their carcasses might feed more useful life forms. Also, parasites on the ocean floor are less likely to harm mankind.

Fifty years in space and not only is it not dead, it's still sending back useful data decades after its expected demise. Great engineering, teamwork, and a commitment that's still alive five decades after launch. That's both touching and inspirational.

Given that our species can make Voyager happen - along with all the other exploring, discovering, and building we've done since the advent of civilization - I find it truly sad that we may be on the verge of ending it all forever.

I get that violent aggression and subjugation were evolutionarily selected as survival traits. But it's both sad and ironic that those traits may also spell the end of mankind. Wouldn't it be sad if some of the things we've launched into the great unknown are still sending data back to us when there's nobody left alive to receive it?

It would be less insulting if they dispensed with the intelligence-insulting bullshit and just said "We decided it would be more profitable for us to pull the plug, and we really don't care about customer satisfaction or well-being anyway, so sorry, not sorry.

I mean, it's HP. This NOT happening would be unexpected.

But it IS good if you're a business. Every job you successfully displace with AI is a large cost saving. (At least until there are no more people with jobs that allow them to pay for your product or service).

I'm interested in what you've open-sourced, but your homepage link goes to Slashdot and I don't see any mentions of open source in your journal.

On the "soft" side of AI uses, just earlier today I had a conversation with ChatGPT regarding food and fuel shortages here in Canada which might result from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. That then evolved to my query "Please comment on how the inequities at play in North America over the past 30 years might have been different if policies and attitudes promoted by people such as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor had been adopted". The answers were thoughtful and informative. I didn't explicitly check for hallucinations, but I saw no indication that it was making stuff up. This was by far my longest use of AI - I kept questioning until the 'freebie' quota was reached.

All that is to say that AI - at least at this moment in history - may be more useful at providing a sounding-board and food for thought than it is at giving hard, quantifiably-correct answers.

Thanks - I'm taking that as food for thought. It seems to me that proliferation of personal, locally-hosted LLMs would go a long way toward removing the business motivation you mentioned.

And I'm entirely behind making AI output not subject to copyright. I'm just concerned that human beards will claim authorship of AI-generated stuff and copyright it in their own names. Sadly, my "AI on every desktop" scenario makes that all the more likely.

There seems to be some potential for a lot of good to come out of AI, but right now it seems to be putting its weight behind civilization's slide into a dystopian hellscape.

Never mind will we - rather, can we - turn the tide and make AI work for the good of all humanity, or at least make it neutral?

Is AI so dangerous that it can never support the overall common good? Or are we so fucked up that we are unable to make it work for the collective good?

Sorry, that was more than one serious question - my bad.

If memory and processor prices ever become sane and reasonable again, could this be the end of the AI bubble? If free-as-in-beer-AND-speech models are readily available, and if the computing power required to run them is affordable, what do the major AI merchants who've been inflating the bubble have to offer?

Sure, there's the training time and effort. But just as the internet spelled the end of having no choice but to pay for music and other media, won't it also be the way in which the training data that AI companies already stole can be re-stolen by folks who are running their own LLMs on their own hardware?

"Gazing into Sam Altman's Orb" could be the modern-day equivalent of a tattoo inked in a Nazi concentration camp.

What's that Sam? Your iris-print isn't in your database? I'm shocked! /sarc

It's astonishing to me how the plebs of the world are being treated more and more like cattle, and how they're increasingly eager to comply.

On a side note, what are the chances of hackers messing with the database? Having a major criminal swap identities with you would be... inconvenient? Deadly? But they're taking all prudent precautions, so that could never happen, right?

Fair point. But geo-politics makes strange bedfellows, and this may be one of those unicorn moments where Putin's desires and what's best for the free world in the long term actually align. (Note that I consider America - and Israel, of course - to be no longer a part of the free world).

Dog help us if random YouTubers are taking over for traditional news media.

On the other hand, what used to be a fairly solid traditional journalistic foundation - those of you old enough to remember Cronkite know what I'm talking about - long ago started giving way to sensationalism. With the advent of Faux News, what used to be serious journalism devolved into the pre-internet equivalent of clickbait. The sad end of 60 Minutes' credibility at the hands of genocide-supporting Bari Weiss sealed the deal: reliable and responsible TV journalism is dead and cremated, and its ashes have been pissed on.

On the other hand, I've found a few YouTube journalism / editorial channels that I trust. For news and opinion about the shit going on in the world just now, for Americans I recommend the channels Large Man Abroad and Secular Talk. For Canadians, I suggest Wrong Enough to Know Better and Rational National. I'm well aware of the Left-leaning bias in all of these; AFAIC, these days the Leftists are far more reliable and objective than any Right-favouring sources I've found.

As a Linux user I primarily use EXT4, so I've gotten used to assigning 'natural language' filenames to my files. Being able to use spaces, and many punctuation characters, makes filenames more descriptive and easier to read. That's important to me for large libraries of certain file types.

With few exceptions NTFS does allow that; but FAT32 doesn't. I like some of my external drives to be accessible by Windows machines 'just in case'.

Granted, Linux's handling of NTFS drives is a bit limited. An accidental disconnect will corrupt an NTFS drive. Then I have to use my wife's laptop to repair it. But I find the more flexible file naming capability worth the tradeoff.

As an aside, it seems to me that EXT4 is a far more robust filesystem than NTFS. I don't have enough experience with FAT32 to comment on how fragile it is or isn't.

Look for the Philippines to (again) become a US protectorate; or maybe even the 51st state, assuming that Agent Orange doesn't try to take Canada first.

My condolences to your wife, and may she never experience a serious blow to the head or an eye.

I know a bit about this because I have cataracts and a vitreous detachment in one eye. Lots of floaters, but probably not bad enough - yet - to need a vitrectomy. But cataract surgery is only a matter of time, and I also have IFIS...

Why are we allowing a shit stain government like that controlling the US right now to put Iran in the position where threatening international shipping was a matter of self-preservation?

As for that "allowing" part, America hasn't allowed it. They've simply failed - miserably, predictably, and even predictedly - to prevent it.

You SHOULD have listened to the experienced and knowledgeable American military leaders who told you that attacking Iran was a BAD idea.