The people who are seeking AGI will be happy when an LLM appears clever enough to fool them, not anyone else.

They may even realise this, because they think everyone else is less clever than they are.

This is why the whole thing has been called AI in the first place.

That blank box is a proof if and only if it is a proof. That makes it a self-reference and has no truth value.

I was going to suggest gluing a thin, flat strip of metal around the edges, but yeah, anything stiff would serve the same purpose.

Seems to me that would make the true ethical choice to be to buy it from the second-hand shop and then burn it, robbing anyone else any chance of advertising that fashion.

Mild disagree. Most spreadsheets are Turing complete, especially if they have one or more built in programming languages and have been for decades at this point, yet new “must have” features seem to get added to Excel with every release. Or that was the case until the recent “Office is no longer Office” debacle anyway.

And programming languages themselves keep updating and changing.

As I’ve said before, once Linus is gone, we might well end up with splits at the kernel level rather than at the distro level. And we would be wise to avoid any one organisation’s stock kernel, even if there are some very large organisations providing a lot of code for the kernel at present.

I can see a future where, say, GNOME, start producing their own kernels to support their vision of the Linux desktop from the ground up.

And it’s all but certain that Canonical and Red Hat would be very interested in things going their (respective) way(s) when the time comes.

And the smart ones would agree with it and insist you’d be insane to think otherwise.

Not a doctor, but that sounds like an OCD-type thing to me. I suspect most people do not feel the need to touch a control if it is already set as they want. Also, this might be in violation of rule 3 as a result.

Consider consulting with a doctor or psychologist or (cheaper) trying to get yourself out of this habit before it diversifies into a family of them (assuming it hasn’t already).

See also: feature creep

An old computer trick / prank / “fun” thing to do was piping random things to /dev/audio, or finding whatever program was available that could take any old file and not complain while translating it to audio by some means or another.

On my distro there are at least three of these programs installed by default: aplay, paplay and pw-play.

Some or all of these will complain if the file or stream they’re given isn’t a recognisable audio file, in which case, there’s a --raw or similar flag where it’ll just shrug and blast whatever through the sound system. If you’re creative, you can set different sample rates and hear it at different speeds.

VLC is just a really fancy way of doing the same thing.

For even more “fun”, try opening a file in Audacity / Tenacity, which will default to raw mode if it can’t tell what a file is, and you get to see the waveform and so on. Just take care not to modify and save over an important file with that.

Any C-levels, current or former, who were in charge during the unethical behaviour should be made to pay this. Either they knew or they should have known. Seize their assets, take them back to basic income and lifestyle and only then take the remainder of the fine from the company.

Yeah, I know this is a pipe dream. These people have their arms lodged so deep in politicians it makes their mouths flap, so it’ll never happen, but it would stop this sort of behaviour right quick.

-1 would be antihydrogen. Blackholium is whatever number is large enough to cause gravitational collapse, so probably one or two more than the largest neutron star.

There are exotic atoms in that chemical formula that aren’t in the periodic table. Not even if you count the equivalent table of potential antimatter atoms.

Muonium is sure to exist in non-zero quantities at any one time, for example.

There’s a Unix timestamp that ends with at least one of 42069 or 69420 within any 24 hour period. Often both.

Yeah, my university had those, but they also had an interface to it accessible from the more modern systems.

I also did a work experience placement with a company that had amber-screen terminals when I was still at school (and the year still started with a 1), so I’m no spring chicken either. They were very early in the process of supplanting them with PCs, which is not something they explicitly told me, but looking back, the evidence was all there.

The “fun” part with those specific terminals was that the admin password for the terminal hardware itself - because they had a rudimentary sort of BIOS on them - was a “fail at the first wrong character” system. With enough tries you could figure it out.

There wasn’t much you could do from there, at least not that I remember, but one of the terminals I used did end up beeping at a slightly different frequency to all the others.

A terminal in the computer sense was originally a screen and keyboard attached to a terminating node on a network. The network didn’t pass through, so it terminated there. This meant the literal, physical hardware. Think old school green- or amber-screen systems attached to a mainframe in the basement somewhere.

A console was a terminal that was serving some kind of purpose and showing some kind of interface for humans to interact with. Without the interface software, a terminal is not a console. Without the hardware, you wouldn’t have either.

It’s easy to see how these things became blurred.

And now it’s worse because we’ve extended the meanings a bit. The program in our fancy GUIs called “Terminal” and which we often just call “a terminal” is actually a terminal emulator.

And to a lesser extent, so is the thing you can access on many distros by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. This sometimes gets called “the console” because it’s even more like those old terminal interfaces. Full screen. Text only. Largely monochrome. No GUI.

And deeper still, a terminal, console, or terminal emulator doesn’t have to mean “a shell” which is another thing entirely. Shells just happen to be one kind of interface that can run there, and is often the default option in a GUI terminal emulator.

From a console, the default program is generally some flavour of login prompt. And then the system automagically loads whatever is configured as that user’s shell once they log in.

Nah. It’s not, or wasn’t, Redshift. Nor is it a vision issue. I can have the emoji picker on screen at the same time as my comment and they’re definitely very different colours.

I think the picker uses images, but the on-screen text renderer in Firefox is using the Noto Color Emoji font as a substitution (because the text font doesn’t have emojis) and whatever Firefox has set as the default colours for the glyphs in it.

My picker clearly doesn’t know how to generate the right modifier sequences to change those, and I don’t think it’s worth mucking around with Unicode zero-width joiners and colour modifiers to try to figure it out.

As someone aware of the ancient lore, but am in fact from the early continuance of the Eternal September: the AOL logo

In the early days of the WWW, there was an influx of clueless folks - often AOL users - saying “me too!” on anything and everything with little to no further input. It was among the earliest of Internet memes.

Oh. The AOL logo isn’t an emoji? Then 🔼 and 🔺 are close approximations. I’m not sure what, if anything, can set the colour(s) of those. My emoji picker says the first one should be white on blue, but it’s showing as white on orange as I type in the comment box. The second one is just red.

I was going to suggest using pro-ICE rhetoric dripping with over the top sarcasm, but there are too many sufficiently smart pro-ICE people who’d see through it and too many anti-ICE who might have trouble discerning it. And then there’s the issue of getting the tone right in a stressful and dangerous situation.

True. He’s in government, and specifically that government, so he has access to all the money and drugs he wants, so if he’s remaining clean, he’s doing exceptionally well on that score.

This should not be taken as an endorsement of his abilities as a politician or his knowledge about science. Plenty of other evidence suggests he should be doing neither of those. Hell, I’m not even sure I’d follow his advice if I was a heroin addict trying to get off the stuff.