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Think of the power consumption needed to power holodecks 24/7 so nerds can fuck wood elves or whatever their kink is.

You could train an AI just to play chess. Sites like chess.com have tens, hundreds of millions of games to use as training data. But the AI isn't "thinking" though, it's just being asked given this input, what's the most likely outputs and picking one based on its settings. Then the other player moves, the context updates, rinse, repeat. Such an AI would likely whoop most people's asses but experienced players might figure how to lead it down a path where it doesn't sufficient training data to play strongly.

But it's not a generalized LLM like ChatGPT where it's picking up a handful of chess games from god knows without knowing or enforcing the rules or anything else.

Likewise I bet we'll see AIs for poker and other lucrative online sports. I bet a lot of online casinos have amassed huge stores of data to produce AIs, as well as players using scraping or logs to do the same. I could even see online casinos running AIs in games because it's a way of taking money from players beyond the normal rake.

Javascript is a dogshit language that everyone is stuck with. The best that we can hope for is the likes of typescript take the edge off of it. Even though it's like smearing marzipan over a turd. At least it's ok if you don't take a deep bite.

Doesn't matter, had sex

What an idiot. Everyone knows you can make yourself invulnerable to bullets with blessed magic amulets available on the internet.

Jesus Christ, everyone should know it especially if they're flying there, to the island known as Ireland. And yes all the locals would.

Yes there are parts of Ireland and Scotland which are close but the engineering challenge is so vast that it would cost hundreds of billions if not trillions. The channel tunnel was a major feat of engineering made possible by the relative shallowness of the channel and boring through soft rock and chalk.

The sea between Ireland and Scotland is 2-3x as deep and through granite & igneous rock. A tunnel isn't an option. People have proposed a bridge instead, assuming they can figure a way to sink piles 100-150m into the sea floor and build a 20 mile bridge over waters that can have 15-20m freak waves, high winds and storms. Or the seafloor that is scattered with thousands of tonnes of unexploded ordinance.

But even if they did all that, trains in Ireland / UK aren't even on the same track gauge. Nor would anyone to travel to the tip of Ireland to get to the hinterlands of Scotland, to change trains, to get another train to catch another train to get anywhere in England. Not when it would be easier and faster to get a ferry/coach or just fly.

So basically the idea comes up every now and again but it is not practical or feasible.

I had a US colleague stay with me in Ireland for a week and he was asking if it was possible to catch a train to England. It's amazing the geographic ignorance of some people and Americans seem to be especially afflicted. Maybe it's because the USA is so big, large cities so far apart, and public transport so terrible it doesn't occur to them that Europe is not the same.

Only the headline asserts "built-in backdoors", the actual link... not so much.

A reasonable reading of the proposal, assuming it came into effect, is that ISPs, banks, telcos etc would be asked to retain certain records for a number of months or years in a harmonised way. Law enforcement agencies would be required to ask for it in the exact same way they ask for records right now and all the rules concerning GDPR etc would still apply.

Open source tech has zero to do with it, it's a matter of policy.

Data retention != mass surveilance. Data retention != built-in backdoors. Even the link summary spells out exactly what the purpose of the proposal is (criminal proceedings) and the intended objective (data retention standards).

What I'd wonder is why it's such massive expensive for Duolingo to hire 2 or 3 people to cover a language anyway. Presumably most of the work is contractual - hire somebody competent to produce a course, get somebody to say the lines, refine the course based on feed back and that's mostly it.