It is certainly true you can't watch the whole of The Dalek's Masterplan (where you should really include Mission to the Unknown, making it a 13-parter). The full audio exists, the Target novelisation of it exists (it spans 2 novels!), but yeah, it would be nice if we could someday watch the whole story.

Doctor Who is theatre that merely happens to be shown on TV. It is intended to show the same sort of stuff as a theatrical production and, as such, it is arguably strong for what it is. The same could be said of Thunderbirds/Stingray. Yes, it is intended to be child-accessible and child-safe, but even with thew most juvenile of any of these, the stories have a complexity and depth you won't find in The Fast And The Furious or The Blacklist.

Well, your home LLM costs power and compute time.

A 2B pencil and some paper would cost you less and you'd have just as good a graph. Probably better.

Agreed. It is obvious that "AI researchers" and "AI reviewers" aren't remotely interested in posing challenging problems to AI. They softball because they know that keeping it safe is the only way they'll get anything out at all. But because they do so, people have become convinced that AI is usable, reliable, and trustworthy.

The gap between the promise and the reality is, I would say, probably in the order of a couple of centuries of work, and mostly in directions that LLMs can't go.

You learn habits when you are young. You learn hubris when you are young.

The habit I learned from the start (around 8) was to assume I'd made mistakes, and therefore rigorously find them.

The habit he learned from the start was that if it isn't caught, it isn't a foul.

One of these two habits leads to a robust system. The other leads to the popular meme involving woodpeckers and civilisation.

I was a careful programmer, which is why, at 24, I was writing data stores for CERN. At 18, I wrote nucleotide analysis software. It is bug-free. At 16, I had written a comprehensive meteorological database system. That did have a few bugs, but none were critical.

I have to go back to age 10-12 before I was making the mistakes he was making at 19, because I learned to test and test again. Yes, I actually blew computers up. Literally, whole sections if motherboard destroyed. During testing. I never released code I hadn't properly validated.

Why? Precisely because I knew I was a shitty programmer. That is when you test, correct, test again, and keep going. Nothing ever left my hands until I was sure it was right.

This is not about skill, it's about knowing that you will make mistakes, and therefore finding those mistakes first.

I remember being 19. I was writing AI software for radionucleotide analysts. A couple of years later, I was writing the data store for a particle accelerator.

I am not the best coder in the world. I would regard myself as adequate. But, hy virtue of that, I will hold ALL 19 year olds to the same standard. It is a perfectly reasonable, achievable srandard. I kniw that because I achieved it and I am not the best.

Whereas, if he'd used the software engineering techniques that were well-known and well-described at that time, he'd not have included the bugs in the first place. Or, if he had, he'd have detected them in testing.

I do not find it reassuring that a chief technology officer is pleased that he wasn't clever enough to write or test code correctly. What I do find is that I fully understand how he can be a CTO in an organisation notorious for defective software and even more defective bugfix releases.

I was afraid of that. Still, it's an improvement over IBM's early electronic mail, which used Josephoartigasia Monesi.

1. There's no such thing as a system where only White Hats get to see stuff. If the "good guys" can see something, then you must necessarily assume everyone can.

2. The "good guys" have a nasty habit of only being "good" when they feel like it. You cannot rely on them actually having any ethics or integrity, as has been demonstrated in just about every country on Earth far far too many times.

3. The "bad guys" sometimes turn out to actually be "good guys" (Manning and Snowden both revealed important information that was concealed by actual bad guys in government and the armed forces).

4. Websites and services are trying to have it both ways -- both know what is in each and every message, but also not be responsible for what is in each and every message. That is not going to fly with any sensible person. If you do not wish to be responsible, you have to act in the manner of a common carrier and therefore have no access to what is in a message. As soon as you are free to open messages to which you have no legitimate interest because you claim no responsibility, then you are committing an act of illegal wiretapping/theft of confidential information and I would want the laws to be absolutely ruthless against such acts. (I would consider such a crime to warrant the entire board of directors serving 15-to-life.)

Frankly, most email providers do a really really bad job of things. I used to run my own email server, simply because I couldf do a better job even after finishing a bottle of mead than any of the providers out there could do with "highly trained" chipmunks. I probably still could.

A fair point, but we know that the truth is that as bandwidth goes up, people load their websites more, so we end up with limited improvement for those who are on fast connections and massive consequences for those on slower connections.

Decaf is irrelevant. You will be percolated.

Seriously, AI is nothing like as significant as touted -- and I do use AI a fair bit. It is not particularly robust or reliable, it generates large numbers of errors, it crashes frequently, it consumes vast resources, and the results are of dubious value. The code it generates is sloppy, it takes months to years of repeated cycles to do any but the most basic of engineering tasks, and in terms of cost efficiency, it costs rougly three orders of magnitude more to use AI than to use people of equivalent ability. AI is decent at pattern-matching, but only if you understand the problem space well enough - and most people are far too incompetent to do that.

6G is good, 6G is useful, but not for AI.

France. The US "won" because the French did the winning.

The gangs in the UK have guns. They predominantly use them against other armed gangs and armed security guards. It's extremely rare that bystanders get shot, and most of the time it's in crossfire. The last school shooting isn't in living memory for many in Britain. British pop culture often focuses on defusing situations if possible, then using tactical, precision force should that fail. Precisely the same focus used by the British police and, more often than not, the British armed forces.

America has three to four mass shootings A DAY, and school shootings are just another week. American pop culture focuses on slaughtering everyone in the vicinity, as do the US police and US armed forces.

This tells me everything I need to know about those who has the unhealthy relationship to violent solutions.

Don't waste my time on cutesy theories and soundbites. Either you can offer actual evidence for your position or you cannot. And it is obvious from your reliance on cutesy theories and soundbites that you cannot.

As for "advanced weapons", the US has blown up a primary school in Iran, blew up a hospital in Afghanistan, and a civilian air raid shelter in Iraq. These "advanced weapons" are proving useless in Ukraine, as the Russians figured out over a weekend how to jam the guidance systems. Advanced crap is still crap.

Against this, the British have used aircraft with far less advanced weapons to blow up specific floors in specific buildings - something way way outside the capacity of the US. The day your "advanced weapons" in the hands of imbeciles can match crude weapons in the hands of actual experts is the day you get to tell us about these "advanced weapons".