British nuclear subs were running Windows XP until at least 2017. It's easy to google, but the best article about it is No, Trident doesn't run on windows XP (https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/no-trident-doesnt-run-window...), which ironically makes it very clear that Trident subs were running on Windows XP and had no plans to replace it.
Most UK government excuse: "The programme undertaken by the Royal Navy and BAE Systems to equip the fleet with a Windows-based command system was completed in just 18 days."
Translated: "You couldn't do better in 18 days, so you don't have a right to worry or criticize. Also, don't ask why this was pushed off until the last 18 days of the project."
> You will pick up enough of multiplication tables through doing maths
You will not do maths casually until you have memorized enough multiplication to make it not torture. You will not pick up multiplication from using a calculator any more than you will pick up programming from using a computer.
> native speakers of a language will conjugate correctly without memorising
They do not. They have memorized, through massive, constant, and forced practice, and now they conjugate correctly. The alternative of consulting a computer every time they need to speak is not a realistic one.
> You will not pick up multiplication from using a calculator
Sure you will, at least assuming we're still talking about memorizing multiplication tables here and not how to do long division or the like. I don't think algebra or even basic calculus has any convincing need to involve rote memorization.
I've ended up unintentionally memorizing many things due to frequently needing to consult various lookup tables.
> conjugation
Competent ones will. Wrong conjugations usually "sound" wrong to me even when I haven't seen them before and that's in English of all things.
If AI is still too stupid to show people how to work with it, and to notice their lacks and anticipate their needs, it can't have become that indispensably useful.
The entire point of AI is to accommodate the user. AI doesn't do anything that people can't do, is worse at most of those things, but is a lot faster at some of them (basically looking up things.) The point of AI is natural language UI.
Teaching people how to use AI is just teaching people enough about the world to give them something to ask AI for.
> I would rather pay people and websites for content.
I do not think that this is a workable model. Firstly, because it leads inevitably to monopolization, because you don't want to pay 50,000 people for content, you want to pay 10 people for content. Secondly, because most content is bad and a waste of time and you don't find out until after you've bought it. Thirdly, and most importantly, is that there's no actual, clear separation between "news" and "advertising."
Content is generated because people who want that content generated sponsor it beforehand, and dictate the conditions under which the delivery of that content will be accepted as a fulfillment of that sponsorship. The people sponsoring that content can have any number of reasons for doing it; it can make them money directly (i.e. I have articles about cats, people who like cats subscribe to my cat website), which if you're a linear thinker you think is the only way, or it can make them money indirectly, maybe by leading consumers to particular products or political stances that they have a stake in.
This is simply the truth. Your preferences don't matter, and it's not a moral question. If you pay for content, you're more valuable to advertise to, not less. A lot of work is put into producing trash that you regret having read or watched, and was really intended to make you support Uganda's intervention in a Zambian election (or whatever.) If you "value" reading it, you've failed an intelligence test. Its value is elsewhere for the people to paid for it to be written.
What's recently shown itself to scale is small groups of people sponsoring journalists and outlets who put out tons of content for free. The motivation of those sponsors is usually to spread the points of view of the journalists they sponsor widely, because they believe them to be good.
There was never a pay model that supported things that people didn't feel passionate about or entertained by. Newspapers cost less than the paper they were written on. Television news was always a huge money loser that was invested in to raise the social status and respectability of the network. If you feel passionately about anything, you're far better off paying people to listen, to give you a chance, than to lock away content. Journalism as a luxury good can work, but only for Bloomberg terminals and Stratfor, when it is used to make other lucrative decisions by its buyers.
> orgs like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and others who have an endowment behind them
This is simply sponsorships by governments and billionaires. Never ever been any significant shortage of that (the patron saint of this is King Alfonso X.*) All of those people have wide interests that can often be served by paying for media to be produced or distributed. It's where we got our first public libraries from.
For me, the fact that Substack and Patreon almost work is more important, and is something that wouldn't have been as easy without the benefits that the internet brings for the collaboration of distant strangers.
GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, just like Photoshop is.
Correction: GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, but not nearly as bad as Photoshop because it is organized logically and isn't burdened with sacred historical cruft, advertisements and product tie-ins.
The difference is that once you learn Photoshop it is a skill you can use at many jobs, and GIMP is not. Using this post as an excuse to rant, I've always thought that GIMP's priorities should be to be usable for print (mainly color management, which I think is almost totally fixed and becoming smooth) and to improve compatibility between it and vector drawing software (like Illustrator/Inkscape[0]), and layout software (like InDesign/Scribus[1].)[2]
If you're a European government or an individual rich person and you are really serious about software independence from the US, or if you're China/Russia/etc. and we know you're serious about it, you should throw about 50M at the problem. I think it would threaten Adobe so much that the US might lob a missile at you.
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[0] Inkscape also hated print, and the possibility of real exact colors and real exact measurements, and basically prioritized web icons and art. They also have a UI that requires a ton of memorization of hotkeys (which was part of the motivation for creating the software in the first place.) They seem to have wised up and made serious improvements in all of those areas.
[1] The only problem that Scribus has is a clunky UI that requires a lot of unnecessary clicks, which makes me suspect that it has deeper architectural problems. I think very few people work on it. It's ideally positioned, in the age of all books being online data, to create/become the future typesetting standard for people who want definitive versions of books rather than flowy ebook things which are not a significant improvement over .txt files. You could take a classic book and encode its typesetting, and rather than having 10M of blurry page scans combined with OCR info, you could just have 500K of text, fonts and typesetting information. With this, you could professionally print a perfect copy of the book, and as it looked when it was printed originally.
[2] Inkscape and Scribus, in turn, should be concentrating on pdf compatability, and also a way to sneak into print shops would be to write a good FOSS imposer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition) that integrated well with Inkscape/Scribus.
I'd also like to add that we forget that we're doing it, or at least I do. Once you set something up like that, there's never any reason to get rid of it; nobody is positively discriminating towards Linux.
I love when a ruleset (firewall, for example) has a "comments" field because I inevitably forget why I added something and then Chesterton's fence means I leave it forever, lest I spend hours a year later wondering why something broke.
Based on a FIDO2 spec I used it to write a reasonably compliant security token implementation that runs on top of Linux USB gadget subsystem (xcept for attestation, because that's completely useless anyway). It also extracted tests from an messy proprietary electron based compliance testsuite that FIDO alliance uses and rewrote them in clean and much more understandable C without a shitton of dependencies that electron mess uses. Without any dependencies but openssl libcrypto, for that matter.
In like 4 hours. (and most of that was me copy pasting things around to feed it reasonable chunks of information, feature by feature)
It also wrote a real-time passive DTLS-SRTP decryptor in C in like 1 hour total based on just the DTLS-SRTP RFC and a sample code of how I write suckless things in C.
I mean people can believe whatever they want. But I believe LLMs can write a reasonably fine C.
I believe that coding LLMs are particularly nice for people who are into C and suckless.
> you've had the Patiot act sanction the NSA to have free reign for this sort of thing for the past 25 years.
This is not true. No part of the Patriot Act required all people all private messages and photos to be scanned or have a backdoor to encryption. You're saying this to minimize what's about to happen to Europe, which is not helpful. The NSA made deals with private companies to tap lines, and used its influence and US intelligence's secret ownership of a Swiss encryption company to encourage us to use broken algorithms.
> We've shot it down before, and we'll shoot it down again, regardless of how relentless Palantir lobbying gets.
I wish you luck. But there's nothing keeping the EU from doing, and having always done, what the NSA has also done. What you're trying to stop is the requirement to serve your communications to your rulers on a silver platter.
It isn't corruption or the exposure of corruption that is the crime to European elites. The crime is doing something that will cause voters to choose something that they do not want the voters to choose.
If you are corrupt, and that corruption helps the opposition, you are accused of election manipulation. If you expose corruption, and that exposure helps the opposition, you are accused of election manipulation.
Meanwhile, the US is pouring billions of dollars into their elections, and if questioned, the questioning is considered an authoritarian encroachment on human rights. The US can make their officials into unpersons with sanctions for doing their jobs with integrity, and they'll just go along with it, tsk-tsking at the official in question.
Too bad for Golob, though - since it's Israel doing it for Israeli reasons, the "left-liberals" won't be able to get any of their usual support to attack them, because it's Israelis all the way down now. Ukraine is old news and competing with Israel for weapons, so there's no need for NATO-lackey Golob anymore.
No, they won. Piracy stayed at a microscopic level rather than becoming the usual way people got things. It stagnated, and maybe shrank. That's why they don't want to go into the piracy stopping business, it's a waste of time and money for them when they could be going after and negotiating with AI.
Most UK government excuse: "The programme undertaken by the Royal Navy and BAE Systems to equip the fleet with a Windows-based command system was completed in just 18 days."
Translated: "You couldn't do better in 18 days, so you don't have a right to worry or criticize. Also, don't ask why this was pushed off until the last 18 days of the project."
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