Liam Proven

@Ferk Ah, I see.

I suppose so.

As a one-time committee member on Skeptics in the Pub, there are a lot of things in life that *demonstrably* Do Not Work, never did work, and can be proved not to ever be possible, which all the same, billions of people are very impressed by.

Homeopathy is my go-to example – see:

https://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/

This is true of all Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It’s all a S.C.A.M. ;-)

But it goes much further. Gods, for example. All 100% made up.

And yet…

@Ferk @meejle

> … people are not unimpressed by AI

I disagree strongly. Smart people who understand how it works, and the cost, are DEEPLY and profoundly unimpressed by it.

I want to see it banned.

@meejle @onlooker

> The current state of AI is impressive to me

Really? Seriously? It’s just a fake, every bit as much as ELIZA was – just with a vastly bigger set of responses it generates on the fly from a vast database of stolen material.

@Core_of_Arden @Appoxo The only people I know who don’t use WhatsApp are the very technophobic or rich, antisocial Apple users. It’s ubiquitous. It is the standard method of international texting. I know a few people who use Signal (mostly who work in or around FOSS or security) and a few who use Telegram. They’re all nerds. But friends and family and social contacts and to a degree companies are WhatsApp.

The US is one continent sized country. The ROTW is mostly lots of small countries and lots of movement between them. That means that SMS costs money, sometimes a lot of money, and the Google and Apple systems mean you need to know what type of device the recipient has. If you don’t know, don’t care, and don’t want to know, then you WhatsApp them.

@null @Zerush Well I mean it’s very good at silently downloading files from remote servers without telling you, if that’s what you mean. It does it for other people all the time.

@PanArab @yogthos 20M units in China is too small to count as a rounding error.

When one Chinese phone company hired an American CEO he talked in interviews about how experimentally selling 50M units of a test prototype suggested it might have potential.

@Sxan Immaculate reasoning. Can’t fault it. Well done. 😁

@GregorGizeh @Sxan Old English (and current Icelandic) letters. English had these until we bought printing presses from the Germans, who lack these sounds.

þ represents unvoiced th, ð voiced ð.

So, more logical spellings than the bodge of “th” for both.

So why not?