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Bear in mind that although the desktop/laptop market shares of Linux are relatively small, the vast majority of servers run on Linux, which is why there are millions of new pieces of malware targeting Linux each year. Linux definitely attracts malware nowadays.

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rc primak, wavy, oldfry, wdburt1

This analysis that was linked by Alex5723 a couple of weeks ago might be of interest. Nearly 2 million new Linux malware samples in 2022? Yes, malware on Linux is harder to install, but it’s not impossible and it’s certainly a targeted system.

That and being able to catch Windows malware before it is shared with Windows systems is of value.

My personal opinion is that security software has so little performance impact on computer nowadays that there’s no reason not to run it, regardless of OS.

Glad to have helped.

Just remember that a USB-A to USB-C cable, whether it is made by Mophie or anyone else, won’t let you connect your Magic Keyboard, so the cable that they’re sending you won’t work to connect your Magic Keyboard. The Lightning and USB-C ports look similar, but are not interchangeable.

The advice you were given from Apple was incorrect. The Magic Keyboard has a lightning port, so a USB-A to USB-C cable won’t let you connect anything.

If you want to connect to a USB-A port on your 2017 iMac then what you need is a USB-A to Lightning cable, which it sounds like you already have (the first generation Magic Keybord came with one), so that will do fine.

However, the 2017 iMac has two Thunderbolt 3 ports, which can be used as USB-C ports, so you can also connect your new Magic Keyboard to one of them using the USB-C to Lightning cable that your new Magic Keyboard came with.

This is about 2% of the profit that they made last year, it’s meaningless to them. Facebook will see this as just the cost of doing business.

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks, Alex5723

In terms of a computer programming itself, one could argue that we are already in a black box scenario, in the sense that if you asked the people who have created ChatGPT how it arrives at its answers they wouldn’t be able to tell you, because it has adjusted its models itself with so much data that it is far too complex for a human to understand.

As mentioned earlier, this isn’t really ‘programming’, though, as ChatGPT has not adjusted its ‘brain’, but rather it’s adjusted its ‘mind’ through learning.

There really are tremendous strides being made, though, as Bob99 says. It is notable, though, that even ChatGPT doesn’t use unsupervised learning, which many people see as needed to emulate human intelligence completely, while others think that quantum computing will be required to full replicate the complexity of biological brains, something which is a long long way away, partly due to incredible energy requirements.

Personally, despite wavy’s joke, I see the near future of AI as more of a huge economic disruptor rather than sentience.

 

It’s okay, I’ll forgive you! 😀

Machine learning and programming are two entirely different things. The whole point of machine learning is to solve tasks without explicit programming. Saying that machines can’t learn because they have code is like saying that humans can’t learn because they have brains – the code and the brains are only there as a platform upon which the learning takes place.

Source: I have studied Artificial Intelligence (including machine learning) at university level. Appeals to authority are always unsatisfying, though, so you don’t have to take my word for it – there are many good resources out there on the subject, which I would encourage anyone with an interest in the future of technology to investigate.

Apologies in advance for contradicting, but this isn’t what ChatGPT does. It is not a search engine and it does not copy and paste what someone wrote for it. It is an AI that has been trained via various types of machine learning, and thus it creates brand new results based on the patterns it has learned during its learning phase. Its creators have not gone and created an if statement saying that this is the answer that should be given if someone asks RetiredGeek’s question – it has learnt this itself by recognising patterns, in a similar way to how a human would learn something.

AI is very much ‘a thing’, and, unlike crypto and NFTs, will completely revolutionise the world as we know it. Is an AI with human-level intelligence 10 or 20 years away? No. But if you’re looking for an impact, within 50 years AI will have completely transformed the economy, replacing huge numbers of low-skilled and high-skilled technical jobs with AI workers. I’ve already heard of programmers who have spent the past week doing their jobs by asking ChatGPT to create code and simply copy and pasting it (it can do a lot more complex code than Powershell commands).

I suspect that RetiredGeek is referring to ChatGPT, which was launched recently.

They have tried to reassure the public by saying that the killer robots will not be equipped with guns but will instead be equipped with explosives. Because killing everyone in the vicinity is apparently better than the (already horrific) killing of specific people. Isn’t that reassuring…

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wavy, Alex5723

It displays fine for me too, using the current regular Firefox version (107.0).

May I suggest temporarily disabling CookieBlock and seeing what happens? You could try loading icloud.com in a private window, once CookieBlock is disabled, if you don’t want cookies to even be temporarily stored in the main location. If it works then you know it’s a CookieBlock issues, but if it still doesn’t work then I suggest you try Help -> Troubleshoot Mode to rule out issues with other extensions and settings.

The difference, I would say, between a lecture at the University of Baltimore School of Law and a newsletter article on AskWoody, is that I don’t suppose that the University of Baltimore School of Law expels its students for discussing politics on campus.

As for the article having a political slant, Mr Oppenheimer admits in the article itself that the proposition he is putting forward (and arguing for) is “provocative”. It wouldn’t be provocative if it was politically agreed upon.

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Alice

As for modern tech and law being closely intertwined, there most certainly are, yes, which is why Mr Oppenheimer’s articles are valuable and, as someone involved in tech, something that I look forward to reading each week.

I do appreciate that law and politics are closely intertwined, and your point about society being caught in the gap is an astute one; however, if this forum is to be politics-free, then if newsletter articles absolutely have to venture in to politics when discussing law then I would expect them to touch on the range of differing political viewpoints rather than advocating for specific political opinions, as this week’s article does.

Turkeypedal makes a good point; this newsletter article is clearly political and can’t be viewed in any other way – the article is based around big statements such as “free speech can’t be reconciled with truth” and “misinformation is good” and then goes on to expand on them, and these are political issues, not legal ones.

I’d say that banning one of the most prolific contributors to this site for making vaguely political posts while publishing political articles in the newsletter is rather hypocritical. Maybe it’s a case of the user’s political posts being left wing and the newsletter posts being right wing, I don’t know, but that would be even worse if true.