Okay, so people have less disposable income than they did a few years ago, and less need for indoor entertainment devices than they did during the pandemic. Is it really surprising that fewer purchases are being made? (Plus, did they include "digital signage" and monitors with HDMI inputs when they were compiling the statistics?)
Pretty sure the US allows individual states to set the ages. In Canada, it's provinces that set it. Lowest age I've ever heard of was 12 (for limited permits to move farm machinery along back roads in Saskatchewan, although that was decades ago and it might not still be a thing). I had a full and unrestricted license at 16, but the rules have changed since then.
Actually, that's pretty much it. According to the article, it attacks a specific piece of ecommerce software (Magento), and I get the impression the attack isn't viable if the software has all the latest fixes. So it's dangerous only to a subset of servers.
It isn't the only factor, though. You're going to have a harder time getting doctors in Kapuskasing or Sioux Lookout than Toronto no matter what you pay them.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that we should just set all the clocks to UTC and stop trying to coordinate wall clock time and solar time, since walll clock time is arbitrary anyway.
Half of the human population is of below-average intelligence. They will be that dumb. Guaranteed. And safeguards generally only get added until after someone notices that a wrong answer is, in fact, wrong, and complains.
In part, I believe someone's going to die because large corporations will only get serious about controlling what their LLMs spew when faced with criminal charges or a lawsuit that might make a significant gouge in their gross income. Untill then, they're going to at best try to patch around the exact prompts that come up in each subsequent media scandal. Which is so easy to get around that some people are likely to do so by accident.
(As for humans making up answers, yes, some of them will, but in my experience it's not all that common—some form of "how would I know?" is a more likely response. Maybe the sample of people I have contact with on a regular basis is statistically skewed. Or maybe it's a Canadian thing.)
How about taking advice on a medical matter from an LLM? Or asking the appropriate thing to do in a survival situation? Or even seemingly mundane questions like "is it safe to use this [brand name of new model of generator that isn't in the LLM's training data] indoors?" Wrong answers to those questions can kill. If a person thinks the LLM is intelligent, they're more likely to take the bad advice at face value.
If you ask a human about something important that's outside their area of competence, they'll probably refer you to someone they think is knowledgeable. An LLM will happily make something up instead, because it doesn't understand the stakes.
The chance of any given query to an LLM killing someone is, admittedly, extremely low, but given a sufficiently large number of queries, it will happen sooner or later.
Calling a cat a dog won't make her start jumping into ponds to fetch sticks for you. And calling a glorified autocomplete "intelligence" (artificial or otherwise) doesn't make it smart.
Problem is, words have meanings. Well, they do to actual humans, anyway. And associating the word "intelligence" with these stochastic parrots will encourage nontechnical people to believe LLMs actually are intelligent. That's dangerous—potentially life-threatening. Downplaying the technology is an attempt to prevent this mindset from taking hold. It's about as effective as bailing the ocean with a teaspoon, yes, but some of us see even that as better than doing nothing.
Yes, there is C++ code still being written, and it's a reasonable choice for some lower-level and complex code , but it's a much smaller percentage of the whole than it was even ten years ago. Web stack stuff tends to be written in memory-managed languages, and it probably accounts for more lines of new code than anything else these days (note that I didn't specify good code). You can have a whole career without ever getting down into the weeds.
Similarly, assembler still had some practical applications in games and video codecs when I got out of school. These days, I wouldn't expect to see hand-written assembler outside of an OS kernel or other specialized low-level use. It's still not gone, but it's been gradually going for many years now. Languages without memory management likely never will completely disappear, and they have massive inertia because of the sheer number of C utility libraries lying around, but they're gradually becoming more marginalized.
What it comes down to is: understanding how memory works is useful and broadening for someone who wants to program, but it's no longer necessary even for a professional. (I think we're mostly in agreement on everything except relative importance, in other words.)
You don't need to understand the details of how memory is allocated to understand that taking up too much space is bad, and that there's often a tradeoff between programmer time, machine execution time, and memory allocated, though.
Some people found the primitive ELIZA chatbot from 1966 convincing, but I don't think anyone would claim it was true AI. Turing Test notwithstanding, I don't think "convincing people who want to be convinced" should be the minimum test for artificial intelligence. It's just a categorization glitch.
Manual memory management has about as much applicability these days as assembler did back when I was doing my degree. It should be covered as part of learning How Things Work Under the Hood, it's still needed for some kinds of specialist work, but many—perhaps even the majority of—people writing code will never need to deal with it in the real world, because the languages in which most code is written these days all have some form of memory management.
The scariest part is that the last time I was up there (admittedly some time ago), the total population of Cochrane was around 5000. Never mind the infrastructure for the lots, they're going to have to entice a new grocery store into town if even half of them get built on. And I hope they've got an agreement with the Northern Ontario School of Medicine to send them some doctors. And that they've expanded the Internet bandwidth available for remote work by considerable, because there aren't very many jobs up there either. (Nor is Cochrane the first to try this. Another nearby town sold lots off really cheap a few years back. I don't think they got much out of it.)
As for why they're doing this . . . most Northern Ontario communities have been slowly but steadily losing population for the last quarter-century or more, because the towns have very little to recommend them unless junior hockey or snowmobiling is a central part of your life. (I grew up in the area, so I know.) This is a stupid publicity stunt to try to push the population up again. The one thing every municipality in the area has lots of is land.
To my knowledge, no—the type of person who would be able to create such a printer usually isn't interested in making printouts. Theoretically, an impact character printer (daisy wheel) is within the range of an enthusiastic hobbyist with enough programming knowledge to write the driver. A laser printer of modest resolution should be within the reach of a skilled team. Inkjet I think requires too many specialized parts.
(I’d like to have an ARM tablet or maybe convertible laptop running desktop Linux and FreeCAD, but there’s some mutual exclusivity in there).
Run the FreeCAD on your main machine. Put a remote desktop server on it as well, and run Remmina or some other client on the tablet. Drops the requirements considerably, and should be good enough for the application you have in mind.
"How stupid do they think we are"? The answer is, very stupid. It's sort of an offshoot of Dunning-Kruger: overestimating their own intelligence leads them to underestimate everyone else's.
Normally the portion of the pipe on your property is your responsibility. It isn't the city's faullt if someone is too dumb to maintain their property.
Pay up, unless you're willing to declare bankruptcy to shed the debt (which I doubt would be allowed).
I ended up with a 103-key Unicomp New Model M (essentially the same layout as a 101-key, but with one Windows key and one context menu key stuffed into what would have been the small blank spaces in the bottom row between ctrl and alt—I really wanted a full-length spacebar). Linux is most often installed onto ex-Windows PCs, so it's hardly surprising that it expects the Windows keyboard layout.
(I believe the current generation of Gnome devs is big on minimalism, AKA omitting or removing features. I can understand the appeal from a code maintenance point of view, but it's never been a DE that I liked.)
You can buy keyboards with replaceable keycaps. You can also buy keycaps with Tux logos on them for at least some of those keyboards. You can decide for yourself whether your aesthetic dislike of the Windows logo is worth the rather higher price of such a keyboard.
Tax rates in general are higher there, and not all taxation scales with population (corporate tax, for instance). It also depends on how the government allocates the money it spends—Norway doesn't have the US's ridiculously inflated military budget.
Okay, so people have less disposable income than they did a few years ago, and less need for indoor entertainment devices than they did during the pandemic. Is it really surprising that fewer purchases are being made? (Plus, did they include "digital signage" and monitors with HDMI inputs when they were compiling the statistics?)