It is absolutely predefined - if you make the same moves it will give you the same results, every time. Same as playing ChessMaster 2000 from 1986.
It may narrowly fit into the broad definition of 'AI' (like, since the 70s) but that's not what's being discussed in this thread.
Believe what you like though.
I agree it's great at writing and frame-working parts of code and selecting libraries - it definitely has value for coding. $1500 bil value though, I doubt.
My main concern there lies in the next gen of programmers. The work that ChatGPT (and Claude etc) outputs requires some significant programming prior-experience to allow them to make sense of the output and adjust (or correct) it to suit their scope and requirements of the project - it will be much harder for junior devs to learn that skill with LLMs doing all the groundwork - essentially the same problem in wider education now with kids/teens just using LLMs to write their homework and essays. The consequences will be long term, and significant. In addition (for coding) it's taking away the entry-level work that junior devs would usually do and then have cleaned up for prod by senior devs - and that's not theory, the job market for junior programmers is dying already.
When people say "I fucking hate AI", 99% of the time they mean "I fucking hate AI™©®". They don't mean the technology behind it.
To add to your good points, I'm a CS grad that studied neural networks and machine learning years back, and every time I read some idiot claiming something like "this scientific breakthrough has got scientists wondering if we're on the cusp of creating a new species of superintelligence" or "90% of jobs will be obsolete in five years" it annoys me because its not real, and it's always someone selling something. Today's AI is the same tech they've been working on for 30+ years and incrementally building upon, but as Moore's Law has marched on we now have storage pools and computing power to run very advanced models and networks. There is no magic breakthrough, just hype.
The recent advancements are all driven by the $1500 billion spent on grabbing as many resources they could - all because some idiots convinced them it's the next gold rush. What has that $1500 bil got us? Machines that can answer general questions correctly around 40% of the time, plagiarize art for memes, create shallow corporate content that nobody wants, and write some half-decent code cobbled together from StackOverflow and public GitHub repos.
What a fucking waste of resources.
What's real is the social impacts, the educational impacts, the environmental impacts, the effect on artists and others who have had their work stolen for training, the useability of the Internet (search is fucked now), and what will be very real soon is the global recession/depression it causes as businesses realize more and more that it's not worth the cost to implement or maintain (in all but very few scenarios).
I know you're meming, but in Civilization (as in most games), you're playing against predefined scripts and algorithmic rules that the computer opponent has, as well as having cheaper costs for resources than the user at higher difficulty levels - because it cannot compete with a skilled human player at that level (it literally cheats).
No LLM, no neural network, no deep learning.. not 'AI' in the modern sense that's being discussed here.
.. And NVMe SSDs, and large HDDs.
I bought a Crucial P310 MVMe 2TB card barely three weeks ago for the already-inflated price of $132.58 (not on sale).
The exact same card from the exact same retailer is now $225.13.
70% increase in 21 days.
That's the average amount of inflation we'd have in eighteen years.
I'm not advocating political assassination - but it does amaze me that there are ~400,000,000 guns in the USA and nobody has even taken a shot at Musk yet.
Oh that makes more sense. Appreciate the explanation.
Tech giants are well known for lobbying against any legislation that gives them less freedoms to exploit markets and regulations of any kind that impact them - but this legislation that was targeted specifically at regulating them and removes a significant number of users - "this is suspicious, I think they might be the ones pushing it!"
There's so many people in under this post trying to turn it into anything but what it is - legislation attempting to protect kids from the harms of social media. Which, again - are well documented.
I'm was a casual RHCP fan until that book came out, I own a couple albums.
Haven't been able to listen to them since. It's just lost its appeal when it's now associated with that attitude in my brain.
I don't get how people can 'seperate the art from the artist'. I get that it's potentially a valid attitude, but my brain just doesn't work that way. Same with Jackson after Leaving Neverland.
In Australia we have this thing called school, all the kids go there.
I have kids at ages affected by this ban. They don't care about it at all. They already communicate with their friends via iMessage and FaceTime (both unaffected by the ban), they walk to school - so they often walk with friends. Theres a small skate park near the local shops they also walk to and hang out with friends sometimes, they also walk to the shops and practice basketball with friends at nearby ovals with practice courts regularly. They go to cinemas or big shopping centres (malls) with their friends sometimes - but have to be driven there anyway so parents have to coordinate.
TLDR: the ban doesn't affect a lot of kids at all, and they socialize more or less the same as I did when I was a kid.
The only kids heavily affected are those with Snapchat, Tiktok, Facebook and other crap that they shouldn't be on to begin with, and are getting a huge favour done to them by removing them for a few years.
Peanuts are definitely not ideal, but much better than drinking oil from restaurant gutters or deep fried refuse.
Likely peanuts selected to be easy to dispense. Hopefully the program continues and they move to a more ideal food, but it may have to be something appealing to the crows to incentivise them?
Yes.
Full photo:
collapsed inline media