I'm looking forward to an AI assistant that can use my voice to make phone calls

I'm sure some people with selective mutism that would like to use text to speech with their own voice

> How will we adapt?

Digitally signing audio clips

Ok mutism is a great use case, thanks. Still, the problem is solved also with normal text to speech software

That, on average, they would be worse off if they were born elsewhere. It's a predictor - nobody was suggesting that it's the only factor, or that it's deterministic.

Once you have unlimited physical access to the hardware, software protections are worthless.

And that's ignoring that it could just be sold for parts.

It would still be possible to find a compact subregion of a large region where no girls were born. However, the fact that it was 132 villages makes this seem unlikely, unless the large region contained many thousands of villages.

132 villages giving birth to only boys for 3 months straight is probably a 0.001% chance of happening naturally

1,000 births (a random guess) with 50% chance of girl, never happening once?

yikes

> 1,000 births (a random guess)

You don't have to guess, it's right there in the first sentence of the article. There have been 216 births, so about 1.6 per village, which makes having zero female birth statistically normal in each village individually, but possibly not over the whole area if these villages are all in the same area.

no girl in 216 birth is a probability of 1/(2^216) : it's either cherry picking or criminal. The article is ambiguous on the way the villages were identified ("a red zone" ???).

I know that was probably a random percentage, but for a different perspective a 0.001% chance of an airline crash would still result in an accident each day just because of the sheer amount of air traffic, and that's just for one of the world's more "exotic" modes of transport. In a world of 7 billion people things that should happen extremely rarely still happen every day/month/year only because the dice get rolled so often

1/2^216 is 9e-66, so it's closer to 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000009%

I think that 9e-66 is rather irrelevant.

If I flipped 216 coins, the exact sequence that I get back also has a probability of 9e-66.

If I flipped 532 coins, the probability that I get any specific subset that share the same side is the sum of all probability that gives that result.

What we know is that 132 out 694 villages, with the average number of born children for 3 months being 1.6, had zero girls. The other 562 villages with unknown average of children had girls. As such we can conclude that the probability must be the sum of all sequences of births that results in 132 out of 694 villages having exactly no girls born under the period of 3 months.

The probability of the 132 villages is thus undefined as we simply do not have enough data on the spectrum of sequences. Based on the global census of 943 females per 1,000 males we can suspect a bias and create a ball park guess, but there is simply not enough to say an exact number like 9e-66.

Serverless is really the wrong term to use here. That refers to a specific way of handling cloud infrastructure (the point being that there are still servers, you just don't care)

Excel is used for client-side only programs. There are no servers at all. All programs originally were client-side only originally because networks didn't exist.

Google sheets (and other google docs) can be programmed in "serverless" JavaScript that runs in the cloud somewhere. It's hellishly slow making sheets API calls, though. Feels like some kind of remote procedure call. (Slower than driving Excel via OLE Automation even, and that's saying something!) Then it times out on a wall clock (not cpu time) limit, and breaks if you take too long.

A CS grad student friend of mine was in a programming language class, and the instructor was lecturing about visual programming languages, and claimed that there weren't any widely used visual programming languages. (This was in the late 80's, but some people are still under the same impression.)

He raised his hand and pointed out that spreadsheets qualified as visual programming languages, and were pretty darn common.

They're quite visual and popular because of their 2D spatial nature, relative and absolute 2D addressing modes, declarative functions and constraints, visual presentation of live directly manipulatable data, fonts, text attributes, background and foreground colors, lines, patterns, etc. Some even support procedural scripting languages whose statements are written in columns of cells.

100% success, expected time until death 3-70 years with a 95% confidence interval

With kotlin, the final .toList() call can be removed

I could purchase a semi truck today and drive it despite the fact i'm not licensed. I don't see how it's any different - the thing stopping people from driving vehicles that they don't have the license for is that it is illegal and you can be punished.

Repossession doesn't come into the equation - the same way I can buy a truck, they can buy/own a car that they aren't allowed to drive. It makes sense that they would sell it and buy one they are licensed to drive, but nobody's making them if they want to sit in it and make car noises while not moving.

A person taking a job in teaching benefits society as a whole but disadvantages them individually. We should transfer some of that benefit to them to make it an attractive option by increasing taxes and salary.

Or, you know, you could send them some of your own money before you volunteer other people's.

What did he say that made you think he was volunteering other people's money rather than his own...? He would presumably also be paying the increased taxes he recommended. Also, why such an abrasive/defensive response when he simply recommended paying teachers a more attractive salary?