For those curious, the characters are katakana (the syllabary often used in Japan for foreign words, onomatopoeia, etc) and they’d be read as “ma-ri-u-su”, which is possibly intended to represent “Marius” under Japanese spelling conventions.

Betteridge strikes again.

A chatbot is a tool, nothing more. Responsibility, in this case, falls on the people who deployed a tool that wasn’t fit for purpose (in this case, the sympathetic human conversational partner that the AI was supposed to mimic would have done anything but what it did—even changing the subject or spouting total gibberish would have been better than encouraging this kid). So OpenAI is indeed responsible and hopefully will end up with their pants sued off.

If it were an enforced cap, I’d be wondering who it was that had the shares in a desktop/laptop/“real computer” manufacturer—forbidding smartphones ≠ forbidding screens or Internet access.

Whether or not that’s a defense depends on the details of the French legal system. In most countries, there are rights you’re not allowed to sign away. No idea whether security of the person is one of those rights in France.

The larger ones were flexible, not floppy—they could be bent without cracking the casing, but wouldn’t just bend under their own weight.

Nah, I’d end up explaining why floppy discs weren’t floppy, instead, and let the younger folks explain the CDs.

Nah, that’s APL.

Thing is, to the people who don’t follow tech news and aren’t really interested in this stuff, AI = AGI. It’s like most non-scientists equating “theory” and “hypothesis”. So it’s a really bad choice of term that’s interfering with communication.

I think it was supposedly New Zealand or something. It’s been a long time since I’ve read the full texts.

That series of RFCs (1149, 2549, 6214) keeps getting rediscovered by new generations of technical folk. Among other issues that have never been completely addressed are accidental encapsulation of packets in hawks, and whether the Internet is doomed to be slow in locations where the only avian carriers available are flightless.

There has been one successful implementation of the protocol to date. 55% of ping attempts went through.

(As April Fools RFCs go, the only one that’s arguably more popular than IPoAC is the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, the source of 418 I am a teapot).

It’s off center, but still balanced because it hasn’t fallen.

Until a vibration hits, or someone blows gently on the blocks at the top right.