The author of the article, Beth Mole, has a PhD in microbiology and her writing is generally detailed and pretty good. I hope he doesn't really not believe in germ theory, but if that's the case, it explains a lot of the decisions he's making.
Lenovo only officially supported 4 GB, but you're right - the MB supports 8 GB, and I can confirm it works: that's what I have in mine. That and an SSD make a huge difference.
I'm reading this and it can't possibly mean what it says.
Section 3 says:
(a) PROHIBITION ON IMPORTATION.—On and after the date that is 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the importation into the United States of artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence technology or intellectual property developed or produced in the People’s Republic of China is prohibited.
(b) PROHIBITION ON EXPORT.—On and after the date that is 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the export, reexport, or in-country transfer of artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence technology or intellectual property to or within the People’s Republic of China is prohibited.
Note that in (a) and (b) the third part of the "or" clause is "intellectual property". It isn't qualified as (say) "artificial intelligence intellectual property".
And in Sec. 2 (6) "Intellectual property" is defined as work protected by copyright, property protected by patent, stuff which is trademarked, or trade secrets.
But any preprint on (e.g.) arxiv.org is copyrighted, hence "intellectual property" under this definition. So as written, this seems to prohibit the exchange of research in general with people in the PRC. The restrictions on AI are problematic enough, but this is just ridiculous.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through Richard Hofstadter's "Anti-intellectualism in American Life". It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964, but it's striking how many of his observations are still pertinent - which is consistent with his identification of anti-intellectualism are as persistent theme in American history. Indeed, in his chapters on evangelicalism he discusses these ideas as they manifested among the Puritans. There are good accounts of the revivalists like Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday (late 1800s - early 1900s).
Many prominent politicians were subjects of anti-intellectual attacks. If you're annoyed by modern political trash talk, consider this observation about Thomas Jefferson:
"It was charged that he kept a slave wench and sired mullatoes; that he had been a coward during the American Revolution; that he had started the French Revolution; that he had slandered Washington; that he was ambitious to become a dictator, another Bonaparte; that he was a visionary and a dreamer, an impractical doctrinaire; and, to make matters worse, a French doctrinaire."
Of Adlai Stevenson, he says:
"The quality in Stevenson that excited most frequent attack was not his intellect as such, but his wit."
" The association of intellectuality and style with effeminacy which I have remarked on in connection with the reformers of the Gilded Age reappeared in the 1952 campaign."
Some of the attacks on Stevenson in this vein that he quotes from the media of the time are just incredible.
He's a wonderful writer, too:
"But in world full of dangers, the danger that American society as a whole will overesteem intellect or assign it such a transcendent value as to displace other legitimate values is one that need hardly trouble us."
"... an unbridled passion for the total elimination of this or that evil can be as dangerous as any of the delusions of our time."
I'm thinking of reading his "American Political Tradition" of "The Progressive Historians" when I finish this book. Highly recommended.
What's likely going on is this. Google is not going to launch an AI computation for every search. That would be lunacy. They're probably identifying some commonly occurring searches, running them through AI, and then injecting that AI result whenever those searches occur. They're probably not exact searches but clusters of similar searches. When your search lands into a topic cluster for which there's a pre-computed AI summary, then you get that summary.
Distracting adjectives like effing probably spoil the match between your search query and the topic cluster.
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