NYTimes: Japan Has Millions of Empty Houses. Want to Buy One for $25,000?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-houses.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Japan Has Millions of Empty Houses. Want to Buy One for $25,000?

Houses in Japan typically decrease in value over time until they are worthless — the cultural legacy of post-World War II construction and shifting building codes — with only the land retaining value. Owners feel little incentive to maintain an aging house, and buyers often seek to demolish them and start fresh. But that can be expensive.

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AI sceptic Emily Bender: ‘The emperor has no clothes’

Her thesis is that the whizzy chatbots and image-generation tools created by OpenAI and rivals Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI, Google and Meta are little more than "stochastic parrots", a term that she coined in a 2021 paper. A stochastic parrot, she wrote, is a system "for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning". https://on.ft.com/465EHFT I saw this article when using the Financial Times app and thought you might be interested: Financial Times, AI sceptic Emily Bender: 'The emperor has no clothes' -- George Hammond -- Read the full article at:

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