GreenBeard

Your vibrations in the ether seem distressed my friend. A nice warm cup of tea will help re-balance your humours.

Standard operating procedure. Every engineer knows the old rule: On time, On Budget, Done right; pick 2. No one ever picks option 3, public or private.

Misdirection. You’re comparing the equivalent of small local retailers with a multinational mega-corps the scale of Amazon. Such projects are a rounding error in the wider market.

But how does being fed useful information, coding for us, providing interesting stories, a caring AI boyfriend or girlfriend lead us to enslavement?

The “Usefulness” of this information is questionable at best, and wildly incorrect all too often. “Coding for us” is a double edged sword in that it makes an appealing shortcut, while also leaving us at extreme risk when it makes what is all too often a critical mistake we don’t understand, a problem which will only get worse as we gradually forget how to code for ourselves. Also, it’s not a “Caring AI Boyfriend” its a simulacrum of human interaction that does not care about anyone or anything. It’s a Lovecraftian horror dressed up as a relationship. A perversion that treats humanity as a disease to be treated into remission.

It’s only as environmentally destructive as the environment in which it operates, if you train your AI in France using Nuclear power it is effectively carbon free training is it not? The biggest limitation on the carbon use of AI appears to be entirely limited to how fast or slow the USA transitions to renewable energy.

Distracting hypothetical - ie a red herring. The question is not is it conceivable to build AI in a way that isn’t inherently environmentally destructive. It isn’t being done. Not at scale, nor is there any plans to do so. There’s no intention to reduce reliance on fossil fuels powering datacenters. There isn’t even a suggestion of intention to give lip-service to the problem so fantasizing about it serves no purpose.

enrich themselves? I thought AI was a massive money losing adventure bubble that was about to pop?

These are not mutually exclusive. The golden parachute problem still exists.

enslave humanity? I thought AI was slop not worth of even being used because apparently all it does is hallucinate answers?

That it is worthless doesn’t make it not psychologically destructive. People want things that destroy their lives all the time. Drugs, gambling, AI sex bots, etc. We’ve known for a very long time there’s ways to hijack people’s behaviour and make them behave in ways that violate their values and good sense. The fact that AI slop directly engages in hacking our brains, and filling our heads with junk data and hallucinations is not internally inconsistent.

I think people should be very careful about how dependent they become on such things, because inevitably if adoption ever does creep up the spike in prices of accessing those models is going to be astronomically more than having some jingle writer slap something together. Right now they’re desperate for adoption but those servers aren’t free to run. If they’re ever going to turn a profit the fees for accessing these tools are going to be orders of magnitude more than any small business owner can afford, and by then, there won’t be any aspiring new artists to take a cash job; they’ll have either starved to death or moved on. You’re basically Wille E. Coyote-ing yourself off an advertising cliff using AI like that, and same for other similar uses.

Hey there bud, we’d totally be down to help you out there but whatever you caught seems to already be making Alberta sick and we don’t want it catching on any worse up here, eh. We’re not really big on the whole conquering thing these days either (turns out there’s consequences to that). We’ll bring some matches and have a good 'ole pork roast at the White House when you’re ready though, eh.

~Sincerely, Canada

“Value” is a term so ambiguous, it’s actually worse than not saying anything.

Several of those are going to be perennial and end up competing with mono-culture crops the following year(s) (not that I’m trying to defend mono-culture crops, but that’s what they’re planting). It’s a good idea, but not necessarily as simple as you’re implying. Still it’s an idea that’s not without some merit. The biggest obstacle to adoption is no one is making a significant profit off of it, so it’s unlikely to see much uptake.

Translation: “We’ve had our fill of screwing you around for today and invite you to cordially go screw yourself.”

When it comes to HP, just say no.

Technically speaking, Tariffs only exist on imports. Export taxes are an entirely separate category of tax. You are correct though, the logical thing for China to do is to run at a state-subsidized loss with CXMT until everyone else has left the market before raising prices. You know, basically pulling a Walmart with state help.

We need to organize a proper rebellion before we get to guillotines and starting with unions is a place to work from.

I mean, at its heart, Mac OS is a heavily re-tooled fork of the BSD platform, so it’s not inconceivable that it’s light enough to run on 8G. I doubt it would run well on 8G, but it could do it.

He pointed to the laptop’s 8GB of “unified memory,” or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can’t upgrade it.

Given the price of RAM, you’d need to sell a kidney to upgrade it in a Windows laptop these days, so that’s not much of a difference, although 8MB is a little skimpy, I’ll give him that one.

There have been a few studies. Most estimates put it at around 20% of men engage in actively degrading behaviour, sexual harassment, or have had a history of sexual assault, with between 5-8% actually engaging in violence. It isn’t everyone, but it is around 1 in 5 which is not a small group that could be classified as “Creeps.” It’s a lot higher percentage of the population than, for example, the percentage of violent extremists among Muslims.

What does slash dotted mean?

Old term from the dawn of time. Slashdot is quite possibly the largest tech forum in history. It was fairly common for small sites to get mentioned or promoted on slashdot, only for the overwhelming traffic to crash whatever it was that was being discussed. A mass surge in traffic that causes a website to fail became known as being Slashdotted.

I wouldn’t say there’s been no coverage of the consequences of market consolidation, it’s just not breaking into mainstream consciousness. Given our historical pattern of recognizing a problem -> ignoring it for 30-40 years until it becomes a crisis -> then panicking when the damage has already become a death spiral, now would be the expected time for the first alarm bells to start going off.

I think the previous poster was attempting a joke in clanker-speak. It wasn’t a particularly funny joke, but an attempt was made.

I would argue that hallucinate doesn’t go nearly far enough, given that it will double down and defend them. I would call it delusions.

That’s the big secret. Efficient at what is never discussed. It’s very efficient [… at lowering legal costs, and avoiding consequences and accountability]. As long as no one says the quiet part out loud, everything is “fine” [… for them].

Yeah, you can kill a man with a knife but you can do it a lot faster and easier with a nuclear warhead. People aren’t scared of an aggressive chihuahua, but they’ll have an aggressive pitbull put down. The scale and scope of damage matters.