But what of it?

If you're not watching your competition at all levels, you're not doing it right. The reality of retail has always been dog-eat-dog. Can they do it better?

Let's look at the proof. Yes, powerfully successful, but they suck at so many things. They mis-deliver. They have a product search engine from hell itself. They fake their reviews-- or permit them. They screw their partners with a smile.

Intelligence is one thing, execution another.

Here we go again with this.

NVidia shipped 100k AI GPUs last year, which - if run nonstop - would consume 7,4 TWh. Crypto consumes over 100 TWh per year, and the world as a whole consumes just under 25000 TWh per year.

AI consumption of power is a pittiance. To get these huge numbers, they have to assume long-term extreme exponential scaling. But you can make anything give insane numbers with an assumption like that.

I simply don't buy the assumption. Not even assuming an AI bust - even assuming that AI keeps hugely growing, and that nobody rests on their laurels but rather keeps training newer and better foundations - the simple fact is that there's far too much progress being made towards vastly more efficient architectures at every level - model structure, neuron structure, training methodologies, and hardware. . Not like "50% better", but like "orders of magnitude better". I just don't buy these notions of infinite exponential growth.

Sadly this theory is extremely wrong because most of our surface water is in the oceans and despite water being locked up in the poles some of the driest places on the planet are Antarctica's Dry Valleys, right next to the Antarctic ice sheet just as on the Arabian peninsular and elsewhere there are deserts adjacent to oceans. Whether a place is arid is determined by the local climate which is dependent on a host of factors such as prevailing wind direction, local topology etc. not the amount of polar ice - even when that location is right next to that polar ice!

Everyone (including Slashdot) is presenting the study wrong. It's forecasting that world incomes would drop by nearly a fifth relative to what they would have otherwise been, not relative to the present.

Not everywhere. The paper claims that Canada looks like it will have a net 5-20% boost to GDP thanks to climate change.

Maybe Republicans really like dick picks

Thanks Yuri. How's the weather in St. Petersburg?

An 18-wheeler was overkill.

Everyone knows that they should have used a station wagon.

While I'm no Oracle fan, VirtualBox remains free. There are numerous alternatives, each with their own quirks.

There are lots of alternatives suddenly gnawing at VMWare, and their client base is unhappy, to say the least. Some MBA class ought to be taught on glaring examples of how to thwart your own acquisition with bad projections and client-base mismanagement.

"Oh yeah, this is gonna be a freaking goldmine!" Then aim the barrel at your Nike Golds and shoot your foot, repeatedly pulling the trigger, until you can walk no more. In the meantime, competition starts running past you as you look for bandages.

Nobody can even define what general ai would even be. It's just the singularity all over again we were supposed to get to a decade ago.

If someone thought the ai-pin was a good idea and reasonably priced they probably believe the general ai already exists. You shouldn't let them decide how to use money.

Maybe if Israel hadn't been politically and financially backing Hamas, it might have been different. But hey, all that counts is "Palestinians bad, Israelis good". Simple is so much easier to cope with than reality.

No, at least not without chemical assistance or mental issues which, in either case, means that the brain in question is not functioning properly.

No, it may sound logical but it is not actually using any logic. All it is doing is predicting what text is most appropriate to add next. It is not doing what a human would which is have some concepts in mind and then struggle to find the correct words to express or explain those concepts. Current AI is exactly like a parrot: it can mimic human writing - and yes do so insanely well - but that is all it is doing mimicing, or in some case just flat out copying. That can, and indeed does, give an extremely powerful illusion that AI somehow comprehends what it is writing but at no point is the AI recognizing a concept and then trying to express that concept in words as a human would.

It's not just a question of whether it's justifiable. It's just simply nonsense to think that they can enforce this. Anyone can run Stable Diffusion on their computer. There's a virtually limitless number of models finetuned to make all kinds of porn. It's IMHO extremely annoying all the porn flooding the model sites; I think like 3/4ths of the people using these tools are guys making wank material. Even models that aren't tuned specifically for porn, rarely does anyone (except the foundation model developers, like StabilityAI) specifically try to *prevent* it.

The TL/DR is: if you think stopping pirated music was hard, well, *good luck* stopping people from generating porn on their computers. You might as well pass a law declaring it illegal to draw porn.

Light exposure, depth, degree of exposure, isolated from others or clustered... many factors can affect survivability.