It's not the first
But on the main topic, Bitcoin was released as a response to the 2008 financial fuckup, it's even mentioned within the first block of the blockchain. It was created to fight the man of debt-based money and all those financial games. How in the hell did it end up partnering with the man?
Work from home is going to go away because government is going to make it go away, just wait. Cities need the tax income they make from business offices. They're not going to just allow it to go away. Our cities and towns are designed around people working in offices. Getting rid of that would involve completely rethinking how our society works, and that's just not going to happen.
The world is changing and we shouldn't try to hold it back arbitrarily. It's simply idiotic to drive around burning fossil fuel when you're going to work on a computer anyway.
OTOH, there are a lot of jobs you can't do from home, and a lot of reasons for people to live in cities. Education is one example; remote studying might work at the university level to some extent, but not for everything and not so well at the lower levels. Old prestigious universities have seen half a millennium of societal and technical change, and people still come back to study there in person. Then there are things like entertainment, you can't go to a restaurant or a theatre over TCP/IP.
I'm looking at this from a Finnish city of about 150k people, living in a quiet neighbourhood with a 15-minute walk to the city centre, and my mental image of US cities and offices is rather different -- I expect a huge urban sprawl where you need to drive miles away from the centre to reach your gigantic office complex. If your offices are already spread around the countryside, I don't see what it has to do with cities.
Cities have existed for thousands of years because of various reasons, but what they all have in common is the need for people to get together. I think office work is a pretty small part of this in the big picture.
You just need a glass rod through the wall on a line of sight between the router and the receiver.
I wonder if we could make very long and thin, so far as to be flexible, and choose the materials so that the laser light stays inside the "rod".
I also recall these things called "wave guides" for microwaves, basically metal tubes for directing EM waves. You could also insert an extra conductor passing along the middle of the tube to adjust its properties. I believe it was called "co-axial" or something. Future engineers might find a way to miniaturize these things to match the size of these "lap-tops".
People talk about their "bucket list" all the time and they aren't planning suicide.
I'm well aware of that phrase. But this is exactly the point I was trying to make: people talk about "kicking the bucket" without meaning it. They talk about things they want to do before they kick the bucket, but then they are never going to kick the bucket -- they just say that because it sounds cooler than just dying. I guess it's one of my autistic traits that I try to understand what words and phrases really mean, instead of throwing random words around.
On the hardware side, manufacturers are more cautious. The AI cores are designed to serve more than one purpose. They might be accelerating the new fancy model, yes. But they also help improve your native camera application, or make Adobe export several times faster. They are more of a continuation of standard SIMD operations, like Intel SSE or ARM Neon instructions.
I recall MMX stood for "multimedia extensions" in marketing speak, while it was really more about "matrix mathematix". I wouldn't waste my money on "AI cores" but if they're really just wider SIMD units, I'm much more interested — but even then only if they are freely programmable without some closed SDK. It doesn't need to become a SSE-like CPU extension, I'm fine with something like OpenCL support, where it might actually make more sense.
It's interesting, though, how linear algebra with large arrays is suddenly becoming cool and important. I thought people had been doing it on computers for decades, but I guess it was only important to a certain class of geeks. Gaming gave us cheap GPUs which helped a lot, and I guess we're in for some more windfall from the latest hype.
I know you are not a fan of
Do androids do it with electric sheep? Now that would be a dick news story.
<morbo>Ultrasonic humidifiers don't work that way!</morbo> They break water into tiny droplets, which then evaporate naturally more easily than bulk water (see Köhler theory / Kelvin effect). The effect of the article is about evaporation itself.
Ultrasonic humidifiers use less energy than traditional ones that rely on direct evaporation, but the droplets can be a health hazard. If the water has any pathogens (and it likely does), they may be carried about along the droplets.
Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine. -- Andy Warhol