Somebody needs to explain how its going to be the currency of the world when it can only do 7 transactions per second.

The Lightning Network but it's not perfect.

Also somebody should explain to me why bitcoin is the best of all cryptocurrencies, just because it was the first. Satoshi?

The first - yes, the best? doubtful. What really sets Bitcoin apart is that it has no creator (Satoshi has never been discovered, some believe he's not just one person, he represented an organization) or company behind it. There are developers but they don't run around advertising it or promising anything. There's a sense that it's truly public, decentralized and there's no personal interest involved.

This is great news. Now please ban the use of plastic for packaging of small items. Literally everything is wrapped in tons of plastic.

And then it would be nice to see to return to glass packaging for milk and its derivatives, e.g. yogurt. And make it so that returning the packaging would grant you money or a discount on new purchases, so that people would be incentivized to do so.

They don't: it's an issue only with the Adblock add-on/extension. uBlock Origin users haven't noticed anything.

But that shouldn't stop a torrent of hatred towards Google which spends billions yearly to maintain YouTube which is ridiculously expensive.

Fees are just fine for most coins except Bitcoin which is currently not meant to buy burgers.

Transaction fees per chain:
Ethereum: $1.4
Tether: from 0 to $1
BNB: under 0.45%, normally under 0.07%
Solana: $0.00025
XRP: $0.0002

And even for Bitcoin the fee now stands at $10 regardless of the transaction volume. You may send 1000 bitcoins ($47 million) and still pay exactly $10. Regular transfers between banks are a lot more expensive for such huge sums of money.

Speaking of crypto coins "largely" used for illegal activities. FBI reported a few years ago that the illegal volume of transactions on crypto chains was less than 1%.

Speaking of crypto coins not being used for anything useful: welcome to the world of failing economies where there's sky high inflation and people don't have any means to invest into something decent/worthy and countries with heavy money transfer restrictions.

Amazing how on /. ages old myths are regurgitated again and again. I mean Silk Road ceased to exist 11 years ago for Christ's sake.

Bitcoin is currently traded at around $47K a piece.

I don't know if I have to believe in this or not, but if you could sold me a couple for a few bucks, I'd grab them immediately.

What does it mean to "use"? To encode (lossless) audio in Ogg Vorbis? I stopped doing that over a decade ago. To have and listen to audio files encoded using Vorbis? I have those but I've long switched to AAC as my primary lossy audio codec.

As for raw numbers: in my audio collection there are 356 files in Ogg Vorbis, 127 in Opus (youtube rips), 2392 in AAC, 1430 in MP3 and 1292 in FLAC.

Vorbis had it limited run as a better/open/patent-free alternative to MP3 but then most people encode for themselves, so in the end the best supported codec wins out, and that's AAC nowadays. Why not MP3? AAC at roughly 192Kbps is comparable to MP3 at 320Kbps. And then Apple with all its might chose it.

As for online music stores, AAC is king (Apple iTunes), MP3 is close second, then come FLAC/PCM/WAV. And if not for downloading/buying but listening to, YouTube is primarily Opus, so you just cannot neglect it.

Vorbis? Spotify, some obscure online radio stations and that's probably it.

aims to sharpen clarity, color and image quality

Even setting aside that this sentence is rubbish in terms of English (sharpen color? sharpen image quality? what is that?), is this tech even right for the consumer? I mean it sounds like you will be watching something completely different than what the camera/operator shot (or rendered) in the first place.

I hate headlines like this.

No, it doesn't work "just like the human brain" which consists of wild flesh which is not fully understood yet. Not only all neurons and connections between them are slightly different, they are not set in stone and change outside of their primary functions of controlling network weights (or so we think).

And then we have functionally different parts of the brain and even different neurons.

Exactly what I was going to say.

The language used in those filings is so dense I guess most humans will fail to produce a correct answer most of the time.

ChatGPT4 is a thing. Have you tried it? Because it looks like you've never done that.

It's smarter than the vast majority of people out there. It's smarter than me in a ton of math/physics related tasks. It can solve never before seen tasks granted it needed terabytes of data for that which indicates this path is not the most promising because we have a much smaller memory and computational capacity. That's the definition of intelligence.

I mean we've had ton of break-throughs in AI recently and all of them are not "intelligence" for you?

How about AlphaGo? AlphaFold? ChatGPT4? Dall-E and Midjourney? Boston Dynamics' Robotics AI? 100% lifelike voice generation? Voice replacement? Voice recognition? Often near perfect translation? A ton of stuff.

Solving Go and prediction of protein structure are not computationally achievable/solvable. There is intelligence to that whether you want to believe in your own supremacy or not.

Nothing above seems like "true" AGI yet but we are moving goalposts all the time. The Turing test has long fallen, people are devising more devious tests just to recognize AI talking to them back.

People love to believe Intelligence is unique to human beings except it's not been proven by anyone. If anything scientists have been discovering that animals are a lot smarter and intelligent than we've ever imagined. Some claim that even plants are intelligent.

I've not stated or implied that.

I meet AGIs daily. I hope you're one of them as well. There's no magic to our brain which means that AGI will be created sooner or later. Whether LLMs will lead to AGI or not, I don't know. The human brain can be digitized, emulated and if needed scaled. There's no known physics which prevents this. We haven't yet fully achieved that because it's extremely complicated.