$207 billion over five years is one Northrop revenue.

Ah, clever. Would you also care to argue that rocks can't do arithmetic, which is what I actually said?

I'm not sure how any of that makes "it right though." It rather sounds like you're arguing against the author's apparent point that such things emerge out of whole cloth from the magic that is human intelligence.

I don't think we're having the same conversation. The OP asked about how not buying stuff decreases productivity. I explained that "productivity" in this sense is GDP / capita and not buying stuff decreases GDP. I'm not discussing social policy and certainly have not "missed the wealth gap." If you would like to discuss social policy, there are lots of Slashdot articles where such things happen.

You know, Slashdot has this great feature where messages are shown in threads. The message I relied to, for example, is shown immediately before mine. If you read the message (the one that mine is a reply to), and engage that vaunted human thinking ability, it might make more sense.

My comment was about a logical error made by someone I assume is human. I'm not sure that, plus your own apparent error, is quite the evidence for human intelligence over machine that you think it is.

Yes, that's the story you and the article author probably learned in grade school. It's not true, of course, but it certainly appeals to the lone genius personality cult cognitive bias.

Yeah, that's not much better.

Einstein, for example, conceived of relativity before any empirical evidence confirmed it.

WTF does that mean? How can you confirm something before anybody conceives of it? If we assume its just clumsy language then its just not true. Maxwell's electrodynamics were known to be in conflict with Galilean relativity (among other things) and the physics community had spent decades working on the problem including Lorentz, Lamor, Poincaire and others working out the necessary transform to replace the Galilean one. Einstein, who was a PhD student at the time, wrote a very nice paper tying it all together.

As for metaphors, or vocabularies or whatever, Einstein was notably not a fan of the metaphors that are currently most associated with general relativity.

There's also a nice little paper by some physicists where they train a small neural network (much, MUCH smaller than any LLM) on various types of observations and show that it learns symmetries of the physical system. One of their examples is learning the invariance of the spacetime interval.

Perhaps drunk too?

I doubt it. The summary (I didn't read the article, I meant it when I said "stop reading") sounds like a typical opinion piece from someone with lots of opinions and not much concern for accuracy. To pick the same example again, the Einstein myth is pretty overwhelming but this guy takes it to the next level with the "didn't like the metaphor" stuff. Is that the 2025 version of "the narrative?"

The Arduino bootloader does indeed make using ATMegas nicer, but the ESP32 uses its own bootloader, which is burned in, not modifiable. The RP2040 too, and I expect most or all of the RISC-V chips as well.

The Arduino toolchain also contributes a lot but, except for the ATMega, it's also created and maintained by not-Arduino.

It's maybe been useful motivation. The problem is, it's essentially the same definition as that of "the soul."

None of your examples are examples of "not thinking." They're examples of things that you think don't think.

The problem with that is it's entirely useless for extrapolating, as much as your prejudice would like you to think the opposite. It's also generally agreed that rocks don't do arithmetic, but if you arrange them in just the right way they're actually awfully good at it.

Funny, but the entire human population spends most of their time not "thinking."

From coordinating complex movements like walking through routines like driving to work to, yes, knee jerk reactions to most things, most of what our brains do is subconscious. Only the weird justifies the effort of actual executive control. Whatever it is that we call "conscious thought" is even rarer.

Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research.

Well, you can stop reading there. I don't necessarily agree with the thesis, but the supporting arguments seem to range from wrong to kind of dumb.

It's pretty important if you're working in a developing field. The original TPU couldn't do floating point so it wasn't really useful for training. IIRC they also work best with matrices that have dimensions that are multiples of fairly big numbers (128? 256?) with later generations working best with bigger matrices.

That's great for the current focus on gigantic attention matrices but not so great if the next big thing can't be efficiently shoehorned into that paradigm.