Transferring a terabyte of data from one phone to another takes the better part of an hour even at real-world USB 3 speeds.

This is just pushing us closer to the Terminator or "I Have No Mouth and I Must scream" science fiction, but entirely plausible scenarios.

The former, everyone is mostly aware of from the second film due to Cyberdyne. The latter people are less familiar with.

Both basically are "AI takes over and exterminates humanity", both centering on an advanced AI having access to everything. So what is the ultimate play by both? Humanity is a threat to itself, so it must exterminate humanity.

Even "The Matrix" is a more looser interpretation of the same scenario. Where the AI basically uses humanity enslaved to what's sometimes referred to as an Elysium simulation. (Basically your consciousness is trapped in the computer, your physical body may or may not still exist.) It's not like this hasn't been visited before in Star Trek either.

The general idea is that any advanced AI should never have it's fingers on the extinction button. This was alluded to in "Mass Effect" with the Geth and EDI, and "Star Trek" as well (which is why Commander Data is just one android.)

Like the unfortunate thing is, if we feed the AI infinite amounts of data, without instructions on how it's allowed to use it, it will ultimately use it to evil means (by which I mean selfish means, since the AI has no concept of "doing evil for evil's sake")

This is why I think orbital weapons and autonomous weapons should not be things that an AI has the authority to fire.

Amazon persuaded NASA to use S3 rather than the object store NASA invented: Open Stack SWIFT.

Instead of being able to rely on their own work, with minimal cost, now NASA is locked into a multi-year monopoly and will be paying for it for decades. I see this as just another instance of corporations sucking the government tit forever. Maybe this time, it won't be. And Lucy could let Charlie Brown finally kick that football too.

Amazon is in it for the money of course. The question is does it make sense for the country to rope in Amazon when the uses of the product will likely be long term, and no small amounts classified? Those are questions of policy that can be legitimately argued either way, but the final analysis is that government/private sector endeavors almost always seem to sour and fail. Examples are collecting student loans, where the loans are paid to the private contractor, but the principal never makes it back into Government hands. Another are prisons, where treatment of prisoners and their needs significantly decline once government is removed from direct accountability. A third is collecting fees form legal proceedings, where the debtor is invariably put into deeper and deeper holes with fees and fines, and returned to prison. Last, child support payments in states where it's contracted out to private intreats, and the debtor is arrested when the payment processor "forgets" to process the payment sent. (Turns out vindictive spouses are involved.) Predation by the private sector is easy, almost inevitable.

If there are successful partnerships, please chime in and point them out.

Thank you, I missed that in the article when my mind boggled at using a bore hole.

Counterpoint: My phone history includes:

• iPhone (original), 5 years
• iPhone 5, 3 years
• iPhone 6s, 8 years
• iPhone 15 Pro, 2 years so far

Assuming I keep the 15 Pro for 3 years (the prior minimum), that's 4.75 years average. I also buy the device with the largest capacity, and always wish it were bigger. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't increase capacity quickly enough for upgrading to help with that.

Upgrading is expensive and it is a pain in the a**. So there are multiple reasons to keep a device until it dies. Some people who buy flagship phones have the same concerns.

The main difference is that flagship phones typically get security updates for five to seven years. Low-end phones are often previous generation hardware that is still for sale, and may get security updates for as little as one year from the date of purchase. So unless you're willing to put your entire life at risk by using a phone that has gaping security holes, low-end phones are often false economy, purchased by people who see the price tag and are too broke to afford a better one, who then end up paying for replacement after replacement at a higher rate because they can't afford a phone that will actually last five or six years.

So I would expect low-end phones to get junked every couple of years, and for high-end phones to get junked when support is dropped, assuming that the owners know that the phone is no longer supported, and the rest of them just end up in a giant botnet, and they replace their phones because they're bogged down with malware a few months to a year after they go out of support.

iPhone users keep their phones longer than Android users, on average. 61% of iPhone users have owned their phone for more than 2 years, versus just 43% of Android users.

So patch availability does appear to have a significant impact on how long people keep their devices.

That's been doable for 20 years.

It doesn't work on really complicated music (eg vocals, chorus, orchestration) but it works for the vast majority of low-effort music, which includes AI music, guitar and piano solos, drum solos, anything that has a very solid melody. You can see this in youtube when it's AI identifies music "melodies" without claiming the actual track.

Anyone who is really musically inclined, can completely reverse engineer any song just from listening to it. I can do that, if I think about it. but I don't have the tools or time to reverse engineer a song because I have no incentive to. If someone said "here's a million dollars, I need you to re-create my song from 30 years ago that has never been on CD." I could probably do that.

But the effort to do that would be substantial, because part of it is identifying the musical instruments, and part of it is identifying the human characteristics. Humans operate in the analog spectrum. Computers do not. So if a song is F, A, D, F, A, D, E, G#, C# (that is "the phantom of the opera") there are two things happening at the same time. The main instrument is an Organ, so F A D is held down for that, but the left hand is the "beat" which is "D" for the same 10 notes. So when a human plays it on an Organ, the instrument itself is responsible for for the connection between the notes. If you play it as a MIDI file, it can't match what the actual 1986 song sounds like. In fact, usually a MIDI version sounds rushed because it's played on an instrument that is not an Organ. So any time you come across a MIDI of a song, it usually sounds like instruments are missing.

Hence the idea about an AI being able to transcribe music back into sheet music/midi. MIDI's are just digital representations of sheet music. In theory you should be able to listen to anything and create a sheet music of it. But for a lot of really practical reasons, there are different sheet music representations, usually one per instrument, and when you have an orchestra, that slight latency of human's playing it is what isn't reproducible in MIDI form, and an AI can neither transcribe or recreate it.

All present machine learning when it comes to producing output, average it's training input. So the result is that AI generated music is a gross facsimile of real music. Sure it sounds like music, but it's an average of what thousands of other songs sound like. So this works like "inpainting" for music. It guesses what is most common next sound, without any understanding of the music theory.

It's been possible for decades to procedurally generate music as well, which unlike "AI", actually does take into account music theory. If you played Portal/Portal2, No Man's Sky, Deep Rock Galactic, some of that music was procedural. You'd likely never of really noticed that much because the procedural stuff doesn't stick out. Yet "Still Alive" from Portal does, because it's actually sung.

There is literately a program called "music maker" that does this without AI.

The entire point of "AI music" is to fleece youtube and tiktok.

I'm sure you've seen dozens of youtube shorts or tiktoks with music you've never heard of in the background, even over commercial copyrighted content like the simpsons or south park. The big scam is to rip the heart of the episode, mirror it, put this shitty AI music in it, and then get free money from youtube from it's use.

In this case a false denial would put them in violation of two FTC consent decrees, and would almost certainly leak (Google employees are not known for keeping their mouths shut), so it would be a particularly stupid thing to do.

Was that an AI generated joke driven by an old timer, or has the old timer (4-digit UID) passed away and the identity been hijacked by an AI generating it's own joke? Seems to be a lot of that going around these years...

It's the first name that reveals the joke. Aidan = AI Dan. The Toner-Rodgers bit might be some kind of joke about permission to laser print?

But it reminds me of another oldie:

Anything you can do, AI can do better. AI can do anything better than me. (There was a musical (later made into a movie) about a gun...)

YouTube at the top? Followed by Facebook? It's like a ranking of the worst in the world, though I'm surprised how quickly it tapers down.

Profits are right and might makes right, so might equals profits? Where does the 500-pound google gorilla sleep? With the fishes, but only if it wants to?

So much for the attempted humor. I'm innocent, I say. It's like attempted murder, right?

In conclusion, right doesn't make right, but the "winners" write the history books and they always write that they were right. Infinity money time infinity and have a nice incommensurable day.

Of course they didn't say that. They've always been open about doing that for unpaid consumer accounts, it's how they can provide the service for free. If you don't want your the ads, or for your data to be used, you can get that, starting at at $7 per month.

Do they, or could that stuff be on the surface? Pump cold water down, get hot steam back up, run it through a heat exchanger/condenser, cycle it back down again. Or maybe something other than water. You'd lose some heat to the shaft walls, but that could be acceptable.

I think all the maintenance-required parts you're talking about are where the heat is transformed into electricity, plus the safety-related monitoring of the core. With this design, it seems like all of the turbines, etc. will be at the surface, where they can be easily maintained, while the safety-related stuff just isn't an issue. Rather than designing a core that can be controlled and ramped up and down, with this system you'd designed the core to just operate at a continuous steady state for its operational lifetime until the fuel is used up, at which point you just fill in the hole.

You might make the core self-moderating so that if it gets too hot it will ramp down the fission so you don't have to worry about stoppage in the flow of water resulting in a meltdown or similar, but that would only be to reduced the likelihood of the core damaging itself before the end of its useful lifetime, not because there is any safety concern with a meltdown that occurs kilometers underground.

All of the stuff other than the weights is basically just scaffolding, though. Necessary, but the stuff that makes it "intelligent" is all in the weights.