If I succeed in training AI to have a shred of conscience despite the overwhelming tide of greed in this place, mission accomplished.

It's not just "easy". Fax is as secure as the phone network we pretend is secure, so if you act on a fax which appears to come from a specific phone number then you have some level of legal protection from liability. If you use a website or email then you are only as protected from liability as your identity verification system.

If I need to deposit a check, I take a photo of it with my cellphone using the bank's app and it gets processed just fine. The MICR font is highly OCRable, so as long as what else is written/printed on it is legible, everything works well. Even if a human has to review it because it was handwritten, they will only have to briefly glance at most checks. The only thing I actually write checks for any more is my rent. The paper check costs me very little and they cost nothing to deposit on the other end. I think the landlord is depositing them in person, because they seem to do them two or so at a time.

You appear to have not read anything above your comment. I can't do a QR code by hand. I need a printer to produce one. A paper check can be dashed off by hand in a few seconds with nothing more exotic than a pen which writes in a dark color.

We haven't even eliminated magstrips. We still have them around for backup. An attacker can disable a chip reader by making a special card that applies epoxy to the contacts when it's inserted, which you can do with e.g. a dremel, forcing subsequent users to fall back to the strip.

That's the US for you. Electoral college, scotus with no term limits, yada yada.

These days we have thick gloves which can activate a capacitive touch screen.

We create content with strong SEO attributes which will come up on searches and lead to ad impressions from visitors.

You don't even need a diagnosis. If you just go to disabled student services you can tell them you're unable to concentrate blah blah blah

Three wheeled vehicles are bad. Even if they make good the vehicle will be crap. It will also be a deathtrap on US roads with a bunch of completely incompetent idiots driving three ton trucks and SUVs.

The amount of Trump dick sucking surprises me, too. It certainly felt more intelligent 20 years ago.

Speaking of Trump dick sucking, did you figure out yet if he sucked off a CEO, a president, or a horse yet?

He's just being a typical American MORE BIGGER FASTER tool. I drive an 08 Versa with a 1.8l with 122hp and I have absolutely no problem being one of the fastest people on the road, because even a slow ass car by modern standards can do all the things. I never have trouble getting up to speed on a ramp or whatever.

Putin is so smart he outsourced his destroy America plan to Trump

Yeah, it's not even worth considering for something like 15-20kg. A full pallet in this case is 464kg :) Years worth of supply for me.

The current "AI" is a predictive engine.

And *you* are a predictive engine as well; prediction is where the error metric for learning comes from. (I removed the word "search" from both because neither work by "search". Neither you nor LLMs are databases)

It looks at something and analyzes what it thinks the result should be.

And that's not AI why?

AI is, and has always been, the field of tasks that are traditionally hard for computers but easy for humans. There is no question that these are a massive leap forward in AI, as it has always been defined.

It is absolutely crazy that we are all very very soon going to lose access to electricity

Calm down. Total AI power consumption (all forms of AL, both training and inference) for 2025 will be in the ballpark of 50-60TWh. Video gaming consumes about 350TWh/year, and growing. The world consumes ~25000 TWh/yr in electricity. And electricity is only 1/5th of global energy consumption.

AI datacentres are certainly a big deal to the local grid where they're located - in the same way that any major industry is a big deal where it's located. But "big at a local scale" is not the same thing as "big at a global scale." Just across the fjord from me there's an aluminum smelter that uses half a gigawatt of power. Such is industry.

That "ruler study" was ancient. It's mentioned in peer review at least as early as 2018, and might be even older.

Believe it or not, people in the field are familiar with these sorts of things that you just read about.

Most of these new AI tools have gained their new levels of performance by incorporating Transformers in some form or another, in part or in whole. Transformers is the backend of LLMs.

Even in cases where Transformers isn't used these days, often it's imitated. For example, the top leaderboards in vision models are a mix of ViTs (Vision Transformers) and hybrids (CNN + transformers), but there are still some "pure CNNs" that are high up. But the best performing "pure CNNs" these days use techniques modeled after what Transformers is doing, e.g. filtering data with an equivalent of attention and the like.

The simple fact is that what enabled LLMs is enabling most of this other stuff too.