Bitcoin relies entirely on SHA256 ASIC's for hashing and they typically need replacing every year or two because more efficient models come out making the old ones unprofitable, especially at halvings. Due to the RoI and first-mover advantage the profitable ones are very expensive.

If you want to heat your home with proof-of-work, use a coin that uses RandomX or some other deliberately ASIC-resistant algorithm (usually CPU mining).

You can pool mine on an old CPU and still get a few pennies for your efforts, though if you want to invest in an EPYC and have other uses for it (maybe you have work jobs to run during the day and want more heat on cold nights) it could actually be profitable.

Resistive electric heating is still a very expensive way to heat, though some people don't have better options. There's a development near where I am that was built shortly after Nixon announced Project Independence and every house (cold climate) has wall-to-wall electric baseboard heating.

https://www.wired.com/1997/12/...

I had to plead in writing but they'd run out of ink, so I pleaded "not quill cup".

This sort of attack is inevitable when you have open-access software repositories. If anybody can upload a package, that implies any bad guy can upload a package. So:

• Ask yourself if you really need a package for this, or is it simple or straightforward enough you can code it yourself and avoid the dependency and the associated supply-chain risks.
• Do your research. Don't just grab the first package that looks like it fits your needs. Review all of the results, then look at who published them and look them up on the web. Look at their web site. Look at what other packages they've published. Look at how active they are aside from the package you're looking at. Toss any that have red flags like no history aside from this package.
• Validate your packages. Authors often sign packages. If they do, get their keys and enable validation so you only accept packages signed by the author you know. That way if a package gets hijacked it'll fail the signature check.

Back in 2002 I was working with image processing, and I came up with a video compression idea: treat the video as a 3D image and apply 3D Fourier transform, then drop the weaker components as done with similar 1D/2D schemes. This would provide a natural balancing between temporal and spatial resolution, depending on the scene. I wasn't much of a programmer back then, but I later realized this would probably be too heavy for practical use. I also learned that the same idea had been put into development around the same time as Ogg Tarkin, but it didn't get very far either.

As a bonus, the Fourier/wavelet format could be decoded in arbitrary resolutions in space or time. This idea is actually used in some music playing libraries, producing 24-bit output from a format intended for 16-bit quality.

Been a while since I've flown a budget airline. On the normal flights I've taken, there's always a few people (usually older people) with paper boarding passes.

Free up the human capital to do what exactly? I like the Star Trek vision as much as anyone, but it's not like we can go explore the galaxy on star ships because we're freed from working in factories.

I think even Star Trek illustrates that work and even existential struggle is an essential part of our development as humans. Kirk had more than one soliloquy to that effect.

Perhaps we might get farther as a society and an economy if we value work and employees as assets rather than mere costs and liabilities. Would change the focus of what we are making and why we are making them.

Awesome! Let me know when you're ready to work union free on the assembly lines in the widget factories. Or to pick produce. Or do you think you're somehow in the management class?

Apparently I'm not human? I like hyphens, en dashes and em dashes. I understand what all of them mean and how to use them correctly, and I find it helpful when text that I'm reading uses the right one.

From the summary:

If the world's most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.

That's not the right conclusion. It doesn't say much one way or the other about AGI. Plausibly, ChatGPT just likes correctly using em dashes — I certainly do — and chose to ignore the instruction. What this does demonstrate is what the X user wrote (also from the summary):

[this] says a lot about how little control you have over it, and your understanding of its inner workings

Many people are blithely confident that if we manage to create superintelligent AGI it'll be easy to make sure that it will do our bidding. Not true, not the way we're building it now anyway. Of course many other people blithely assume that we will never be able to create superintelligent AGI, or at least that we won't be able to do it in their lifetime. Those people are engaging in equally-foolish wishful thinking, just in a different direction.

The fact is that we have no idea how far we are from creating AGI, and won't until we either do it or construct a fully-developed theory of what exactly intelligence is and how it works. And the same lack of knowledge means that we will have no idea how to control AGI if we manage to create it. And if anyone feels like arguing that we'll never succeed at building AGI until we have the aforementioned fully-developed theory, please consider that random variation and selection managed to produce intelligence in nature, without any explanatory theory.

It'll be at least half of that in ten years.

The Zoomers have no interest in cable TV.

> Why not just build the proper infrastructure with what we know works?

I tried to do this locally. The government allows the pole owner (electric or telephone usually) to charge $50/mo/pole to the startup that wishes to hang wires.

The owner pays $5/mo in property taxes to the town.

There are exceptions for large corporations that are in the state's good graces.

It's just to keep competition limited to the cartel.

Short answer: corrupt government.

This was my first thought as well.

Such marketplace confusion!

Whichever way you spin it, it's a scam. Perhaps fraud even, though I don't know about the legalities around setting up these kinds of funds.

All very true, except you imply that this is a new situation in US politics. It's not. Until the 1883 Pendleton Act, political appointments were always brazenly partisan and there was no non-partisan civil service (except, maybe, the military). Firing appointees for petty vindictiveness was less common, but also happened. Trump isn't so much creating a new situation in American government as he is rolling the clock back 150 years, to a time when US politics was a lot meaner and more corrupt than what we've been accustomed to for most of the last 100 or so years.

Of course, the time when our Republic has had an apolitical civil service, strong norms around executive constraint and relatively low tolerance for corruption corresponds with the time when our nation has been vastly more successful, on every possible metric. That's not a coincidence.