Art distorts reality in order to show us different perspectives and perhaps give a warning.

Could the world of Bladerunner 2049 be a thing? Absolutely. Is it likely to be exactly like that? Probably not. Same with Gattaca.

I love cyberpunk literature. I've been reading it since my teens. It prepared me for everything that's happening these days. And what I really like about that is that some things have been outpaced by reality. In many places we are already in post cyberpunk utopia before we even reached cyberpunk.

As Deni Villeneuve said to the Google engineers:"You guys are making it really difficult for us to write science fiction."

Which pretty much sums up the state of things with fiction vs. reality.

We don't want to be associated with a fascist regime when the wind changes.

Steam was introduced by making it mandatory to be able to buy and play Half-Life 2. Big red flag right there and then, which is why I decided _not_ to use Steam right then and there at the beginning of it all.

Yes, HL2 was an excellent game and dominates the hall of fame of videogames for good reaons. Which is why Steam took off like a rocket. And yes, Steam offers great value and Gabe and his crew manage the service well. But if he changes his mind or valve gets sold to some greed leech investment gang things can go belly up pretty fast. I buy my pure-bits versions of videogames with GOG and archive the packages myself. If GOG would shut down tomorrow, I couldn't care less. Which is the way things should be. I'm too much of a (seasoned) computer and internet expert to be fooled otherwise.

I trust Windows Server 2003 more than I trust Windows 11. It's less stable, but Microsoft isn't in control of your machine.

... up with a method to convert radiation to electricity directly, we'd be ready to back to nuclear power.
Until then it remains a dead end.

Nuclear fuel or power isn't the problem. Nuclear Fission steam power and nuclear waste is.

There, FTFY.

Say what you will about Steve Jobs, but ever since the switch to MacOS X he always had one budget item in each category with sometimes great or even exceptional value for the money and Apple quality along with it. The legendary white 12" iBook G4 was by far the cheapest subnotebook at it's time and the first Mac minis could be bought for 250-300 euros, offered great value for the money, were excellent machines and very small. Any PC equivalent that even could come close would cost hundreds more and came with ultra shitty windows.

So good for Tim Cook finally getting back into offering a neat quality budget item. I might actually buy Apple again, believe it or not.

... than an elaborate auto-complete / stochastic parrot inside an evolved naked ape. So am I. So I'd say you're likely dead wind about your assessment. At the state of tech and the rate it's improving it's short-sighted to assume that by some magical mystery attribute humans can have consciousness and artificial beings can't. That's just silly.

There is quite a bunch of solid evidence that what we call consciousness originates in the different levels of brain and the two hemispheres interacting, communicating with and reflecting each other.

Why shouldn't a non-biological brain setup be able to do the exact same things?

Example: Those countless AI CPUs going into "model rearranging" mode on a regular (daily) basis looks to me pretty much like what sleeping is to us. It even happens in the same intervals (based on our sleep and wake cycle).

The only thing I see a larger gap in is use having (and basically being) bodies with loads of secondary sensory input, hormones and gradual shifts in body and brain metabolism. But I wouldn't be so sure that those are required to build a consciousness.

Bottom line: He definitely knows more about AI than I do, but his statement sounds very simplistic IMHO. Not buying it.

This is smart actually. Tech is moving so fast, classic universities can barely keep up. Yes there are basics you need to know regardless what decade you live in. Graph theory and Boolean algebra doesn't change that often. But all that is better covered in premium video courses and in-house exercises with the seasoned devs. No need for degrees, wasted years and hundreds of thousands in debt. I actually agree with Peter Thiel on this one, believe it or not.

... a Vacubot yet, even though they're getting cheaper and better to the point of actually being useful.

No effing way am I going to let some Internet of Trash device load excessive amounts of very personal and private data to some anonymous computer in the cloud. Obviously.

The man bought a vacuum cleaner that required an internet connection, and that didn't make him suspicious?

Not so clever I reckon...

The pigs using ubiquitous street camera surveillance to accuse the woman, or the woman using ubiquitous in-vehicle camera surveillance to prove her innocence.

No part of this story makes me warm or fuzzy.

and the ubiquitous surveillance of large swathes of the internet as well. Woohoo!

Note to self: stick to Debian and don't touch Ubuntu or Mint for a few versions until the kinks have been worked out.

Shut down all sensors that have nothing to do with navigation, that Google uses to put people under surveillance, stop the data collection and stop sending data to the mothership all the damn time. I guarantee you power usage will go down significantly.

How do I know that? because my Fairphone 4 running CalyxOS gets a few more hours of battery life than the same Fairphone 4 running vanilla Android, and my Fairphone 5 running Ubuntu Touch also does better battery-wise than the same phone running Google's surveillance platform.