I had 64Gb in my last laptop and 24Gb in the laptop before that. That's over 10 years of laptops.

Not once have I ever "run out of RAM".

People talk utter shit about this kind of thing. Sure, it's STUPENDOUS resources compared to my 48K ZX Spectrum had, and I have a screenshot of an "about:blank" tab taking up 24Mb just for the tab alone.

But it's really not that affecting of anyone using a computer, even a power user.

And it still pisses me off that people still sell 8Gb machines in this day and age. Ridiculous. I had THREE TIMES THAT over 10 years ago, and that only because it was the literal motherboard limit.

Buy sensible fucking amounts of RAM, and then you don't care if Chrome takes up 10Gb, it really won't matter at all.

(All numbers in bytes, because the other stuff is a bollocks measurement)

But at no point are you REQUIRED to eat nothing but ultra-processed foods either. It's entirely optional.

Of course some will be cheaper, but that's like saying "Ah well, we can afford to smoke the PREMIUM cigarettes, which are healthier" - it's WORSE.

And the listing of what's in your food is a million times better than what's in your cigarette or your vape, for instance.

Allergies and preferences also don't come into this. If you have an allergy, you can't just force every food to be hypoallergenic to you when most people aren't allergic.

Sure the cheap crap burger isn't as good as the premium steak. Obviously. But this is then trying to sue the burger maker... even though what they are doing is within all the guidelines. And ultimately the result of that is... no burger for you. Can't afford steak? Oh well. You're not eating today then.

But yet cigarettes are still legal?

Sorry, but you have an enormous battle on your hands to prove anything. All FDA-approved ingredients, all approved food-industry practices, the expectation that consumers don't just live off one food item and exercise some common sense in their portioning and overall diet, etc....

It took decades to get close to tobacco bans and that was clear and obvious evidence of not just knowing it caused cancer but that it did so hugely significantly and then the entire thing was surpressed for decades. Good luck proving it to anything like the same standard, and we still haven't banned that yet either!

This is just a way to make the cheapest of available food more expensive, ultimately.

*what NOT everyone can afford to do...

Horseshit.

I spent decades never spending more than a couple of hundred GBP (Slashdot Classic still ddoesn't let me type £ properly... see?) on a car, then throwing it away and buying a new one when the MOT failed. They often lasted years.

What now everyone can afford to do is BUY IT FROM NEW or lease the damn thing. Both are ridiculously expensive ways to "own" a car. Honestly, that's a modern disease thinking that you have to lease the thing, with balloon payments no less, and then have it serviced exactly according to their schedule. It's horseshit. Just buy a car.

Stop buying from car salesmen with huge lots and a minimum of 4 figures on the crappiest of cars, stop paying £1000's (grrr!) for a basic cheap shitty old used second-hand car with a history you have no idea of, and stop getting into ridiculous finance arrangements or thinking you have to preserve a service history that NOBODY gives a damn about.

I did the maths on the BBC article and it turned out that they made something like £76 REVENUE per customer per year. God knows what the actual profit was per customer. You'd literally do better just selling oranges by the side of the road.

They were clearly just haemorraghing money from the start and it just never took off.

I know of only one couple who ever used them and they lived a weird lifestyle. Lived in a stupidly expensive part of London and had to get a Zipcar or similar to even go grocery shopping. Every time they went somewhere, they had to find a Zipcar. Even if they were planning a week away, they spent a long time trying to book and track down and GET TO a Zipcar if there wasn't one nearby.

Irony was that, unusually for those kinds of places in London, they lived in a gated community with parking and so could have just... bought a car and parked it there.

Unregulated currency = money laundering.

It's the only reason for Bitcoin to exist.

Comparatively, nobody touches the regulated cryptocurrencies because... they don't facilitate money laundering.

It's like cash in that respect. The only reason for any business to choose to deal exclusively in cash is to facilitate money-laundering. And all the big money laundering operations are usually hidden around cash-only businesses.

I refuse to have ads in any paid service.

My Slashdot still has Disable Advertising (from donating back in the day) and every now and then they STILL JUST IGNORE IT.

Fortunately, it's not an ongonig subscription, so I don't really care that much but - I paid for a reason. The button is still there for a reason. Honour it, or give me my money back.

I wouldn't ever pay a monthly subscription and then tolerate even a single second of an ad or one appearing on the screen anywhere. It's one or the other, not mix-and-match.

It's also one of the reasons that I don't have any monthly subscriptions to things - because apparently even your PAYING CUSTOMERS are just ad-revenue nowadays.

"One of them was to increase daily active users by 5% by the end of the year."

Gonna need a bit more than that to pay back those $1tn loans...

"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.

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

It was based on solving a maths equation.

(As a mathematician, yes, I could argue that I studied as a school of mathematical sciences inside a university but also...)

There's a big and very obvious difference between "scientific research" and "mathematics".

Nobody was out there putting clocks on satellites trying to work out what the weird time-dilation problems were that they were seeing in every experiment. Instead, the maths was solved and TOLD you to go looking for them because on the face of it they appeared patently ridiculous and incompatible with what we knew of physics at that time.

The question is not if they replace 3 million jobs (even if we believe such a number plucked out of nowhere).

The question is does it REMOVE 3 million jobs.

Or, like every automation that ever happened (and AI is just automation, it's not intelligent at all), is it just the case that the jobs become obsolete because they were basically worthless and could be automated out of existence by anything that came along, and then they allow other jobs to do more, or require other jobs to be created, etc. etc. etc.

Because, in history, if you look at it over the years (not days or weeks), the number of JOBS just keeps increasing, and pretty much in line with the number of people that need them. Of course there are blips, but pretty much over the last few hundred years... more jobs, all the time.

It's not even a question of "do jobs just stop being created", historically, it's far more "can ALL jobs keep pace with population expansion". Sometimes they waver a bit in that aspect but pretty much... there are always jobs. Because as the lamplighters get obsoleted, the electricians, street-light technicians, etc. come in to replace them, and then people have 24/7 lighting so now you need more people to secure the factory, or whatever other examples you want to pluck out of the air. Secretaries weren't obsoleted by email. Retail shop worker's job were replaced with online delivery drivers, and so on.

Sure. Not the SAME JOB. Of course. But the fact is that the jobs evolve just like the people, and the number of jobs - and thus the unemployment rate which *roughly* corresponds to the number of jobs (but also health, social security and thousands of other factors) stays... pretty much the same. Countries like Greece have high unemployment not because AI came round and stole all the jobs... because the rest of the world are doing just fine... but one of a thousand other factors. But if you look overall... the unemployment rates aren't changing JUST because of AI, and aren't likely to. Because even if that happens, you now need someone to wrangle the AI, a dozen people to help run it, a dozen people at the electricity company to keep the lights on for it, more people to make and sell and transport and fit the GPUs and so on.

This is yet another evolution, marketed as apocalyptic catastrophe. And I fucking hate AI. But it's just automation. Yeah, someone's worthless job copying Excel figures from one box to another might be obsoleted. But you know what? I bet nVidia, the cloud providers, datacentres, software-pushers, even electrical installers, etc. are hiring like crazy to take up the slack.

Not the SAME job. It will be REPLACED. But there will still be jobs, probably more of them. They won't be REMOVED.

It's right, though.

Both quantum mechanics and relativity were based on solving part of a partial differential equation which derived - ultimately - from Newtonian physics, but which had extremely bizarre and unpredictable output.

When you solved the maths that you could (a p.d.e. doesn't have a single complete "solution" as such), you ended up with incredibly weird stuff that few initially believed was possible.

It was only when we confirmed the maths, went out into the world and looked for this bizarre behaviour that we managed to confirm it.

It's quite literally a true statement. Nobody sat there saying "oh, I wonder is space is a bit curvy" and then found it, the same way that they didn't say "I wonder if there's stuff that works probablistically below the atomic level" and then went looking for it.

Both spring from the solution of a p.d.e. given a bizarre and often-thought-impossible (at the time) answer resulting in a world based on rules we couldn't have imagined... and THEN we confirmed that's what was actually happening in real life.

High-end physics pretty much mostly comes from solving maths equations and then going "What the fuck..."

Duh.

It's the only quote I ever use about AI.

As soon as I realise an article, or an image or whatever is AI generated, I just stop and go elsewhere, and often just block that channel/page/site/user.

At this point, it's openly discriminatory as a policy, as far as I'm concerned. This was AI - NOT YOU - making this and I'm not interested in the output of an AI. If I were, I'd just go onto an AI and have it make that, rather than pick it up from some other third-hand place that reposted it.

The irony of "social" media being almost nothing but AI nowadays is so laughable. Facebook was there for me to talk to my friends and family, see how my old school friends were doing, etc. etc. etc. and after becoming just a bunch of curated junk it turned to shit and I basically stopped bothering. And now it's just AI and reposts because everyone else stopped bothering to post too.

I come to Slashdot, for example, not for the articles. They're just there to promote discussion. I come to interact with people and read what people think.