The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.
Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.
I have a bunch of old data stored on Kodak Gold CDRs from the 1990s. Kodak claimed 100 year archive life -- although I guess this was just a "best guess" based on accelerated aging tests.
Perhaps I should check them and make sure that bit-rot hasn't set in.
Otherwise I don't bother with backups, they're far too stressful. I mean... if you're backing stuff up you've got to choose the right media, keep a copy off-site and have a restore strategy in place. If you don't backup then none of this is a worry any more. I'm sure AI will fix everything if I get a hardware failure, corruption or malware on my active storage media.
Carpe diem solves everything!
Since when does the public health matter when there are corporate profits at stake?
Microsoft is not a person. It is a massive company capable of pursuing many mandates, some of which can either appear or can actually be entirely at odds with each other.
Of course, the correct way to do this is to pass a Federal Law regulating AI, and then using the supremacy clause of the Constitution to set aside State laws that conflict with it.
But, Trump has never been one to do things in the Constitutional way. He just things that EOs are "rule by decree" even if they're not.
Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.
From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.
The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.
The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.
It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.
Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.
I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.
This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.
I don't think the US actually enforces anything approaching the spirit of robust anti-trust law now. The goalposts have been moved back so many times, they're on another field now.
It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.
In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.
What if a somewhat lanky fugitive broke into my car and glued the accelerator to the floor as a side quest on his mission to get the band back together and save the old Catholic school?
eVTOL man-carrying craft (flying taxis and flying cars) are not yet economically viable -- and won't be until we have a whole new generation of batteries with higher energy densities and cycle-lives. At the current cost of operation, these are a solution looking for a problem.
Hell, China can't sell all the EVs it makes so the chances of them selling any of these is....
In an of itself, that's a perfectly cromulant opinion to hold, but I doubt it's going to be shared by a bunch of people with Robinhood accounts paying electronically for the delivery of "freedfrom from techy surfdom".
Nothing motivates a man more than to see his boss put in an honest day's work.
