If that CEO thinks the behaviors of the LLMs are "super smart", then I really wonder about his level of intelligence...

IT's certainly novel and different and can handle sorts of things that were formerly essentially out of reach of computers, but they are very much not "smart".

Processing that is dumb but with more human-like flexibility can certainly be useful, but don't expect people to be in awe of some super intelligence when they deal with something that seems to get basic things incorrect, asserts such incorrect things confidently, and doubles down on the same mistakes after being steered toward admitting the mistakes by interaction. I know, I also described how executives work too, but most of us aren't convinced that executives have human intelligence either.

... with a metric ton of salt, but on the demographics of China and their impact he seems spot on. And let's be honest, there's not that much you can get wrong here. It's quite simple math.

... within this decade. And he's been doing that for a while. And his reasoning sounds plausible.

Broadly speaking, a lot of the 'cloud native' stuff are complex solutions to potentially complex problems that fit within the parameters that those approaches can handle.

If you don't have those complex problems, then it's a premature optimization that is painful. If your use case is not the sort of use case resembling the bread and butter of the applications that instigated these approaches, then it's all pain, no gain.

There was a team that maintained a project that was broadly panned for not being good enough. The developers decided that the cure for what ails them would be changing to 'cloud native' approach, despite the complaints really being about limited functionality, not even about performance or scaling issues. Now on top of having the same functionality complaints *now* they have performance and reliability complaints too, and they have no idea what they are doing, they just arbitrarily carved their single fixed instance of software into a couple of dozen fixed instances of services (they can't figure out how to scale arbitrarily, so they still have exactly one instance of every component). Not one of them is capable of debugging the convoluted network situation they've created, and the logging information is just a mess.

The blender crew effing rocks, that's for sure. I sure hope Ton Roosendahl is enjoying his (part-time?) retirement!

I'm listed as a donator because I'm actually one of those rare few who bought a commercial license back when Blender still was closed source and was being sold as a commercial product by NaN. They went commercial for a year or so after blender was available as freeware. I paid 250 Euros and still have the color-printed receipt. I might frame it and hang it on the wall some day. :-)

You already had your turn in the late 2010s after big data and before AI. You don't get to come back to the hype line for seconds.

The infrastructure required to perpetually get decent to good quality petrol to where it's needed is insane. For electric you just need a battery, some solar cells and you're good to go. Petrol throughout south America is notoriously bad, often mixed with (bad) (m)ethanol and often a gable to fill in your tank. Its not uncommon for adventure bike riders to bring an extra spare piston and cylinder along in case you frag yours beyond repair and need to replace it somewhere in the ass-end of Patagonia.

That doorstep countries around the world are moving to solar and electric vehicles faster than developed countries makes perfect sense.

The line has muddied, as consoles went USB and console accessories started being PC compatible.

Once upon a time, you popped a game cartridge into a purpose built specialty thing with bespoke capabilities to do the things the game companies wanted, with proprietary connectors and instant boot up and what you get is what you have.

On the PC side, you futzed with config.sys/autoexec.bat to have just the right memory layout, depending on if you needed the maximum conventional memory, ems or xms, and environment variables to match your dip switches.

Now a game console is an x86 box that takes some time to boot to an OS then you select an app, which probably is a game, and good chance it's developed with a game engine that pretty much equally supports Nintendo, PS4, and Microsoft ecosystem.

The PC side you just plug in, often the exact same accessory, and things automatically go. The UI of Windows can be obnoxious, but this is a prime mindset for Valve to take advantage launching their PC that's 10-foot optimized out of the box.

Nintendo held on to console-ness longer, with their Wii and Wii-U gimmicks, and their switch admittedly isn't an x86 box, but it's basically a gaming tablet, which is the other big thing eating into the casual gamer market.

This is a detail many PC fanbois tend to overlook. And it's the reason consoles are so successful.

Point in case: I ditched hardcore PC gaming 25 years ago because it was becoming ridiculous with the constant hardware upgrades, fiddling with drivers and the mess that is M$ W1ndows. And I at one time had the most performant gaming PC available that costed roughly 5000$. I'm a computer expert but when even AMD went from one socket type to something like 5 different (Intel was already at roughly 10 different socket types back then) I got tired of keeping track, said f*ck it and left PC gaming alltogether. I just stopped the hardware upgrades, installed Linux for programming and the occasional Linux-native Unreal Tournament and Tribes 2 session and left it at that. This was in the late 90ies. I don't have the kind of space, time and attention anymore that PC gaming needs.

Roughly 15 years later I had some cash left and was curious about the new games such as the Deus Ex reboot and some discounted FarCry title and got an XBox 360, the last iteration just at the end of that generation that could run on a regular monitor without hassle. With all kinks fixed and a large cheap library of budget-priced games as GOTY premium editions and an affordable box that I knew would run those games with zero config fuss I was all set.

I've been with XBox ever since, always lagging 1-2 generations for price and stability reasons. I'm still using a Xbox One X as my main gaming rigg and it's totally fine. Yeah, I do miss mouse and keyboard occasionally, but I also enjoy being prolific with the controller by now and just leaning back on the sofa doing Open World Looter-Shooters, (A)RPGs or the occasional Spaceflight game. Every once in a while I ponder getting back into PC gaming but when I l then look at the prices, the science involded and remember the hassle of dealing with shitty operating systems, drivers, flaky software, etc. I quickly drop that notion again.

I might look into that new Steam Box thing, but I still have 82 games for XBox One alone, not counting my 360 titles. Most of these games I haven't played yet, so I'm not too much in a hurry. I also love the fact that the XBox is backwards compatible, which is a huge plus, Kudos to M$ for doing this. M$ W1ndows sucks, but with XBox they're still the global underdog and behave accordingly. And have me, a prime-time Linux user for 25+ years, as a paying customer, believe it or not.

I think pupils should learn to hand-write. It's a useful skill to have. What I think should be done away with is torturing children with dictations and other non-sense that are basically speed-writing contests _without_ teaching them to type and giving them the option to chose typing over hand-writing.

The thing is that while the heat pipes can work in space and may have been used in satellites and then brought to earth, the issue is with the amount of thermal energy and having radiation as the only way to evict heat.

So while the mechanism for heat pipes started in space, the computers are *way* more wattage than the space based applications.

I wonder how the developers feel about that characterization. Now all performance improvements are subject to being attributed to motivated by AI for marketing points...

I know you're trying to be sarcastic, but the truth is, we Europeans are only going to get through these times of de-globalization, demographic decline and power-shifts together. The UK would've been far better off throwing their weight behind EU issues that need solving rather than using the EU as a cheap scapegoat for the elites grabbing a paycheck and lining their pockets.

[disclaimer: continental European here] ... but I think it's safe to say that even proud EU citizens are surprised at how the UK seems totally and irreversibly shafted at this point. No gloating here, it's really painful to watch.

Here's a perfect expert analysis of Brexit and it's outsomes in 90 seconds.