... with a Linux setup on her brand new good Lenovo laptop with the lates W1ndows pre-installed. Backed up her Thunderbird Mail directory, wipe-installed Mint Linux and set it up in a few minutes. The difference in boot time and responsiveness is night and day.

I started at a new company a year back and hat one of their Win Laptops for a few weeks before my dev MB Air arrived. The system was so finicky to the point of being unusable. I was speechless. I fundamentally don't get why people even use W1ndows for regular stuff these days. If all you need is Mail, Web and some digital project and content management. there is absolutely no need for anything other than a lean modern Linux. The last version of W1n that I used for anything meaningful was Win2k and that was just about 25 years ago.

Totally bizarre.

... big techs obscene cash reserves and not so much third-party or VC investment money, so I'm not too concerned for the market, to be honest. The environment and the looming AI threat is a different issue, but's that's not so much about the market. If the bubble pops I hope for little impact for ordinary folks.

I think the woosh is directed the wrong way, the comment had an example of exactly and obviously useful data, so it has to be sarcastic.

"Matter-over-Thread" is actually a solid strategy compared to most 'cloud connected' wifi smart devices.

This is more akin to Zigbee/Z-Wave. It's a local, non-internet scheme for local communication and control. You can get a totally local air-gapped Matter over Thread setup running without internet. It's if you pick a cloud-connected thread border router when you get in trouble, but you can roll your own, e.g. with Home Assistant platform providing a way forward.

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.

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.

Elon just made a pertinent statement:
https://futurism.com/future-so...

... 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.

Some possibilities:
-The agent buys the wrong thing and Amazon sees a substantially higher rate of returns or other bad customer feedback
-The agent buys one thing despite Amazon search results trying to push a different option
-Amazon's upsell for "you may also like" is tanked by the agentic purchaasing.

... 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.

Don't worry, they are probably getting paid 300b by Oracle, 250b by microsoft, and 38b from Amazon so it all will work out nicely.

A lot of the deals lately seem to be company A and B pay each other X amount of money and pretend that is big revenue despite relatively little net money exchanging hands.

You could, in theory, have a context that is entirely within the sandbox and useful. Hence my comment about getting things in and out of the environment potentially negating many of the scenarios I can think of. But broadly speaking, if you had some local processing to do, you feed the environment a blob and the environment can now pretend it's a normal file as far as it is concerned, and then you can pull the blob out when done. WASM can't touch real stuff but you can feed it stuff within the reach of javascript which itself is still sandboxed, but specific network touch points and user indicated file touch points can be put in the reach of javascript.

So if you wanted to apply, in browser, some linux utility to a file, then the user has to indicate a file for operating on via browser, and that action allows javascript code to access that file, and with that granted it can load it into some memory that you've allocated for this purpose, and when done move the data back or wherever.

But the much needed sandbox does greatly complicate things and for some sorts of files the resource usage would be prohibitive in this scenario.