I don't necessarily need a manager present to do this. I'm a big boy and can schedule a meeting and politely invite the small number of people it takes to coordinate.

Modern devices are killing us, both physically and mentally. The Internet of Things (IoT) is composed almost entirely things that we don't want or need.

Buying groceries with a check?! Look at this rich guy. The rest of us have to fill out a credit application and take out a mortgage when we want to buy a Christmas roast.

Yea. your friend's line of reasoning is pretty common but it is a bit of a head scratcher to me. There's less transparency in private business, so there's corruption and unethical dealings that most of us never find out about. The point of having services under government control is that it's the people's money and the organization should ideally be answerable to the people.

The anti-union shift has been a bad strategy for the Dems. Unions can get their members showing up to the polls or even for political action far better than Act BLUE can by just sending upper middle class donors a panicked email begging for donations.

  Some people don't like unions because it's an extra layer of politics. It seems inefficient to have dues and voting and people getting paid just to be reps. But taking a step back: if you want to walk into a room with your boss to negotiate something, like a job or raise or working conditions. You, as the worker, are standing alone and your boss has an entire organization (and legal team) behind him/her. Without unions every person is negotiating under a serious imbalance against some of the richest and most politically connected organizations in the world.

I bought an HDTV too early and it quickly became obsolete because it didn't support 720p only 480p and 1080i. That's what happens when you buy technology, someone doesn't bother supporting it because it's too much of a pain, there is too little money to make, and ultimately they know that people are just going to buy new hardware when their old hardware stops working.

I get it when an organization outsources something when they don't have enough work to sustain a team. Like a small town government isn't going to operate their own roof repair division just to repair government roofs (rooves?), you instead would hire a local contractor that has plenty of private work to keep their crew busy.

But some things the government does all the time and it doesn't make sense to outsource, like most office work. Of course outsourcing some temp staff can be practical if one can anticipate things like seasonable demand, but hiring local students if the job and time frame fit (summer job) is better still.

At the end of the day an organization can pay an employee, work out benefits, etc. Or it can pay a for-profit business to take a cut for management, owners, etc and try to cut corners on quality or benefits for the employees. I know how the neoliberal "third way" think, and they'd rather reduce the number of government employees, even if that amounts to giving taxpayer dollars to a private owner and gutting good paying union jobs in the community. It's no wonder the working class is struggling under skyrocketing housing prices, high tuition, and low wages. It's all symptoms of an unhealthy economic system that is the direct result of our political shift in both parties in the US. (and a general trend in much of the West with neoliberalism, especially the anglosphere)

I think I will cancel a few streaming service and Amazon prime to compensate.

Yeah, it's not even worth considering for something like 15-20kg. A full pallet in this case is 464kg :) Years worth of supply for me.

The current "AI" is a predictive engine.

And *you* are a predictive engine as well; prediction is where the error metric for learning comes from. (I removed the word "search" from both because neither work by "search". Neither you nor LLMs are databases)

It looks at something and analyzes what it thinks the result should be.

And that's not AI why?

AI is, and has always been, the field of tasks that are traditionally hard for computers but easy for humans. There is no question that these are a massive leap forward in AI, as it has always been defined.

It is absolutely crazy that we are all very very soon going to lose access to electricity

Calm down. Total AI power consumption (all forms of AL, both training and inference) for 2025 will be in the ballpark of 50-60TWh. Video gaming consumes about 350TWh/year, and growing. The world consumes ~25000 TWh/yr in electricity. And electricity is only 1/5th of global energy consumption.

AI datacentres are certainly a big deal to the local grid where they're located - in the same way that any major industry is a big deal where it's located. But "big at a local scale" is not the same thing as "big at a global scale." Just across the fjord from me there's an aluminum smelter that uses half a gigawatt of power. Such is industry.

That "ruler study" was ancient. It's mentioned in peer review at least as early as 2018, and might be even older.

Believe it or not, people in the field are familiar with these sorts of things that you just read about.

Most of these new AI tools have gained their new levels of performance by incorporating Transformers in some form or another, in part or in whole. Transformers is the backend of LLMs.

Even in cases where Transformers isn't used these days, often it's imitated. For example, the top leaderboards in vision models are a mix of ViTs (Vision Transformers) and hybrids (CNN + transformers), but there are still some "pure CNNs" that are high up. But the best performing "pure CNNs" these days use techniques modeled after what Transformers is doing, e.g. filtering data with an equivalent of attention and the like.

The simple fact is that what enabled LLMs is enabling most of this other stuff too.

Jevons Intensifies

Privatization was always part of the grift.

Even the 6 year old Broadcom BCM7218X supports AV1. I think we're at a stage where picking AV1 by default is viable for HD streaming, with standard def fallback for other codecs. (even if those other codecs can do 4K, maybe the older devices aren't up for doing it)