Comment Re:Dumbass puts huge money late into obvious bubbl (Score 1) 96
Well that's a scary thought in a world where people have to sell their labor to survive...I hope you're wrong but I fear you may not be.
Well that's a scary thought in a world where people have to sell their labor to survive...I hope you're wrong but I fear you may not be.
One generally overlooked thing that it did was launch thousands of children on careers that didn't entail plowing with the chakitaqu'lla to plant potatoes or spending interminable days herding sheep. My brother-in-law knows an accountant who was the first in his town to use a computer, lured off the farm by the realization that they were just a tool and even people like him could learn to use them.
This was the situation at least as far back as the '70s, when I was generally the only under-30s person in the adults section of the library except for college students.
IIRC Farcebook didn't run on the OLPC, the Sugar OS wasn't designed with interactive image-heavy web apps in mind.
This was much of the problem, lack of connectivity. In Paruro where my brother-in-law lives when they distributed the OLPCs the only option for Internet connectivity was an expensive ISDN line, and later an extremely congested 3G tower. In Paucartambo, where our niece taught, there was no connection for the first couple of years.
Another was that teachers were not provided with OLTPs, only students. I got a couple on Buy One/Get One and gave one to our niece, and my sister-in-law used the ancient creaking Win95 laptop we gave her until 2010.
So a good first effort, and lessons were learned. Today I can't help but think it would be much more successful.
In the 1970s Indira Gandhi convinced India's government to spend millions on secondary education, and especially computers. The portion of the world which didn't laugh at the effort was condemning it for not using that money to provide arable land, seeds and clean water (as if governments are unable to do more than one thing at a time). The investment has paid off many, many times.
It's India. No one planned anything.
Did you know that the heavily contaminated neighborhood next to the Bhopol plant is still occupied?
mahogany lined corporate offices
No such thing. I've worked on Jassey's and Bezos' offices (and Bill Gate's as well). Their offices are only marginally better than other managers' offices in the company (although they do have much more extensive security precautions). You're probably thinking of Oracle.
Our corporate executives already sold them the rope as well as the nails and lumber for the scaffold decades ago.
US crash tests are deliberately engineered to favor our overweight road tanks.
Yup, ain't our 'Free Trade' system great?
They sell for that price in countries where there is no existing automotive industry to try to overwhelm, they sell at that price (or lower) in China. There really is no evidence of dumping, just specious claims from Detroit.
I'm reminded of what the Benetton F1 team did when rules specifically prevented teams from using wheel speed and gear information to run traction control systems. Instead they used a combination of incoming air stream pressure (similar to how an aircraft's pitot-static system works) in combination with some preloaded per-event data and track position information to make another traction control system that did the same job.
Information about past leases and public data from competing landlords might still be enough to do the job.
An LLM may be an ingredient, but the current commercial approach of trying to just build an LLM so big that it magically becomes an AGI somehow (or I think the idea may be to make a stochastic parrot good enough to be hard to distinguish from an AGI) sure doesn't look anything like a path, especially when the returns are diminishing so hard.
sure, instead of 50 kids with OLPC, you could give 1 mac. Also, what you do with a mac without internet and little included apps? no brew install, no new apps (and fewer free apps, most that exist are paid apps)
Nothing motivates a man more than to see his boss put in an honest day's work.