LLMs are randomized algorithms. They return a random value from its weighted set of dialogue options. As such, I'm not sure I would put LLMs in the same category as AGIs.The article below is interesting about how non-determinism works in such algorithms and why such randomness is actually useful.
https://towardsdatascience.com/llms-are-randomized-algorithms/

Of course this means, at best, I will never trust LLMs to be anything more than a convenient but lazy data miner, never mind that I'll still need to double check its answers/sources.

Let me guess, this story was submitted by Apple's marketing department?

It'll be at least half of that in ten years.

The Zoomers have no interest in cable TV.

> Why not just build the proper infrastructure with what we know works?

I tried to do this locally. The government allows the pole owner (electric or telephone usually) to charge $50/mo/pole to the startup that wishes to hang wires.

The owner pays $5/mo in property taxes to the town.

There are exceptions for large corporations that are in the state's good graces.

It's just to keep competition limited to the cartel.

Short answer: corrupt government.

This was my first thought as well.

Such marketplace confusion!

If this were the case they would not permit manual selection of the rapid acceleration mode.

A guy I knew had an early Model S.

When he wanted to impress me with the acceleration he tapped a couple settings on the screen to put it into Ludicrous Mode

This was around 2013 or so.

I'm not seeing how this is a problem.

I have a V6 and a V8 truck and both need a manual low gear selection to take off like a rocket. OK, the V6 not so much but the V8 can spin the rear tires in 2WD mode.

I don't let the average drivers in my life use it.

They would hit a tree if they were given a Tesla that was always in Ludicrous Mode.

I can't think of a sci-fi series that's more polarizing than this one in recent memory?

Even in my own group of friends, it runs about 50/50 that people either loved Alien Earth, or they thought it was trash.

I watched it because of a high recommendation from one guy I know, and tried to give it a chance. I had to stop after a few episodes. It was just painfully awful, IMO. I mean, sure - lots of money was poured into good special F/X and it's the creatures we all know from the long-running franchise. But the story line and characters were ridiculous.

I mean, sure -- let's take a bunch of kids and immediately throw them into harm's way, doing "save the planet" stuff! And "Boy Kavalier" is a bad caricature of just about every tech CEO in modern times that people like to poke fun at. Except even more over-the-top with his "poor me ... because I'm SO intelligent, nobody can even have an enjoyable conversation with me" garbage.

The thing is though? I *do* get the points people raise in favor of it. The concept had "legs" in the sense there's potential in the idea you have competing corporations with different approaches to "improving humanity" and it creates a dynamic of tensions between your cyborgs vs your hybrids or synths. It's just that to me, it felt like they took those great ideas and squandered them.

No they're not. You're exaggerating. The majority of these developments are still empty. China's declining birth rates coupled with the increased mortality from COVID have thrown in a monkey wrench into their planning. Up to 80 million units are still empty, with slim prospects for ever being bought or even used as social housing. Most of them are just crumbling ruins at this point. Even where people have moved in (often with heavy government subsidies, essentially turning units into an eastern Section 8 housing project), occupancy is still under 10%. They simply built too many units, and there aren't enough people to live in them. Some developments are being reclaimed for agriculture, with farmers grazing livestock and plowing fields on the strips of land between crumbing concrete structures.

I'm not sure if Wire has new management but I just recently learned they've gone fully open source, are working on federation, and are using an RFC-specified tree-based efficient group chat encryption algorithm. RCS is eventually meant to adopt the same algorithm.

Folks using Telegram Groups (which are unencrypted, actually) might have a look. Yeah, somebody needs to run a server if you don't want intelligence agencies to provide one for you.

I uninstalled Wire years ago when they wouldn't take privacy seriously (yeah, I filed a bug) but it seems like a second look is warranted.

It was always a Potemkin village.

Getting my popcorn ready for when they turn that on in Austin. I only day trip to there infrequently, and I've already seen a stopped Waymo at a traffic light intersection with APD cops around it.

Don't worry, there are only four digits on most pumps. When it hits $10/gallon, the 9/10 of a cent falls off the end!

Have you seen what a brass dollar coin looks like after a little bit of circulation? The metal tarnishes badly, to the point where you can barely identify the artwork.

Only if they stop making it out of that crappy brass that tarnishes into an ugly brown metal slug after only a little bit of actual circulation. I learned this back in the Sacajawea coin days when there were postage stamp vending machines that tried to accept and give change with dollar coins. The artwork on the coin may have changed since then, but the metal hasn't changed.

For those who may not be familiar (zoomers and foreigners), the previous dollar coins were the Susan B Anthony dollar, for which the primary complaint was that it was too hard to tell apart from a quarter (similar size and ridges), and the 4cm silver dollar, which was simply too huge to be useful.