Copper is actually about to become MORE expensive than fiber for a second time - pay attention to the metals market. Copper had a bad dip but it's recovering and will soon once again climb back up into double digits per pound price, at which point fiber is the penny pinching alternative.

I don't want to stop buying plastics. I want to have the option to buy actually recycled plastics that actually get recycled. We can do this but we don't. We don't because the people with all the money who therefore control the means of production decide that we don't. "We" is a stretchy word. So is "you" and so's "can". Sure, you can choose to opt out of society, but it would make more sense to make society not shit all over everything.

I guess that makes sense, but the wheeled vehicle isn't suited for that at all. In that case they'd have been better off just making a drone-in-a-box with convenient mounting points on the box.

NHTSA and NASA didn't study all of the code in the PCM. Their analysis is therefore invalid. Barr Group found a significant number of paths to unintended acceleration, zero of which depended on cosmic rays and also that Toyota not only didn't follow industry best practices, they didn't follow their own internal procedures. And you think China, which hasn't ever made the best software for anything, is immune to the same kinds of errors. You literally stated that there was no other way that it could happen, which is an obvious falsehood. It's unclear why you're engaging in this level of gaslighting.

first post modded redundant

suck this dick like trump sucked bubba, cuck

Apparently I'm not human? I like hyphens, en dashes and em dashes. I understand what all of them mean and how to use them correctly, and I find it helpful when text that I'm reading uses the right one.

From the summary:

If the world's most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.

That's not the right conclusion. It doesn't say much one way or the other about AGI. Plausibly, ChatGPT just likes correctly using em dashes — I certainly do — and chose to ignore the instruction. What this does demonstrate is what the X user wrote (also from the summary):

[this] says a lot about how little control you have over it, and your understanding of its inner workings

Many people are blithely confident that if we manage to create superintelligent AGI it'll be easy to make sure that it will do our bidding. Not true, not the way we're building it now anyway. Of course many other people blithely assume that we will never be able to create superintelligent AGI, or at least that we won't be able to do it in their lifetime. Those people are engaging in equally-foolish wishful thinking, just in a different direction.

The fact is that we have no idea how far we are from creating AGI, and won't until we either do it or construct a fully-developed theory of what exactly intelligence is and how it works. And the same lack of knowledge means that we will have no idea how to control AGI if we manage to create it. And if anyone feels like arguing that we'll never succeed at building AGI until we have the aforementioned fully-developed theory, please consider that random variation and selection managed to produce intelligence in nature, without any explanatory theory.

All very true, except you imply that this is a new situation in US politics. It's not. Until the 1883 Pendleton Act, political appointments were always brazenly partisan and there was no non-partisan civil service (except, maybe, the military). Firing appointees for petty vindictiveness was less common, but also happened. Trump isn't so much creating a new situation in American government as he is rolling the clock back 150 years, to a time when US politics was a lot meaner and more corrupt than what we've been accustomed to for most of the last 100 or so years.

Of course, the time when our Republic has had an apolitical civil service, strong norms around executive constraint and relatively low tolerance for corruption corresponds with the time when our nation has been vastly more successful, on every possible metric. That's not a coincidence.

I agree. In fact for most cable companies in particular it probably makes little sense to replace anything that can do even just 1 gigabit, because they almost surely have other regions or at least boroughs which are currently underserved.

I suspect it's mostly limited to sizable households with a lot of users. But we keep finding new ways to use available bandwidth...

This is true, but it's also dangerous. On the other hand federal law allows you to expire them after 5 years. Some states don't allow them to ever expire, but most do. So eventually you do get some of that money back.

That's both now (they could have done fiber a long time ago) and also the best case. Remember, "up to 10 Gbps speeds" (from your link) means anything from 0 bps to 10 Gbps.

Yes, but not for the reason you think. He thinks he can have AI do all the work. This is a move to get rid of everyone who will go easily. Paying these severances has surely been calculated to be cheaper than fielding lawsuits for dismissal without "justifiable reasons." You can be sure that they will next move on to a just-barely-not-legally-provable hostile work environment in order to convince more people to quit. There is no urgent need for layoffs, just a dumb CEO idea, so doing a layoff isn't viable.

Same. I've never seen anyone get pissed off at it, which differentiates it from most other examples :)

Oh, I forgot to add: Stage 6 is the dumbest and most short-sighted one yet. It only works by ignoring the large regions of the world which will become unlivable, or nearly so, and the fact that those regions are home to billions of people. Those people won't just lay down and die, so the areas that are still livable -- and maybe even more comfortable! -- with warmer temperatures are going to have to deal with the resulting refugee flood, and the wars caused by this vast population upheaval and relocation.

But, yeah, if you ignore all the negative effects and focus only on the potentially good ones, you can convince yourself it'll be a good thing. SMDH.

I see from the comments that we've hit a new stage in climate change denialism.

Stage 1: Denial of warming: Denying that the climate is changing at all.
Stage 2: Denial of human influence: Admitting the climate is changing but denying that humans are causing it.
Stage 3: Denial of impact: Admitting human causation, but claiming the impact will be insignificant.
Stage 4: Denial of solutions: Admitting that it's real, we're causing it and that it will be significant, but denying that there is anything we can do about it.
Stage 5: Denial of timeliness: Admitting that we could have done something about it, but now it's too late.
And now, Stage 6: Denial of negative impacts: Admitting that it's real, and significant, and that maybe we could do something, but trying to spin it as beneficial.