I continue to use burned DVDs for backing up the critical stuff. Not perfect, of course, but not electromechanically-failure prone like a hard disk drive, not "terms of service" failure prone like cloud storage, and not "the charge magically held in the gate leaked away" failure prone. I have optical discs over 25 years old which are still perfectly readable.

There's only 2 reasons to have a new piece of hardware rather than make this an app on your phone:

1)It adds new sensors that your phone doesn't have (yet) that will enable new functionality. This won't be the case, as there's no usecase for it
2)It adds a new IO methods that aren't possible on the phone. AR goggles might do this. An AI assistant doesn't, it's all audio and voice.

This is basically just going to be replacable with a bluetooth microphone paired to an app on your phone. Which means nobody is going to buy it- even if they can actually find a usecase people want AI for (doubtful).

True, when I asked it to generate a spam email campaign, or a deepfake video of a local politician, it did great. I'm glad our society now has access to this wondrous new technology. I can't wait to see what amazing impact it will have on our lives. Too bad it can't, you know, go find me some facts and all, or at least tell me when it can't find any. Actually AI doesn't even go looking for facts. It generates text that looks statistically like text it has seen. So in no way does it do anything related to research or even summarizing. If you're using it to summarize something, you're using it wrong. It won't be an accurate summary.

I just asked it a fairly simple (in my opinion) question: "What are the top 3 tier one parts suppliers in the North American automotive market, by revenue?"

It very confidently gave me 3 tier 1 suppliers for the 2022 fiscal year. The top, not surprisingly, was Magna, which is probably true. But it said the revenue was ~$18.9 billion. That doesn't seem to line up with any facts I can find online about Magna. Typical revenue is more like $10 billion per quarter, or $40 billion per year. I can't figure out where it got the figure, and the links to the sources didn't turn up anything to support its statement.

Of the 4 cited sources, one was Wikipedia, and two were links to Continive.ai which, in my opinion, is a low quality source. The fourth source was here which rates tier 1 suppliers *globally* and by market cap instead of by revenue.

If this is the best AI can do, I'm not interested in wasting my time.

Those exist, but divide the view count by number of comments. It will show for the most part thousands of views per comment. That means most people aren't using the social part. I've yet to ever write a youtube comment, but I use it daily. So if you asked me if I use YouTube you'd get a yes, but it's not social media for me. If you limit it to those who read/write comments it would be fair, but I'm not sure they did that.

Unlikely. With skills in economics, AI, and deception he'll either become a think tank wonk or a Silicon Valley startup charlatan.

We see these ideas that are obviously nonsense all the time. This one has been picked apart by multiple people with industry experience already.

What these things are is essentially the venture capital version of the scam mails you get in your mailbox every day. If you make it big enough and insane enough, someone with more money than brains will think he spotted an opportunity that everyone else missed and will invest.

Why is it, you think, that 99% of these things vanish without a trace after an initial storm of publicity?

Wind and solar are only less expensive if you can actually build them. The current president has made it clear that he will not allow any new large wind or solar projects in the USA. Given the long running tendency of the GOP to swing even further to the extreme right, and the Democratic party's long history of capitulating to the GOP, it makes little sense for businesses to make long-term plans around renewable resources. Even if Trump leaves office and is voted out by a Democrat he might be replaced by someone who's even crazier and decides to actively destroy old renewable power setups. So if you need power for your data centers it just makes more sense to bite the bullet and go with nuclear.

Also, nuclear can probably done for a lot less money if they get the government out of it. Take out public financing and pork barrel contracts and nuclear can be less expensive. Especially if the same companies build the same reactors repeatedly instead of implementing one new design on a rare occasion. We'll find out if Starlink actually gets built and it's four reactors are powered on before the AI industry goes tits up.

I'd say the same for YouTube. It's used to watch videos. The number of people who comment on them is minimal compared to the userbase. I'd be very curious to the exact definition of "social media" they use is. I don't think it's what most people consider to be social media.

JPEG XL was also an image format Google worked on.

I read the fiction novel Termination Shock a few years ago and it was about this kind of solar engineering. The premise of the book is pretty solid: it's surprisingly cheap to do this, and there's no international organization to oversee it, and in fact we've been dismantling or at least weakening the rules based global order for a decade or more. Some country or organization somewhere is going to calculate that doing this will be a net benefit to themselves, and will just start doing it. Heck we *were* doing it inadvertently with ship emissions, and when we stopped it created a termination shock of its own. There's no way that this won't happen, and then it's going to open the floodgates on geoengineering. Only *then* will we get enough countries together to make some international agreements.

Not anything. Especially when dealing with nuclear. There are some parts that once degraded cannot be safely replaced. For example, the containment unit. And others where making a new one makes more economic sense than replacing even when technically possible. What state this plant is in I have no idea, and am not qualified to have an opinion on. I just hope experts are making the decision based on economics and power requirements and not politics.

No, it isn't. You're absolutely deluding yourself. And even if it was, nobody uses it to actually write anything. Learning to write (vs read) would be, is, and has been for 50 years an utter waste of time.

Why does it matter? Microsoftâ(TM)s code was buggy garbage long before they implemented vibe coding. If the entire OS was rewritten by a buggy AI nobody would be able to tell the difference.

If the hardware is still present, but is disabled, you're still carrying around the hardware. Most importantly, you're probably still powering its logic even if it's inaccessible to you.

BMW, like most German cars, is overcomplicated and overpriced garbage sold only to self-proclaimed car enthusiasts who wouldn't know how to change a tire let alone a timing chain. BMW got themselves into a bit of controversy by including heated seats which only functioned by subscription.

Now, say I had bought a BMW but didn't want the heated seats. I don't pay for the subscription. There's no additional cost to me, the purchaser of the car, because the profit from the people who do opt for the subscription are the ones paying the cost of the extra hardware in my car, correct?

Wrong. I am now carrying around an extra-beefy alternator to power the heated seats. I am now carrying around all the extra wiring to power the heated seats. All of this impacts my performance and my fuel efficiency. And all of this extra complexity adds a failure liability when something damages part of the heated seat hardware. All for a feature I specifically did not ask for by refusing the subscription.

With a disabled chunk of logic embedded in a processor, is it a negligible cost and a negligible risk? Maybe, but as the purchaser, it's crap that I didn't ask for, and you are imposing on me. If I have to carry it around and power it up, I expect to be able to use it.

If the manufacturer doesn't want to supply a feature then they should not supply the hardware. Leave the spots on the circuit board unpopulated. In the case of a chip, leave it off the die.