It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Shouldn't the ACLU and EFF be devoting their efforts to ending the Valley Transit Authority's comprehensive video surveillance of all its bus and light rail passengers first?

https://www.marchnetworks.com/...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

What's been going on with the VTA over the past twenty years makes the deployment of LPR cameras in San Jose look like a joke. An LPR system records license plates, but the VTA records comprehensive video and audio of every single passenger who rides on it. That includes where those passengers get on on off - exactly the sort of "tracking" that the ACLU and EFF condemn.

Exactly when did all those MTA passengers consent to give up their privacy? If privacy is sacrosanct for people driving on public roads, what about people on public transit?

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

Is this the same Klarna that has already been through one cycle of being super bullish about AI and then having to re-hire some actual customer support?

Ha. I can't access the article to be sure, but I think they mean making the user feel like the computer is incompetent, not making the computer feel bad about its performance like Marvin the Paranoid Android.

It shouldnâ(TM)t really be surprising that the compulsive liar was lying.

That's only very partially true. The uptick in unpaid mortgages gave the house of cards a little tap; but it was the giant pile of increasingly exotic leverage constructed on top of the relatively boring retail debt that actually gave the situation enough punch to be systemically dangerous; along with the elaborate securitizing, slicing, and trading making it comparatively cumbersome for people to just renegotiate a mortgage headed toward delinquency and take a relatively controlled writedown; rather than just triggering a repossession that left them with a bunch of real estate they weren't well equipped to sell.

That's the difference between a store of wealth and a speculation. Long after nVidia - or Bitcoin - have faded into history, gold will still be valued as wealth.

Trivialize it all you like. But that's just shortsighted pedantry. Gold has been considered valuable for longer than people have been writing it down. There's almost nothing with the unbroken track record of gold in being a store of wealth, and it'll still be wealth after we've all turned to dust.

And why would aesthetic uses not be intrinsic value? Sure, if it were a case of unproven demand or a fad... but that isn't the case.

I don't really see what cursive would provide that printing would not. They aren't that different from a fine skills perspective.

Sure, cursive is prettier. But the best argument for cursive is speed. It's just faster. And if you have to write a lot of text, the difference becomes significant. But nobody has to write in high volumes any more.

Well, here's my anecdote. I have been typing continuously since the 80s, making a living coding, writing business and management docs, creating software manuals and training materials... my whole adult life had a keyboard in front of it. But I never learned to type "properly". To this day it's a hodge podge process of controlled, high speed chaos.

Several of my aunts were in administration. They all knew how to type properly, and they were slightly faster on the keyboard than I.

They all got repetitive motion conditions in their hands and wrists later in life. I've never had so much as a hint of it.

Draw the line however you like, but I believe the unstructured chaos and higher error rate I accepted are the reason for the difference.

I live in an all-electric house.

I bought heatpumps within the first 2 years of buying it. Heating with resistive electric is expensive and inefficient (technically it's about 100% efficient... which is awful compared to a heatpump which can be MORE efficient... because it uses the tiny amount o of heat already present in the air outside your house, even in sub-zero temperatures).

My electricity bill is one-third of what it was when I moved in, purely because of heatpumps. By comparison, I have also moved all my home IT to half a dozen individual Raspberry Pi's which, collectively, run at about ~100W... less than it costs to run my laptop, let alone a server.

Most people are trying to reduce their base load and reduce their heating costs, not increase them.

Can it put the fecking taskbar icons back where they were? And let me drag it around the screen? And bring back the start menu? And finally move everything into either control panel or Settings (but not both)? And actually let me choose to NOT update if I so wish? And making things an OFF BY DEFAULT OPTION first, and never removing an option, just switching it off for those who don't want it? And letting me theme Office again so I can make it look like Office 2000? And ....

Because I absolutely hate AI with every fibre of my being, but if lets me do those things, I might well consider supporting it.

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.

Yep, any increase in demand is going to affect prices even if it's not in your location as costs for supply will increase. This increases for everyone not just the people next to datacentres.

Not that the OP didn't also have a valid point.