I would suggest an Nvidia Shield or a MECOOL KM2 Plus Deluxe. If you want an easy to set up TV stick product, these are at the top tier. There are some great advantages to rolling your own media player hardware but for most people it's not worth the cost and hassle.

Yes and no.

Visible light carries energy, and hence, yes, absorbing visible light will heat the fabric. However, at temperatures less than a thousand degrees or so, most of the heat energy is carried in infrared light. Since the fabric is specified as being black in visible light, it may or may not be absorbing in infrared.

Do these people really think they're hiding Directive 4 from us?

Well, yes: we live in a society in which 50-kg small humans coexist in spaces with 1000- and 2000- kilogram metal vehicles travelling at a hundred km/hour, and only the social rules keep them safe.

The entirety of our civilization's "safety" relies on our society and its rules. It's not a "small minority"-- it's all of it. Every time I drive I put myself in a situation in which I'm less than one second away from flaming death if I should make the wrong move.

Yeah, it's not even worth considering for something like 15-20kg. A full pallet in this case is 464kg :) Years worth of supply for me.

The current "AI" is a predictive engine.

And *you* are a predictive engine as well; prediction is where the error metric for learning comes from. (I removed the word "search" from both because neither work by "search". Neither you nor LLMs are databases)

It looks at something and analyzes what it thinks the result should be.

And that's not AI why?

AI is, and has always been, the field of tasks that are traditionally hard for computers but easy for humans. There is no question that these are a massive leap forward in AI, as it has always been defined.

It is absolutely crazy that we are all very very soon going to lose access to electricity

Calm down. Total AI power consumption (all forms of AL, both training and inference) for 2025 will be in the ballpark of 50-60TWh. Video gaming consumes about 350TWh/year, and growing. The world consumes ~25000 TWh/yr in electricity. And electricity is only 1/5th of global energy consumption.

AI datacentres are certainly a big deal to the local grid where they're located - in the same way that any major industry is a big deal where it's located. But "big at a local scale" is not the same thing as "big at a global scale." Just across the fjord from me there's an aluminum smelter that uses half a gigawatt of power. Such is industry.

That "ruler study" was ancient. It's mentioned in peer review at least as early as 2018, and might be even older.

Believe it or not, people in the field are familiar with these sorts of things that you just read about.

Most of these new AI tools have gained their new levels of performance by incorporating Transformers in some form or another, in part or in whole. Transformers is the backend of LLMs.

Even in cases where Transformers isn't used these days, often it's imitated. For example, the top leaderboards in vision models are a mix of ViTs (Vision Transformers) and hybrids (CNN + transformers), but there are still some "pure CNNs" that are high up. But the best performing "pure CNNs" these days use techniques modeled after what Transformers is doing, e.g. filtering data with an equivalent of attention and the like.

The simple fact is that what enabled LLMs is enabling most of this other stuff too.

Jevons Intensifies

Some of the local orchards use them along with the usual ATV four-wheeler vehicles. They on the road as well, but the speed limit is only 50 MPH anyway. Off the highways they do fine. They carry two people and a decent collection of tools just fine.

If that age had persisted, it would not have remained gold for very long. Monopolies invariably jack up prices for the consumer (since they have no where to turn) and ratchet down payments to their providers (since they have no other platform to use). They burn the candle at both ends, as brightly as they can, for as long as they can, until something collapses. That is exactly the direction Netflix was moving in and exactly what motivated many content holders to go build their own platform.

So that is our terrible choice:
1. the convenience of having one platform that streams all the content we want to see
2. the affordable prices that come only from having multiple separate platforms all competing against each other.

Both options suck for us in one way or another. The magical hybrid option (one platform that streams everything but stays affordable and pays the creators fairly) can't exist so long as humans are its administrators.

We are only a year out from the murder of a health-insurance executive, so the police are more on edge than usual.

Then we need to threaten such things much more often, so that the cops will eventually get used to it, and relax. ;-)

Debian never tried to kill me through my computer. I'd appreciate it if my car manufacturer made their car as safe as my computer.

Fuck it, I just want a Debian car. Then I won't need to extract bloody vengeance from beyond the grave, as my zombie revenant tracks down the CEO of Subaru, and the rotting flesh of my hands tightens around his throat as payment for the time a popup distracted me.

Some people are busting out "definitions" of "End to End Encryption" but people were already using that as in informal descriptive term long before your formalized technical jargon was made up. Nobody should be surprised if there are mismatches. Have faith in our faithlessness.

I personally view the term as an attempt to call semi-bullshit on SMTP and IMAP over SSL/TLS. In the "old" (though not very old) days, if you sent a plaintext email (no PGP!), some people would say "oh, it's encrypted anyway, because the connection is encrypted between your workstation and the SMTP server, the connection from there to some SMTP relay is encrypted, the connection from there to the final SMTP server is encrypted, and the recipient's connection to the IMAP server is encrypted."

To which plenty of people, like me, complained "But it's still plaintext at every stop where it's stored along the way! You should use PGP, because then, regardless of the connection security, or lack of security on all the connections, it is encrypted end to end. Never trust the network, baby!"

Keep in mind that even when I say that, this is without any regard for key security! When I say E2E encrypted, it is implied that the key exchange may have been done poorly/incorrectly, mainly because few people really get to be sure they're not being MitMed when they use PGP. You can exchange keys correctly, but it's enough of a PITA that, in the wild, you rarely get to. You usually just look up their key on some keyserver and hope for the best. Ahem. And I say "usually" as if even that happens often. [eyeroll]

Indeed, every time I hear about some new secure messaging app/protocol, the first thing I wonder is "how do they do key exchange?" and I'm generally mistrusting of it, by default. And sometimes, I'm unpleasantly unsurprised, err I mean, cynically confirmed.

But anyway, if my E2E definition matches yours, great! And if it doesn't, well, that's ok and it's why we descend into the dorky details, so that we can be sure we're both talking about the same thing.

The merger is a bad idea, but the comment "threatening to force Americans into higher subscription prices and fewer choices over what and how they watch, " is a bit too far.

You don't have to pay for the service after all.

Sailing the high seas may be more popular, but given how little is worth watching it's a minor issue.