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.

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.

Doing that would be stupid because we know the government will try to bail them out.

You can't make rational economic decisions when the government will interfere with the market any time it feels like it. That just turns the whole thing into a casino.

Probably not. The people that like AI slop are probably the same ones that watch shows like Ancient Aliens and a host of reality shows on the Discovery Channel in the US.

In the US at least, showing that you accrue temporary debt and pay it off improves your credit score.

Classical bits can store only one number at a time. They probably mean that that many qbits can store the amount of information in the universe simultaneously due to superposition.

I assume you mean buying groceries using credit cards and not paying off the balance in full thus paying interest. Personally, I buy everything including groceries using a credit card (via Apple Pay) and always pay off the balance in full. It's easier than dealing with cash and coins.

Not for me. It takes probably three times as long as with a pen on paper, but I make the effort in the rare case I personally need to verify that a signature is mine.

The torture did end - he was eventually freed by Hercules.

Reminds me of that famous Frank Zappa quote;- "Comparing Guitarists is a stupid sport".

Now Zappa was no slouch on the guitar, considered by many as possibly the most inventive guitarists of the 1970s, but he was far less enamoured with virtuosity than his reputation suggested, eventually even giving up on playing it live, and handing over axe duties to his young apprentice, Steve Vai. For him it wasnt how well you could play the instrument, its what the music you played on it sounded like that interested him.

I feel the same about programming languages. Python might not be the flashiest, its missing some key features, its slow (although in modern days a lot faster than it used to be), and so on. But I can get the job done faster and cleaner than I can in almost any language except maybe Ruby (which nobody seems to use anymore). Is it the best language? Hell no. Does it matter? NOPE. What matters is everyone on my team knows python, and it gets shit done. Flash and virtuosity is for teenagers and shredders. I wanna play the blues.

The last great holdout for windows was games. For office stuff, the transition from monolithic AD/Exchange stacks to cloud based stuff made Macs a viable platform for many organizations, particularly with software devs finding the Unix system under the hood productive for developments meaning that while Sysadmins have traditionally been mac hostile, devs are often mac friendly (well, other than the dotnet guys), and with the corporate drones enjoying the user friendlyness and fashionable appearances of the machines, windows centrality to the office has been under serious challenge.

But games where unchallenged. While modern macs are respectable for games that have been ported, its undeniable that windows was clearly the winner in this field, with access to Nvidia (and increasingly AMD) GPUs and APIs well suited to gaming.

But Valve has different ideas, and despite the attractiveness of the XBOX subscriptions, Valve have a near monopoly on the ecosystem, and Valve do NOT like Microsoft breathing down their necks. So proton (A wine fork that works shockingly well) has been under constant development and is now at the stage where many windows-only games run as well, if not better, under Linux, even on small machines like the Steamdeck (I have one at home, and it runs..... every game I've tried. Oh and with the emulation stuff makes a pretty great nintendo switch emulator too)

So yeah, the final fortress in windows dominance has toppled. Linux is just a straight up better server. Macs are viable and friendly. And now Linux even plays games better, or at least competitively.

And with Microsoft hell bent on turning windows into a hellscape of chatbots , corporate surveilance, subscription slop and advertising, people have had enough.

If Microsoft doesnt change its ways, its going to lose everything its worked for.

Yeah it seems to me the choice is either
1) a stable orbit with a 50% duty cycle, which means more collectors AND heavy batteries. Expensive.
2) Parking it in something like a lagrange point. Extremely stable forever-orbit, but extremely expensive per kg to get it to that place. And space junk from abandoned shit will never go away
3) geostationary orbits that require a tonne of fuel for constant adjustment burns.

None of this of course factors iin cosmic ray shielding and the enormous amount of infrastructure to deal with the fact that the only way to remove heat is radiating it. Massive amounts of GPUs running at full throttle with no obvious way to cool it.

Or, they could just drop these things in the ocean and use ocean currents to power the GPUs. Hell, you could even just use nuclear down there and never have to worry about a meltdown or radiation leaks, because salt water is the ultimate radiation shield and diluter of radioactive particles.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The thing that makes rust a "hard" language is its punishing borrow checker step that simply refuses to compile if you've got code smells that hint at page violations or other memory goonery. Rust punishes you, but in doing so it makes you a better programmer.

Its something I fell in love with Crystal over (which, btw does NOT do a borrow checker), its static analysis step that refuses to compile if your doing things with variables that introduces un-handled nulls. I could feel myself becoming a better coder (which is a hard thing to achieve for someone with 20y experience) simply because it was pointing out anti-patterns in my coding and requiring me to fix them. Its a shame crystal never really took off, its a genuinely good and speedy little language. Who knows, maybe some day. Python sat in obscurity for two decades (Python, for the youngsters in the audience, is OLDER than JS, Java and so on. Y'all only hearing of it recently doesnt make it a recent language) before finally exploding in popularity

Steve Jobs back? Like him or not, the best Apple days, products and innovations were done during his iron fists days. And he drove countless companies down this same path, to the point some are now better than current day Apple is.
Since he will not return, hope whoever is confirmed do more than just damage control and play catch up.

Although Tim Cook has been a perfectly fine leader commercially (The man is a supply chain god, by all accounts), he's never had Job's innate sense for the market, consumer, and for design.

I've long maintained they should have given the top job to Jony Ive. Jony is the reason Apple stuff went from grey boxes to attractive and elegant looking designs that actually made the damn things into fashion accessories. Sure the iphones are technological marvels, but if they still looked like plastic chunks with fold out keyboards, there really would be no reeason to buy one over the equally technical marvels like the Nokias , Androids or bloody windows phones. That was Ives design eye that gave us the modern phone.

Apple would do well to repeat the old move it pulled off with Jobs, and hire back Ives to take over the company.