Accurately predicting the weather wouldn't appreciably change the weather, so you're not at risk of radically changing the system by making predictions. Accurately predicting the stock market on the other hand would immediately change the markets, making them less predictable. Moreover, there's a latency factor involved, as AI is inherently slow relative to things like high frequency trading. It's a safe bet that for the foreseeable future AI is not going to be able to receive and react to inputs at microsecond intervals. The depth of the network and pipelined nature of architectures puts a lower bounds on how fast it can 'think' and respond.

I keep waiting to see some actual revenue reports that show AI companies or AI divisions of companies are generating profits from AI-enabled services, whether it be by increasing productivity or decreasing human labor. The titles of articles like this assert that this is happening now using words like "are" and "is", while the contents of the article are speculating with "could" or "will". I feel like the only people getting rich off this right now are those that stand to benefit from increased market cap and VC investment, which are inherently speculative in nature.

Yep. Every car's engine mapping is dialed in to hit a particular spec to fit in their current product lines, past and future models, and products from competitors. The engine in your VW is going to be used in a range of years and models spread across the VW and Audi brands. When you buy a car you're not paying for the R&D and material value of the maximum capability of the powertrain; you're paying for the features and specifications as listed in the contract -- that's it. You and a million other customers are effectively pooling your money to maximize manufacturing volume to drive down the component costs for the group, but every participant is putting in a different amount of money depending on what version of the final product they're buying.

SWG had player housing suburbs. There was a no-build radius around the major hub cities so a lot of people built houses just outside city limits. They wanted the convenience of proximity to the city's amenities but didn't want to go to trouble of self-organizing and forming a player city.

$44 million opening and $400 million global are historically mediocre numbers for a $100-200 million budget summer movie. The fact that it was top 10 for the year is irrelevant considering the context of the pandemic, economic uncertainty, and a lot people forming new habits about what does or doesn't get them to visit theaters. "Top 10" doesn't mean what it meant 5+ years ago.

Secondly, there's always been a divide between critics and general audiences when it comes to middle-of-the-road genre films (action/adventure, horror, comedy) -- critics want something interesting (ie. different), while general audiences welcome the familiar. Part of it is taste, but it's also likely just down to critics watching significantly more films and demanding more. The result is those films get dismissed by critics, while a small selection may happen to find an audience and do decent business. That's all this is.

I think this falls under the category of the "the AI effect". Basically describing the ever moving goal posts as new achievements and benchmarks are made in AI research. It's an indication that "AI" (as a colloquial term, anyways) is something governed more by a feeling than a rigid, objective metric. It requires a mystique, and that mystique tends to evaporate when vague and speculative concepts move to the world of engineering. Perhaps if/when we do reach the point of creating a human-equivalent general intelligence, that it will be more akin to heliocentrism and evolution, where the new knowledge will demystify aspects of ourselves.

Praise be His noodly appendage(s)

I get the rationale behind testing the numbers with some quick napkin math, but I don't see the sense in that if your math is glossing over the primary component of the system. Adding a one sentence caveat at the end stating your calculation doesn't include the primary operational component of the device is burying the lede. It'd be like calculating the fuel economy of a car, but having the second last sentence be the caveat that you're coasting downhill.

If people here were coming up with alternate theories that account for all the observations that we presently see that have continually point physicists to the conclusion that there's some substantial non-baryonic mystery component of the universe, then that would be fine. But most of the oh-so insightful wisdom being shed seems to come from people who haven't even bothered to brush up on the wikipedia articles on the topic.

While it's certainly unscientific to shut out alternate theories based solely on the 'authority' of whatever happens to be the prevailing theory of the period, that doesn't mean that repeating the same arguments rooted in absolute ignorance of the topic can be passed off as unclouded wisdom. You think physicists haven't considered that general relativity could be wrong for the last 100 years? Or that there's some deeply seated ideological tether to Einstein that keeps modern physicists from wanting to one-up him? Anyone who could come up with something that unseats general relativity would be a sure bet for a nobel prize, and put themselves in the history books.

Maybe the sort of posts I'm talking about are actually a vocal minority of repeat offenders, but it's still pretty depressing when the signal to noise ratio here about certain science topics is even worse than a place like Reddit. Probably because most of the people in less "nerdy" communities haven't had a childhood of praise of super intelligence for being able to program the family's VCR and power cycle the cable modem to fix the "broken" internet.

...a cosmology news story so a bunch of Slashdot armchair physicists without a lick of physics education past high school can tell the science community they've been doing it wrong for the last 70 years.

It'll probably be 10 seconds of actual video which is then chopped up, played in varying arrangements and speeds, with a healthy dose of scary/ominous music, and then be inter-cut by experts that speak only in 4-5 second chunks, and then commercial breaks of 4 minutes trying to sell me a Honda. A wonderful way to spend an hour.

If only downloading something actually cost the entertainment industry money, I would download 10x as much just out of spite.

January release is for dev kit orders from the website.

December release is for dev kit orders from the kickstarter.

The problem with using those classifications is that it firmly puts every major New Atheist figure, including Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, etc, under the 'agnostic' umbrella and just about no one under the other. No reasonable person could or would say they're certain there is no god.

It's still about the frames per second, just not the 'average' frames per second over some long arbitrary sample period. The days of showing single figure timedemo-style averages are long gone on most tech websites.