Yes it was essentially free. Of course I brought a bottle I scrounged from home along with other school supplies, but what else would I have used Glue-All for in college classes? I'm sure that the one bottle I had went bad before I finished it.

Back then, time was essentially free. Dorm life had a prison-like economy: With room and board prepaid by parents, most people just had some pin money for beer. Everything was evaluated in terms of beer equivalents. Genuine tokens for a load of laundry cost at least 3 or 4 beers. Few would be willing to forego those drinks to save a couple of minutes squirting glue.

Our dorm used plastic tokens that would be dispensed from some central site. (I assume the idea was to discourage people from prying open coin boxes on washers and dryers.)

However, when we arrived we learned from the upperclassmen that you could make a wax mold from a real token, then manufacture all the free tokens you want from Elmer's Glue-All. Nobody I knew ever paid to do laundry, but the University never bothered to change out the system while I was there.

Sometimes the glue tokens would jam the mechanism, but that could usually be fixed by using a chair to deliver a firm blow to the slider.

However, if you earn enough gold and karma, you may be eligible to receive a payout!

Well that sounds kind of promising! It will probably be some very large amount, but maybe possible... just being helpful and/or funny on Reddit seems to get you quite a bit of Karma.

I can't see myself buying Gold on Reddit (why buy that would I can buy real Gold!).

However, if I am awarded gold for my many insightful and helpful posts, will I be able to convert that back into money I could use to buy real Gold?

Part of the reason the thing is huge you have to think is something to do with required range abilities, maybe mandating something like a 100 ft range.

That's a tremendous amount of power because of how rapidly electrical energy drops at a distance.

But what if you could guarantee being about four feet away before activating, without a need to aim? Then maybe the device could be small enough to be mounted on a drone that used AI and cameras to get as close as possible to a marked target before going off. It would probably ice the drone as well, but if it stopped the bike/scooter - mission accomplished.

A large rock can substitute as a 'hammer' in a pinch. Fashioning a recognizable hammer from a stick, scraps of animal hide and a stone is not difficult.

Ask me how I know you've hardly ever used a hammer. I've framed whole basements....

Your stone-age tools make OK weapons, terrible "hammers" even in a pinch. Stone is an awful medium to use for that purpose.

But even if I gave you that a stone hammer was even really a hammer at all, even then there STILL are more people alive right now that could build you an AI than could properly strap together sticks/animal hide/rock to make a working hammer that would survive one swing.

You are just dead wrong on this one buddy.

This is my last post as you just aren't even making enough sense to respond to.

It seems that just like the T-1000 Terminator, the cable companies are able to reconstitute themselves from a bunch of little fragments.

Thanks, that is what I remember seeing!

We were thinking of using Unity in a non-game app and that fee structure put it right out of contention.

I could have sworn I looked a few months ago and there was still a significant runtime fee.

Not really, hammers are trivial to make, citation: they've existed for thousands of years

AI has not existed for thousands of years, but it is now equally trivial to make custom AIs, very powerful AI models are now running on Arduino.

In fact I would wager that MORE people currently have the skill AND EQUIPMENT needed to build an AI, than do have the metalworking skill needed to make a hammer!

therefore one can logically assume it is not trivial to make

WTF? Are you even a developer?

Saying you want to "protest" AI is like saying you want to protest hammers.

Guess what, no amount of protest is going to make hammers - or AI - not exist.

Instead you should really spend time learning what "AI" really is, what kinds of AI exist, and what it actually can do, so you can understand real risks... that is worth the same level effort you were thinking of spending on protest.

When people say "the West" (btw, look up a style manual), they mean pretty much the USA and its "culture",

Mistake on your part - generally they mean all of Europe, Canada and the U.S along with (normally) Australia and New Zealand.

Happy to correct your fundamental and rather large misunderstanding!

Just because much of the EU has planned to become an energy-short third world nation, does not mean the rest of the nations have to. Most will engage in common sense and make sure citizens have enough power... and in Australia power literally means life because of the need for reliable AC.

And since Australia only emits around 1% of global CO2 emissions, does it really matter if they go up a little? What Australia does is literally nothing compared to choice China and India make.

the conversation has been historically very caught up on training data, but it will increasingly become more about what happens at inference time, as training data becomes less valuable and what the system does accessing information in context, in real-time... what happens at inference time will become more debated,

The "conversation" has been about training data, because so much of what is used for training ends up in output, and so much of the training data has come from people who were never asked if stuff they had up could be used for training (especially art).

The "inference time" argument around AI's using context, seems vastly less debate prone to me - because that is so easily controlled, at least in terms of something like a local model making use of local app data. I would presumably have control over what apps allowed AI to see data they held, or even on what devices something would run so I could control context visible to the AI that way. It just seems so much less controversial since the inference is happening from my own data, based on my own request...

Unfortunately it could also tell you where to find prostitutes and how to kill yourself...neither of which can be monetized today.

*CANADA has entered the chat*

Joking aside that is a good summary of Siri to date, however where Siri has a lot of potential is the integration is has with individual app data stores. It's just that to date, that has not seemed to work very well to let Siri see into your data, or at least not in the small experiments I have tried... Im hoping that letting local models scare that data might provide some useful boost to Siri being able to give you results based on stuff in your apps.