It's basically a year to a year and a half off people's life expectancies, from the heat alone.

Although this is not trivial, the antivaxxer movement will likely chop 10-15 years off life expectancies and greatly reduce quality of life for much of the remainder, same again for the expected massive reduction in air quality that will result from modern political movements, and the absurd puritanical movement in the US will likely chop another 10-15 years off the life expectancies of women.

These are, therefore, substantially more significant, although politically impossible to deal with right now.

I fully expect that, if current trends prevail, by 2040, life expectancies will resemble those of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

Attending work for 2 days means I pay £190 per week to work, with no recompense from the company. Because there's a decent amount of holiday time, my wages have only dropped £9000 per year from last year. If I needed to attend 5 days a week, I would have to leave the only job that I have ever held that actually made any functional effort to handle my disabilities. In other words, if I lost this job, I would not be capable of functionally working in any job at all, simply because most companes don't give a damn about disabilities. Legally, however, I would be deemed "capable of work". As such, I would have no wages and no benefits. Once my money ran out, I'd be on the streets. There is simply no viable alternative.

If a business guy thinks adding to the homeless is the best way to improve work morale, then maybe he's not a business guy that holds any opinion of value. He may well be listened to, which will cause a LOT of problems for a LOT of people and WILL increase unemployent and, in countries with failing industry, increase the homelessness of people who are far more competent than him, but that does not make his opinion valuable, merely incredibly stupid and sickeningly naive.

It is literally a summarization model. Its context window is the text to summarize. It was literally trained on being given text as a context, and summaries as outputs.

That is why they use mainframes as their example. It implies SaaS will stick around and will be used for some of the most sensitive computing with the highest reliability needs (like mainframes today), but will be mostly irrelevant (or at least unseen) to most people working in the office. It also would mean that about 5-10% of IT spending would go to SaaS while the rest would go to the "Business Agents."

That is of course if their predictions hold water.

If we use your email vs fax machine analogy, SaaS sales will continue to grow through the end of 2026, and then drop by 60% by 2030 and be at 5% of current spending by 2040. That would represent how fax machine spending continued after the Internet entered the public domain in 1993.

I'm pretty sure if 90-95% of the SaaS market is wiped out over the next 10-15 years, that would align well with the predictions made in this article. Anyone hoping SaaS sticks around better hope the continued use of fax machines isn't an apt analogy to use.

AI Overview literally tells you what sources it's drawing on. I don't see why people are capable of looking at what the sources are when they're Google search answers but not when they're AI Overview source links, but apparently, that is hard for some people.

This. Most people inevitably respond in these threads talking about "the model's training". AI Overview isn't like something like ChatGPT. It's a minuscule summarization model. It's not tasked to "know" anything - it's only tasked to sum up what the top search results say. In the case of the "glue on pizza" thing, one of the top search results was an old Reddit thread where a troll advised that. AI overview literally tells you what links it's drawing on.

Don't get me wrong, there's still many reasons why AI overview is a terrible idea.

1) It does nothing to assess for trolling. AI models absolutely can do that, they just have not.
2) It does nothing to assess for misinfo. AI models absolutely can do that, they just have not.
3) It does nothing to assess for scams. AI models absolutely can do that, they just have not.

And the reason the have not is that they need to run AI Overview hundreds of thousands of times per second, so they want the most absolutely barebones lightweight model imaginable. You could run their model on a cell phone it's so small.

Bad information on the internet is the main source of errors, like 95% of them. But there are two other types of mistakes as well:

4) The model isn't reading web pages in the same way that humans see them, and this can lead to misinterpreted information. For example, perhaps when rendered, there's a headline "Rape charges filed against local man", and below it a photo of a press conference with a caption "District Attorney John Smith", and then below that an article about the charges without mentioning the man's name. The model might get fed: "Rape charges filed against local man District Attorney John Smith", and report John Smith as a sex offender.

5) The model might well just screw up in its summarization. It is, after all, as miniscule as possible.

I personally find deploying a model with these weaknesses to be a fundamentally stupid idea. You *have* to assess sources, you *can't* have a nontrivial error rate in summarizations, etc. Otherwise you're just creating annoyance and net harm. But it's also important for people to understand what the errors actually are. None of these errors have anything to do with "what's in the model's training data". The model's training data is just random pieces of text followed by summaries of said text.

I remember when IBM, SGI, Infornix, Oracle, and HP first got involved in Linux. At the time, I included patches from some of them in the Functionally Overloaded Linux Kernel.

I proposed, back then, a simple league table for commercial support of Linux: Every new major feature or software product got so many points, and every bugfix release got a smaller number of points. Kernel features that made it into the mainstream kernel would qualify as goals for, kernel features and products discontinued were goals against. Closed-source contributions got half points, and were also considered goals against.

It would then be obvious which companies were serious and which were piggybacking, and it would also be clear who understood the philosophy, not just the opportunity.

Such a table would have ensured that nobody forgot the companies who contributed. Quite the opposite. There'd be an incentive to encourage the team you supported to improve position in the table.

Of course, no such league table ever happened. I could have maintained such a table without difficulty, but it would require the vendors to openly say what they'd contributed. I couldn't invent one out of thin air.

So I'd say Oracle has to look at themselves, not just the Linux community.

It's possible to conjecture - we know it collided with something massive, so if said body contained very limited radioactive materials, one might expect this to reduce the radioactivity per unit mass.

Is this the answer? Probably not, but it's good enough (I think) to argue that a simple answer is possible.

It has never worked in any empire, it has never worked in any software development team, it has never worked in any rock or metal band. I see very very little reason for saying there "should" be a power struggle, that always ends badly with no exceptions in any domain. C++ has never been in the kernel, so it's hard to see how Rust could defeat it there. Rust is unlikely to replace C because they do different things well - if the Linux devs have half the intelligence they seem to, there will be a natural federation.

And that is the key concept. Linux is, by its very nature, a federated OS kernel, many teams working in their territory but cooperating with other teams working in other territories through a central "government" that happens to have a hereditary god as head of the state machine.

The problem there is that the BSD folk did that, once William Jolitz quit, and found that people followed a very large number of different groups, to the point where none of the BSDs really progressed the way they could, and perhaps should, have done. The scene splintered. One of the most rock-solid, reliable Unix kernels ever devised has, to put it bluntly, not died (despite Netcraft confirming it) but seriously dwindled into a small niche.

You've got to remember, 386BSD came out a year or so before Linux and had X11 running on it by version 0.1 because essentially all the major challenges had already been overcome. It was THE OS to use, for a long time, for most serious geeks, although numbers were seriously cut into when Manchester Regional Computing Centre produced what was possibly the very first Linux distro, using Shoestring as the bootstrap. The MCC distro was easy to install - far easier than any BSD - and although it couldn't do much, it did turn heads. Further, Linux was gelling around a standard framework, whilst BSD by that time was starting to fragment and bicker.

My great fear is that, when Linus finally stops running the show, Linux will suffer much the same fate. There's a LOT of highly-strung egos involved, and a LOT of very rich companies who would far far prefer Linux to be owned solely by them.

*tries to think, but his head explodes from the sheer number of counter-examples.

Neutrinos are called ghost particles because of how little they interact with other matter. They're constantly streaming through your body without interacting with you. A solar neutrino passing through the entire Earth has less than 1 in a million odds of interacting with the Earth.

Not like this with this - the energy here equates to a couple hundredths of a joule. Now, the "Oh My God! Particle" had a much higher energy, about three orders of magnitude higher. That's knock-photos-over sort of energy (and a lot more than that). The problem is that you can't deposit it all at once. A ton of energy does get transferred during the first collision, but it's ejecting whatever it hit out of whatever it was in as a shower of relativistic particles that - like the original particle - tend to travel a long distance between interactions. Whatever particle was hit is not pulling the whole target with it, it's just buggering off as a ghostly energy spray. There will be some limited chains of secondary interactions transferring more kinetic energy, but not "knock pictures over" levels of energy transferred.

Also, here on the surface you're very unlikely to get the original collision; collisions with the atmosphere can spread the resultant spray of particles out across multiple square kilometers before any of them reaches the surface.

I really really wood knot want to corner on wooden wheels. They'd turn to Ash and would be a Birch to fix.