Yeah, agreed. I actually am really struggling to understand how they think there is demand for this kind of thing. Is there market research where someone says "sure, I don't care who's talking, just as long as the content is a topic that I am plausibly interested in and the _conversation_ is not too jarring".
It's true that people will watch AI slop on YouTube; my guess is that is the demand signal they are responding to.

I have once watched an AI generated YouTube video (really it was weird graphics over an audio that sounded like Richard Feynman reading) and I found the explainer vaguely interesting enough to continue watching in the background for 20 min while I worked. I guess that channel got a few ad impressions off my eyeballs for that.

So I can see notionally how this kind of slop might win over some other slop in a transactional zero-sum way, but I really can't see how any of the typical marketing stuff - audience building, brand development, downstream sales conversions, fits in with AI-generated, undifferentiated commodity content. Isn't the whole idea of an influencer that the audience wants a person to connect them to content?

Maybe it will work, but my guess is it will just result in a lot more content that one has to wade through. I'm sure someone will have an AI solution to that. Turn that Hamster wheel up to ludicrous speed!

JUDGE: The jury has sent a question and the answer is no, the death penalty is not "available for both sides" please return to the jury room and limit your consideration to civil damages.

JUDGE: No, a “light maiming” is also not acceptable, nor is “getting medieval on their asses.” Please constrain yourself to statutes approved by this court.

JUDGE: A further follow-up question from the jury, and no we cannot 'dunk them in a lake and let God decide, like they used to do with witches'. That has not been considered a valid means of determining guilt for several centuries at least.

JUDGE: The jury has sent another question and the answer, again, is no. "Excommunicado" is not real - that's only a thing in the John Wick universe. Civil penalties DO NOT encompass revoking all protections under the law for Mr Altman and Mr Musk.

JUDGE: Court reporter, please note that the jury's latest request, quote, can we let them hang by their thumbs for a few hours, end quote, is also denied.

Nuclear reactors use most surface water, not ground water.

Datacentres are no pickier. You can even cool a datacentre with saltwater, you just need a heat exchanger.

Also, closed loop does not evaporate. The loop is not closed if stuff escapes from it.

You're arguing with the actual terminology used in the nuclear industry. "Closed loop" or "closed cycle" designs have the water pumped in a cycle through cooling towers. The towers lose water to evaporation, taking heat with them, but the rest of the water is returned to be reheated again. "Open loop" or "open cycle" designs have no cooling towers. The water is heated and just discharged hot. They consume much more water (over an order of magnitude more), but most of that is returned. Closed loop are more common, but you see open loop in some older designs, and in seawater-cooled reactors.

"How often do you think I print?"

Seemingly not very.

I've printed many hundreds of kg on my P1S, thanks.

I do not consider having to write data out to a card and transport it back and forth between the printer and the computer to be the pinnacle of convenience. That's something that would be considered embarrassingly inconvenient for a 1980s printer, let alone a modern net-connected device. And it's designed to be inconvenient for non-cloud prints for a reason.

Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)

I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.

"I just put my models on a usb drive then plug said drive into the printer."

You must have a lot of spare time on your hands.

"It works great locally" - Um, no it doesn't?

They've made a nice easy-to-use ecosystem. For $400 you can get a P1S that supports adding an AMS, auto bed leveling, enclosed-chamber printing, high precision, high print speeds, and 300/100C nozzle/plate temps, and has an easy cloud print service and a robust ecosystem of models you can just download and print with no extra config straight from the app.

But yeah, their behavior is increasingly entering bad-actor territory. I wonder how long it'll be before they lock entry-level printers into their branded filament?

You are dead right. Agnosticism is much closer to a "null hypothesis" than atheism, yet many atheists like to present their view as "more scientific".

A really rigorous scientific examination pretty quickly comes to the conclusion that the existence of deities (in the spiritual, moral, and experiential ways that most deities are defined) is essentially impossible to prove or disprove with scientific examination of the material world.

In my own opinion it's because faith and religion are mostly about questions of meaning and purpose rather than physical assertions. One's reaction to the tenets of a religion are also experiential - if those tenets provide meaning clarity and improvement in one's being they make sense.

The other aspect of agnosticism is that I find attractive is a kind of intellectual humility. As a single, limited human being, who I am to say what is absolutely true in the metaphysical planes of existence?

I think his age is a big factor even without dementia.

Many older people I've seen have a much stronger "wow, look at this reaction" to new technology- they still see advances as minor miracles when myself and others see them as incremental progress.

I also think a lot of people in that generation have spent less time with psychology and are less prone to being aware of their own emotional and cognitive reactions. This means they don't spend much time reflecting on whether that "wow" reaction is a factual assessment or just an emotional reaction.

And of course the LLM vendors love having people debate this stuff, it keeps the "AI is magic" aura alive even when so much of what "AI" is making seems to be slop.

...and the Cybertruck range and launch date, and the Model 2, and the 4680 battery process, and...

Based on Musk's track record, you can pretty much count on this being a lot less than what is promised and a lot later.

I also just don't see the opportunity. I wouldn't call myself all that knowledgeable about WeChat and its ilk, but I think these "super apps" emerged as China's mobile revolution was taking off, meaning that people started out doing banking and ride sharing etc within these apps. In the US, all those services came out separately.

Admittedly the app landscape is fairly cluttered, but I just can't see the path to US consumers suddenly wanting to hail a ride inside of Xwitter. It's not how most Americans learned to hail rides, and the consumer value in having it all inside of Xwitter seems pretty minimal.

I'm not sure I fully agree. If you know what you're doing, LLM-based code can be quite helpful. I just built a Python scraper using Antigravity in a few hours that would've taken me many days of work and required a lot of effort to learn async function syntax.

It's not a super complex code base, so there's nothing architecturally complex about it. Even then, if I hadn't had a decent understanding of how playwright works, I would've had a much harder time debugging things and fixing some of the dumb decisions the LLM made.

The "anyone can build anything" hype is clearly bogus, but "people who can clearly specify things" can build a lot more than otherwise.

That's actually quite tricky for Google. LLM-based searches unquestionably cannibalize traffic to the web properties that make them the lion's share of their revenue.
However, they surrender their position directing traffic to websites to competitors like OpenAI or Anthropic, then they are far less able to make ad revenue period.

I think their hope is probably to outlast some of the hype cycle and then come in with decent products that leverage their current dominance in ad sales.