Literally every other kind of created media has research institutes, such as the Paley Center for Media which archives and studies television. Every Broadway play is taped on VHS and kept at the New York Public Library, which is incredibly helpful 30 years later when someone is doing a revival of a show and wants to see what the original choreography, sets or costumes looked like. Newspapers are put onto microfilm ... and you say aha but newspapers document the news ... but no, all of it gets saved including the classified ads.

If you think that videogames, which employ perhaps a million people worldwide, are of such little value that it's completely fine if they are utterly lost to the future, I don't know what to tell you. What is unique about videogames that makes them culturally worthless to you?

A long time ago television was seen as disposable, which is why for example most early Doctor Who was lost, and that view is seen as crazy today.

Anyway your point about "property rights of creators" begs the question, i.e., you assume that preservation violates the "property rights of creators" when in fact such a conclusion about preservation would make it a unique status among copyrighted works and you have done nothing to support that conclusion.

Quake III's contribution to Humanity

The reason is Ed Zitron has been making the rounds of business media lately pointing out that their (OpenAI, Anthropic) accounting doesn't add up at all. It's very enlightening to business types, who don't really understand our technical discussions about the mathematical limitations of LLMs, but understand very well when "profitability" is an accounting trick, and when sufficiently large markets simply don't exist for the implied returns from stratospheric valuations. The Emperor's New Clothes And All That.

The latest domino is Meta/Facebook who, like ElonCo, have announced that they have no use for all the GPUs that they bought previously, and are hoping to rent them out to customers instead.

Presumably, these customers will be able to do the kind of "Great Things"(TM) which the AI scientists on staff at Meta aren't able to do themselves. I'm talking about those AI scientists that Meta hired for $100m with great fanfare last year.

Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing World Hunger and Cancer solved in the third quarter this year by Meta's customers accessing NVDA chippies at a fraction of the price that Elon intends to charge, or failing that finding a way out of the continuing Hormuz Crisis by asking Google Gemini to make a plan and emailing it to the White House.

They are now talking about delaying their IPO until next year after all...

"Left the labor force" means you are no longer employed or looking for work. Example - you retired. Or became a SAHM. Or took disability. Or decided work just wasn't for you anymore. While not having a job is obviously a predicate for not being part of the labor force, normally people who are laid off immediately begin looking for work because it was an unplanned exit and they still have bills to pay. Hence, they are still part of the labor force.

Now, those people at Microsoft who took early retirement, I guess they lost their job and are no longer part of the labor force, but it was a voluntary choice and clearly they have the financial wherewithal to do it.

you have to suspend your disbelief a bit. None of it makes sense from a physics point of view, any more than most of Star Trek

Agreed. Make it so, Number One.

It's not a bad idea to put some pressure on kids, even if they crack. In engineering, it's important to test materials until breaking point. In human occupations where stress is an important day to day component (eg medical ER or brain surgery) it's best to see the kids fail *before* they enter university, spend 7 years studying, and find that they can't cope with the pressure after they become interns.

People need to know themselves before they can pick a path, and society needs to know they can handle the path before it invests in someone's education.

Then the user is pretty dumb, aren't they?

What if the user is 7 years old?

A "harmful response" is when you ask "how can I protect myself against COVID" and the response is "drink bleach". Then you do it.

It's common knowledge. Maybe not for you though? I'd suggest taking a class in ancient history to close those educational gaps.

There are at least three classes of supporting evidence: literature (eg Juvenal, Cicero) ancient ruins (eg Pompei, Rome) and modern historical research. Here's a popular science book for you.

Nice repartee!

In that case, the employees who were let go are the lucky ones. They get a head start looking for a profitable company.

It totally has! I saw it in a documentary called Spaceballs. It's ludicrously speedy!

"Aus nichts läßt sich nichts folgern." ist aber nicht Nichts. Was kann man daraus folgern?

It's not wrong, but it isn't right either. AI has gone through several boom bust cycles since the first neural network was invented in the late 1950s, and no doubt will go through several more in the next 80 years. Currently we call everything AI because it allows money to flow into projects by linking them with the stratospheric stock valuations of AI tech companies. Success loves company and all that. Conversely, when the next bust cycle hits, AI will become a dirty word and projects will go out of their way to de-emphasize any connection with "AI". This is exactly what happened in the last two or three bust cycles since 1950 in this field. Might be worse because a lot more people will get burned this time.

As an aside, the vague idea of letting a data-driven program explore inputs is bullshit. There is a likelihood function which controls the desired exploration. This is always specified (or more likely not explicitly, by practitioners, who just use an inappropriate default). The program's task is merely to solve the implied equations by successive approximation. The program designer's task is to write the equations down first.

This is intuitively similar to what physicists have been doing for 250 years when they write down a Lagrangian and solve for critical points where the energy of the system is minimized. This connection is literally what the 2024 Nobel prize in Physics was all about.