Imagine this: you're trying to build a Linux-based appliance. You run up against some problem and Google is no help. So you go to some forum and ask how to solve it. Some smarty pants says "Figure it out for yourself! You want to stand on the shoulders of giants!" Um, no, I don't want to hire a gatekeeper such as yourself for a stupid amount of money to answer one question.

AI is the next stage in the democratization of information in the same way that Google and the Internet were to expensive universities, physical libraries, and books that may or may not be available when you need it. Welcome to the revolution.

And California, in it's infinite stupidity, will refuse to build such plants because it's easier to suck the Colorado River dry and who gives a shit about those other states who depend on it.

Reminds me of that real estate website commercial where the realtor keeps showing the couple one ranch-style house after another. It's still a PC running Windows. The same applies to NVidia's new machine. It's still Windows.

In your case it might simply be that there was not enough of this kind of tasks in the training data.

I agree in general, but not with this strong phrasing. I've let AI build a good amount of non-trivial code. But my consistent experience is that it works best when guided by an experienced coder who can correct it, and when implementing well-known algorithms rather than coming up with novel solutions.

Example: I let it write up a quadtree implementation in a language for which there was no ready solution online. It took 2-3 correcting prompts to get a good result. I could've done it myself but it would've likely taken a few hours to get it all right instead of the half or so hour it took with AI. The important part for me was that there's nothing unknown in how to implement a quadtree. All the AI needs to do is take the 100s of existing implementations and translate them into a different language.

True but too simplified. The Luddites had an entirely different motivation: The fact that factories now employed women and children at very low rates meant that the men lost their status in the family as bread winners and head of household. That was a major social disruption, which we don't have with AI.

I'd compare it more to teamsters or wagoners when cars became common. Your job is threatened by a different way of doing the same thing, a way to which your skills don't cleanly transition. Some choose to pick up the new tech, some want the old ways to persist.

In the end, coachmen became chauffeurs, because rich people prefer to be driven around oder driving themselves, no matter if it's a horse or an engine doing the pulling. But much fewer teamsters and wagoners became truck drivers.

BOTH of them? :-)

The exact scenario we warned about when the discussions about this "responsible disclosure" nonsense started. Someone needs a reminder that letting you know your software sucks is a courtesy, not something you can demand.

It's a general rule-of-thumb that no business invests where there's uncertainty. Case-in-point: power plants in the US take years if not a decade or more to get going because of the bureaucracy and the fickle nature of politics. Why invest billions into a power plant when it will never get approved within the time frame of one administration and the next one will change the rules of the game?

So this suggests the stability of Taiwan for the next 5+ years. Then again, another way to look at it might be that Nvidia is effectively bribing China to leave them alone.

Yeah, their slaughtering of possibly tens of thousands of protesters was clearly a sign of upcoming concessions.

Dictators lose when they make concessions. They stay in power when they double down. That's the hard lesson of a hundred years or so of dipshits becoming big boss by military coup or revolution. Those who put absolutely every penny into propaganda and oppression tend to hang on to power the longest.

And given what the IRGC and the regime have done to the Iranian people and how much they're loved in the rest of the world, staying in power is literally a life-or-death matter for them. The day the regime falls, we'll see all the Ayatollahs and minions hanging from trees.

We likely won't.

They made it very clear that they are monitoring and restricting Internet access, and the fact that even during an active war they went on to sentence and hang protesters makes it abundantly clear what will happen to anyone sharing information with the world that they'd rather not see on the world news.

One of the best things of running Linux instead of Windows is that even if I choose to install a binary driver, it doesn't come with a bunch of "companion" apps and background services and a 4GB LLM, a game launcher, an update program, and whatever other nonsense people want to shovel onto me.

Because if it did, distros would revolt and/or ship a version that was just the driver.

You're a graphics card. Act like it. All you need is a driver, nothing more, nothing less.

I've never seen generators on cell towers, and the batteries last a few hours. They're meant to cover the occasional western world power outage, not a major one.

Yepp, one of the reasons being that POTS will work even during power outages, as long as the central switches are powered. Your VoIP will be down if your house has no power. It probably is more efficient, but that "saving" is also simply shifting some of the power usage to consumers.

Wait, isn't everyone poking fun a Tesla for not using LIDAR? You mean LIDAR doesn't solve every vehicle navigation problem?