Is there room for consciousness to manifest in a brain?

If the data center is primarily intended for use by (exclusively or nearly exclusively) the people in the neighborhood, sure, it could make sense. I know this is quaint and out-of-date but one can imagine a neighborhood squid cache, NNTP server, modern Netflix cache, etc for the neighborhood. Have it be connectable by a high-speed neighborhood LAN, to share the 'hood's WAN.

Just a classic neighborhood network coop, but with some added caching services, which is what would cause it to be called a "datacenter" instead of a "router." ;-)

As if that would really happen. And that's sure not what this is.

Once again, I'm not shocked by the percentage laid off, but I'm shocked by the number of individuals. If 700 people was 14% of their workforce, then this company had about a hundred times as many employees as I would have guessed. Not that my guesses are particularly well-informed, but when I look at what this company's product appears to be and compare it to my own experiences, I can't help but make guesses that are apparently 99% off! (I'm that dumb!?)

What do employees at these large companies do all day? Why were they hired in the first place, or why weren't they laid off many years ago? I just don't get it.

I don't mean it as a put-down of their products, but on the surface it just doesn't look like their thousands of employees do anything bigger or more complicated than my dozen-developers-sized team (which is, itself, much larger than the teams I've been on in previous decades). Is everyone's productivity just .. eaten up by labor-not-scaling problems? Do I need to really read the Mythical Man Month instead of treating it as distant folklore that I'll some day get to?

Or is the answer in some other direction? Part of me thinks I should just drop it, and accept that I really don't know jack shit about the profession I've had for the last 40 years.

I can't really say it's bad for it to be doing these seemingly-bad things, until I know the answer to this: what is the app's intended purpose? Why would/should a person use it?

If it's intended to inconvenience/expose/punish users for trying to find out things about the White House, then maybe the application is doing the right thing.

Restore the repo from backup at the filesystem level, and the hash will be valid because it was valid at the time you backed up.

It would be a nice idea, but with the deluge of AI content being released across...well...everything...how do you keep up and who decides what is, and what isn't, AI-generated?

Even if this crazy minimum-age shit weren't happening, it's generally a good idea to give incorrect information. Have one birthday for site x and a different birthday for site y. Use one of your parent's birthdays here, and a celebrity's birthday there. Pollute the public data and cause confusion.

If minimum age laws help to encourage data public data pollution (all of which arguably shouldn't be public at all anyway), then at least one good thing will have come out of it.

Let's get it up to 84% of parents helping their kids bypass age checks.

do you think YouTube's subtitles are "appallingly bad"?

No, they're much, much better than having no generated titles at all, and by a lot.

mpv won't generate any subtitles for me; it can only show what's included in the data.

The LLMs weren't trained on a story about who won. How TF is it supposed to predict it in advance? That's not how LLMs work. Just train it on one more thing, a story about who won in 2026, and I'm sure you'll see its accuracy go up.

Colorado has been hit hard this year by our lack of snowfall, I wonder if their tests in Utah has robbed Colorado of any rainfall?

So yeah your AI can outperform a doctor that gets 5 minutes with the patient before having to move on to the next one in order to keep their private equity Masters satisfied.

So, suppose, we stick it to the "private equity Masters", compel them to double the number of doctors — forget for a second, who is going to pay for them — and afford them a whopping 10 minutes with the patient.

ChatGPT will still beat humans... And it will be getting better with every month, whereas the humans will not...

A new study from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess found that an OpenAI reasoning model outperformed experienced ER doctors at diagnosing and managing patient cases

AI is sufficiently anthropomorphic to be capable of making mistakes. Demanding perfection from it is stupid. It does not need to be error-free. It just needs to be better than humans...

If you want to keep up, learn to ~~code~~ hablar los idiomas más de moda.

Which means the Swiss run the risk of losing their national identity over the coming decades.

Surely that would be lost in the noise. Don't most cultures lose their identities about every 20-30 years anyway? I'm not quite the same person I was 25 years ago, and I bet you aren't either. Yet we are the medium through which culture waves.

Take a longer view and think of 1926. WTF do you today, have in common with them? Some things, but not others. Reading about their lives is much like meeting someone from the other side of the world.

The amount of time it takes the cultural Ship of Theseus to change all its components, is equal to the average human lifespan. Though you can detect the change of culture whenever you think in terms of decades, in day-to-day life it mainly manifests as "ooh neat, a new 'exotic' restaurant has opened!" Twenty or thirty years later, it isn't exotic anymore.

But.. but.. I was drinking home brew.