This is just license politics, FSF's policy is GNU is the only valid license, anything that is not GNU should be illegal. Including BSD/MIT/Apache, Public Domain, and various kinds of Creative Commons licences.

FSF is okay if they are advocating for open source, but their true beliefs is a lot like PETA (where their belief is nobody should own an animal and it's better to euthanize a healthy animal than to let someone adopt it.)

At any rate I'd hope that FSF steps away from trying to force everyone to adopt GPL, when clearly other open source licenses work better for different projects. The entire "the entire OS must be GPL" is one of the reasons why Linux is still not adopted instead of windows, because you're not going to find 90% of the tools you need in the GPL ecosystem.

AGI to me was always "Adventure Game Interpreter", eg the 1980's sierra game engine.

When the generative AI techbros started calling their slop generators "AGI" I was like "... great now the slop is drown out information on game development history."

ALPR works fine if it's used the way it was intended to be used. Dragnetting and using it as a lazy way to track a suspect that hasn't actually done anything is not what it was meant for.

What it was meant for:
a. Traffic Management (eg congestion control)
b. Parking Enforcement
c. Traffic Control (preventing unauthorized vehicles from entering, eg bus areas)
d. Toll plazas
e. Law Enforcement/Customs signals (eg a specific suspect driving this vehicle needs to be detained ASAP)

Everything else? Get a court order. Drag-net fishing expeditions is the worst use of this technology. If someone has not done something wrong, you don't go out of your way to find something they've done wrong.

To that end, there really isn't a proper use for Flock cameras. They are designed as dragnets. The proper place for these are in redlight traffic cameras that are installed in the traffic management system itself, and the cameras should only be recording and discarding license plates based on violations within the cameras view. Flock does not do this, it's just arbitrarily stuck somewhere where there is a high perceived level of crime and then used to stalk targets who haven't actually committed a crime. If a city wants to use these, they should be be on the main highways in and out of the city, and then rely on redlight cameras on secondary routes. You want to know if a vehicle is within the city still, that's about the extent of dragnetting that should be permitted because that allows Amber-alerts to be narrowed down to specific locations instead of state-wide nuisance alerts.

The drum machine and synthesizers did not replace drummers and real instruments.

In the long run, wavetable synthesis and MIDI did, but only to open the possible options because most instruments are difficult to make in the first place. If you can build a synthesis keyboard that can play every instrument correctly, albeit without the fine analog control of a human, that means "anyone" can play the same music that sounds the same every time. This is why orchestras still exist. Orchestras always sound better than pre-recorded music, but to enjoy you you have to actually BE in the orchestra's audience. There is no way to hear and feel that.

It's the same with theatrical plays versus watching something on blueray/dvd/VHS/film. You do not get the experience of being there. The parts that make it human.

You can argue that computer generated special effects, scenery are better than practical ones, in SOME cases they are when it would put the performers or audience in harms way (example "the phantom of the opera" not only has fireballs, but has a chandelier drop on the audience that is on a cable so that it doesn't actually hit the audience.) You can only do that practical effect in a real theatre. Not only that, there is a risk in the real theatre of being "too close" to these practical effects for comfort. In a small theatre Phantom of the Opera can't do most of these practical effects, so they... use a computer to project those effects.

This is how I see "AI" shaping out in the end. That it brings the ability for people to create works to more people, particularly in locations where the software or people are impossibly priced out of the market. That said, the cost to use "cloud" AI products is far more than paying humans and buying the software that you'd normally make music, animation, television and film with. You will never be able to produce an entire video game, television show or film with the AI we have now because there is no way to maintain a context window longer than a few seconds. This is why so many "AI Slop" things are short incoherent videos. When it comes to music, so far all AI does is "re-autotune" a signer, or predict the next "sound" of a song. It doesn't create anything, so all you can do with AI generated music is create derivatives of existing works. It takes a human to write music. Always. Even algorithm, procedurally driven music (eg portal) ultimately has a human behind it.

This is why people who promote AI, sound like snake oil salesmen. They keep promoting AI to replace human labor or human creativity, but fail to mention that it requires creativity to understand why something IS or IS NOT creative. Many of the AI-slop loving people only use it for making hate/cyberbullying material, because for that stuff to work on it's target it only requires evoking an emotion in the person who sees it. It doesn't require understanding.

Homework has never been a productive use of the students time. If you are at school, you should be learning there. If you are at home you should be socializing with your family or friends.

Like think about it for 5 seconds. Why are people so angry now. Why are people addicted to social media? Because they have not learned boundaries.

If students are spending all their waking time doing homework for 8 different classes, with teachers who don't talk to each other to talk about homework load, you're going to have students who either A: don't do it or B: copy someone elses work.

How is using AI any different from copying their friends homework.

My guess is that it was probably just whatever was available. If the storage on the device survived they could figure out what actually is on it.

I've watched this guy on several videos. He isn't saying anything that tech folks don't know. We know this is an asset bubble, the AI hyperscalers are going to collapse, the companies left holding the bag will be Oracle, who is just rent-seeking, and all the others building data centers are rent-seeking.

Like the fact that some of these places are just burning natural gas like there is no tomorrow shows a fundamental flaw in their plans. All it takes is one backhoe 10 miles from the data center to "oops" the gas line and that entire hyperscaler is offline for a day. Or a drone that accidently hits the substation or switchyard. Why is there not a single solar panel on top of these things? These places are going to be a conflaguration in the banking should a fire break out and there's no staff to try and stop it.

If we expect to have a space industry for the next 20 years, we need to urgently get back to reusable launch vehicles. I'm not saying we need to go quite as far as the NASA space shuttle, but we need to get reusability of large vehicles to get the next space station or even build larger orbital space stations or spacecraft.

But ultimately some kind of space catapult/electrically launched vehicle/space-plane is the final form of this. We know "technically" we can push a jet high enough that a space craft could then be launched from to have the first stage be a completely reusable by landing it right after the vehicle unmounts from the launch vehicle.

Sorry, both Musk and Altman are scammers. "Full Self Driving" F off with that, I would not trust anything Musk says after 2018 over the "pedo guy" cave rescue crap. That's when I knew Musk as a joke. He's always been a scammer going right back to Paypal.

Altman, oh good god, watch any biopic/documentary on the guy, and he is just so full of it. This is literately a guy who uses his own chatbot for everything. There is a reason why the most viral "sora AI" videos were of Altman stealing GPU's from stores.

People misunderstand the problem with PFAS.

PFAS is a chemical class used to bind Teflon to Metal. That's why metal has a "scratch" surface because teflon won't stick to metal either unless the surface is roughed up first. PFAS could be recycled if the manufactures wanted to, but they don't. Just like anything else, it's cheaper to dump it the water than to recover it.

That is where 99.99% of the PFAS problem is.

PFAS in food, is barely a thing. It's not coming from food, it's coming from water contamination. The only way it ends up in food is when you overheat your teflon pan OR you scratch it and the coating starts coming off. It's that point you should probably discard it. That's why people's pet birds die when you use teflon pans incorrectly while cooking.

So while I think the setting PFAS limits is a good idea, but the reality is that the teflon scare is already out there. People are not buying it anymore. They are now switching to titanium or back to cast iron. Cast Iron is probably better to for you since if it leeches anything it's iron, which you need anyway. Back in the 90's people threw out their aluminum pots because of it's connection to dementia, and threw out their pyrex dishes because they "Explode" because the company that owns the Pyrex brand doesn't actually make "pyrex" anymore. Like I swear to god that pots and pans are things you should never have to replace, but any time you've had to replace them it's because the handles fall off from metal fatigue.

The thing is, it's very hard to make electronics this small, as the current processes are basically still "lithography" techniques. A technique that goes back to etching acid into rock. Modern chip lithography evolved from photo lithography, the technique used to etch circuit boards.

The ability to "draw" at sub-millimeter (1000 micron) requires using a light spectrum laser with a wave length small enough. So EULV is literately "extreme ultra violet" 13.5nm, which is basically x-ray wavelengths. Yes you heard that "x-ray laser", or known as the "SX" (Soft X-ray) spectrum which ends at 10nm. X-rays literately eject the electrons of atoms. This is why "10nm" has often been the described as the wall for die shrinks. You can't get any smaller because you're then having to figure out how to do things at atom-level. Which is what the article basically describes.

The smaller things are, the more errors that will happen when your materials aren't perfect. Like the next chips might not be "lithographic" processes at all and might have to be a form of "3D printing" at atomic-level manipulation. Which at this point probably isn't viable from cost levels alone. If we stuck around the current named "5nm" process (is actually a 24-36nm spacing process with a transistor pitch of 42-57) So compare that with the above of 9nm spacing and 15 atom pitch. So yes, in theory that is a 3 times smaller transistor than current "5nm" process.

But also look at what I just said, you need an EULV process for that, which means the laser has to be 2 times finer than than the spacing. Everyone's "2nm" or "18Angstrom" process is still within the same numbers as that 5nm process node.

The thing is, paper checks are more secure in two specific scenarios:
- Transferring a large amount of money between two businesses with no prior relationship (Keep in mind that this is primarily a problem with US small businesses)
- Transferring any amount to a foreign individual. Because all the f**king banks want to keep like 30% of it. Even Western Union wants to keep like 10% of it.

So the best way to make sure the intermediatory isn't eating the funds up in fees is to make sure you get the check in the hands of the person it's supposed to get to. PayPal is the single WORST way to transfer money. And has always been the case, but have become worse in the last decade and refuse to do international payments unless you hand over like 30% of the money. Even then the receiver can't withdraw it even if it's in USD, because Paypal just refuses to do so.

So that is where we are internationally. Between people in the same country? That's a solved issue of which the US is still pretty much dead last, next to north korea. Australia is the leader here, because you can just arbitrarily send money to someone with their deposit-only number. But as I said already, "in country" is a solved thing, it's the cross-border transactions that currently have too many layers of fee-takers.

Apple is the canary in the coal mine.

If Apple can't absorb the price hikes on RAM and NVMe drives, then that means nobody can, which means Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Broadcom, NVidia, AMD, etc are going to raise prices if they have not already and also lose a lot of sales revenue.

This is the deathkneel on consumer electronics that can be blamed entirely the AI data centers.

CANDU is fine. It's mostly about "eating our own dogfood" in terms of energy.

I am not opposed to building more nuclear reactors, I am opposed to building reactors that are not safe by design. A reactor that requires enriched uranium, leads us to the problem we see in Iran. We have not seen any meltdowns with CANDU, but we have seen nuclear material exfiltration from countries who we have exported CIRUS (Research Reactor) to. Specifically India. India has no Uranium, so they use Thorium.

In terms of "where", there are a lot of lakes, particularly in Manitoba, a single reactor could likely power the entire province. Likewise for Alberta and Saskatchewan.

The only place in Canada you likely will never see a nuclear reactor is BC and Yukon, because the risk of the megathrust earthquake causing a repeat of the nuclear accidents in Japan in Fukushima. BC has sufficient hydroelectric power, and capability to install plenty of wind if the business case makes it viable (there are wind power plants around, just not piles of them... yet.)

That said, we should not be building nuclear reactors to ... feed AI. That is stupid. If you need a business case to build nuclear for AI, build the Nuclear plant, and then build the AI data center next to the cooling systems so they can share the cooling systems.

The thing is, there is a very easy way to track the chips, just a very hard way to know the final destination especially if intermediaries just sit on them for a time.

Like the easiest tracking mechanism is to have a mask rom part of each chip have a serial number (remember when this was a big deal with the pentium III?) and production date that is also then read from the chip and printed on the chip when it's packaged. Then when the drivers (for cpu/gpu/ram parts) are first turned on a second write-once space in each chip is written with the system ID they were first installed to. So for a GPU the actual high performance mode will not activate if the system has missing or mismatched ID's, and for CPU's the clock speeds will stay locked at the lowest stable setting.

This would also prevent remarking chips.

When the system "calls home" to verify the id's and the driver matches, it writes the final rom handshake that says what it was approved to work with. If any hardware is replaced at this point, it will drop back to the lowest performance mode until checked again.

The downside here is the same one we see when flash chips are tampered with to have a capacity they do not have, people will pair them in the high performance mode, take the screenshots and whatnot and then part out the system and sell them individually and the final buyer is a victim.

Consumer hardware you do the same thing, but you have a prosumer BIOS feature that basically goes "ignore performance check requirement" which then displays a warning like " Performance check not enabled, hardware will operate at it's highest performance mode after a warm up period, and reduce performance if the system does not shut down cleanly" which basically just keeps an error/crash counter in NVRAM and any time the PC is rebooted it checks if the gpu driver version changed. If there is crash number greater than 0 between driver versions it slows down the clock speed stepping until it finds the crashing clock speeds and doesn't move past it until the driver changes or the driver is told to "reset performance counter".

Having the performance check obeyed will instead "call home" to report the crashes with each driver version and hardware id's. This allows the manufacturer to update driver compatibility matching, blacklist certain hardware configurations, and geolocate hardware that has been stolen/re-directed. It does not allow for remote disablement, as this is the hardware calling home when the driver versions change, or hardware changes, which is something that large data center installs won't be doing.

But also, who cares ultimately. I'm in favor of the minimal tracking mechanic to prevent remarking/counterfeiting of hardware that then ends up on temu/ebay but all tracking mechanics are a double-edged sword where it can be used maliciously to track journalists and celebrities doing work outside their home.