I have a government for that. I can just have my government do whatever the fuck Google was going to do and then I have more water without greenwashing bullshit.

One of the major reasons you can't afford beef, or at least a good beef, is because we have been in a drought for decades now and it has finally caught up with us on cattle prices. There just isn't enough water especially in Texas to keep all those cattle going so they can be turned into hamburgers.

Water is not an infinite resource. If we had a more functional civilization we could solve a lot of the water problems we have but we don't. So Google lobbying for deregulation and tax cuts so that my government doesn't have the resources to provide water on a consistent basis doesn't help me at all when they offset a little bit of the damage they did from that lobbying.

It is a nice reminder of just how fucking stupid they think we all are though.

At least for that price. The video card in it is roughly equivalent to a 4060 which is okay but for a thousand bucks that's really pushing it.

I really wish we would just shut down all this AI bullshit it's making everyone's lives worse but the people in charge want it and what they say goes. It's funny watching these little communities try to push back against the data centers and then getting their asses handed to them unless it's one of the wealthier communities than somebody just fucked up and didn't realize that.

Somebody ran the numbers and found that most of them are getting put in places with severe water shortages and therefore taking all of what's left of the water. That is of course because of you got a water shortage because of long-standing drought the property values are going to be lower so you're less likely to be able to fight off a data center.

Meanwhile small government conservatives are busy using state governments to force local governments to accept the data centers whether they want it or not. Several States especially Texas have overridden local zoning laws and rulings to force the community to allow the data center and to provide it with the water and electricity.

I guess next to that mess overpriced video game consoles seems a little quaint but it's still infuriating. The handful of things to keep us nerds happy or becoming gradually unobtainable. And of course those small government conservatives are happy to give us somebody to blame that on besides AI slopped devouring all of our opportunities...

If you don't like your honey having been regurgitated, there are alternatives for getting honey...

Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones.

That's not what I said. I said that the word "drone", as in a mindless unthinking being, is derived from drones, as in male bees. I did not say "all bees are drone bees".

And an individual bee has limited memory. They even forget which hive they are from after a while if they don't return to it.

You are confusing "forgetting" with "disruption".

Bees have both a geospatial "mental map" (based on landmarks, the sun, etc) and a chemical fingerprint (they recognize their nestmates' smell). Concerning their geospatial memory, not only is it not poor, the main problem with it is that it's too stubborn. If you move a hive 20 meters away, the bees will fly back to the same empty location where their hive used to be and wait there. They don't adapt well to change because they have a long-term memory of "the hive was here".

If a beekeeper wants to move a hive, they have to trigger an "orientation flight" to get the bees to learn the new location (this typically involves locking them inside their hive for several days to disrupt their routine). During an orientation flight, the bees will learn the new hive location, and then they'll subbornly remember that location long-term, even if you move the hive again.

As for recognizing their nestmates, this is again based on smell. A bee being isolated for days or weeks will still be recognized by guard bees at the entrance and welcomed in. However, guards will sometimes let in bees that don't belong to that hive as well, if e.g. they're passive and laden with pollen and nectar; they haven't "forgotten" their scent, they're just "forgiving" of mistakes if there's a reward to be had (bees sometimes make navigation errors, esp. if all nest boxes are similar in shape/colour or due to wind, and enter the wrong hive)

I'll repeat: bees do NOT have a short memory. This is a myth. It's not true. The very example you gave is actually an example of bee memory being too rigid.

Culture wars are absolutely global phenomenon. I have issues with golf courses too especially the private ones. But more importantly the public golf course is at least a public good.

And yeah data center is do guzzle water there are multiple articles about it including ones where forget taking all the water they have caused structural problems with the local ground, not just the groundwater but the ground itself because they pumped so much water out of the ground to use their damn data centers.

Data centers don't have to use all that water but it's marginally more profitable to do so so they do. We could pass laws but well people are busy freaking out over culture War bullshit.

The reason you don't think it's a global problem is because you don't understand the different cultures have different culture or bullshit so you don't see it happening. But it's the same trick everywhere

It's IMHO amazingly impressive how dense information can be stored within neural networks. Even a comparably tiny LLM can store more information than the human brain, despite the brain's theoretical storage being far higher due to its vast number of connections (ANNs are better at information density, we're better at learning from limited datasets). The tiny LLM will crush humans at a quiz in virtually anything except said human's particular areas of expertise. Storing information as a superposition of states across a large number of neurons and connections (whether we're talking artificial or biological) is an immensely space-efficient way to do so, and the human mind is nowhere near the limits of information storage capability.

There is no technical reason why a given organism, such as a bee, could not achieve far denser information representations in order to be able to do more with its limited neural capacity (though there are always tradeoffs). One of the reasons that ANNs learn slower-but-denser is the use of a very low learning rate with a very large amount of data that covers the same topic from many different angles, giving the weights ample time to explore different possible circuits in parallel and seeing which ones predict reality the best ("learn everything all at once" vs. "learn this thing NOW"). Bees aren't tasked with learning anywhere nearly as diverse things as a human is and spend all day doing the same basic job (the same information "from different angles"), so it seems quite possible that their greater "information specialization" as they go about their day may be able to lead to denser representations of said information.

BTW, at risk of a tangent (your comment about non-neuron cells playing roles), it's been really interesting to me seeing how a key difference between artificial and biological learning has been clearing up. In biological neural networks, weight cannot flip sign (Dale's Principle). In the general case, a neuron is either excitatory or inhibitory (usually a small number of inhibitory neurons per cluster of excitatory neurons); it can't change from one to the other even if learning would favour that. At a first glance, that would seem to cripple learning capability (and definitely does if you implement that in ANNs). But what appears to actually happen in biological neural networks is a sort of horizontal learning, co-dependent synaptic plasticity, between excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Instead of merely weakening an excitatory connection down to zero and then being able to go no further, learning simultaneously weakens the excitatory connections and strengthens the inhibitory connections. The excitatory neurons are the primary drivers of information storage and processing, but the inhibitory neurons adjust the baseline to give them the flexibility to express negative net activations as needed.

It is a myth that individual bees only retain information for half an hour. Depending on the memory at hand, bee memories can last days, weeks, or even the remainder of their foraging life. They have to remember things, because the timeframes a hive operates on are much longer than half an hour, including night time and being kept inside by inclement weather for days or even weeks at at time. Individual bees also learn much more than can be conveyed through waggle dances, such as what colours and shapes of flowers are yielding best in a given area at what time of day (bee learning is essential to them being able to function as generalists, able to handle any mix of plants at any latitude).

Also, the hive doesn't just blindly accept whatever any bee says. Each bee functions as an individual in a society. When a bee waggles in the "town square" (on the comb), other bees gather around to "listen" (detecting oscillating shifts in the electric field plus tactile contact and sound). But whether a bee actually decides to make use of that information depends on whether they're having good or bad foraging success. Only a small fraction of bees on average (usually a single-digit percentage of watchers) will decide to make use of the information. And if another bee "disagrees" with a waggle dance - for example, if they've been there and found nothing, or worse, found dead bees, predators or a rival hive), they can make a counter-buzz to argue against it. The arguments can get quite "heated", with many bees taking part.

We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!), but they're all individuals each acting on their own. There are simply various rallying factors that keep them together (for example, the scent of the queen, the desire to live in a warm hive, etc). The information communicated within a hive is limited; bees overwhelmingly rely on their own mind and memory, and perform their tasks as individuals.

I mean, bees attack small hive beetles by building prisons of propolis around them, that's something :)

No the real problem is that it guzzles water and electricity while devouring jobs.

I don't think the billionaires give a shit if AI cost more than an equivalent or even a better human being. They are sick and tired of being dependent on and having to pay lip service to us commoners. So any amount of money they have to spend to get true absolute freedom and true absolute power will be worth it.

As an added bonus we as a species have been so distracted by culture War bullshit for the last 30 or 40 years that we have been falling over ourselves backwards to give all the money in the world to the top 0.1%. so it literally costs them nothing to replace us all with AI and automation.

Even if I can't do everything it's a pretty safe bet it can do enough. Go look up the percentage of white collar workers and ask yourself what's going to happen if even a quarter of them become unemployable. How that's going to reverberate through the economy.

And no, we can't all be plumbers. Blue collar guys don't hire a lot of blue collar guys to do work. And that's before we talk about the actual wages those guys make when you look at the median instead of the average and take out a few crazy outliers working on oil rigs until they're late twenties when they have to give it up because it's too hard on their bodies

It's not a source of truth it's a source of free training data for your shitty AI.

There is a numbnut training in AI off of my comments here and I will periodically drop the phrase trump fucks kids into my comments and his AI chat bot picked it up after only a few comments.

What I'm saying is it's surprisingly easy to manipulate AI chatbot algorithms. It's no different than the early days of search engine optimization.

I don't know nearly enough about the math to say whether or not it's going to be fixable like it was for seo. SEO still has its problems but it's harder tha to manipulate that it used to be.

The real problem is chatbots are approached very differently by people with underdeveloped critical thinking skills then search engines. People get into a conversational mode with them and start to think of them as friendly friends and we'll start believing whatever they tell them. You're basically forming a parasocial relationship like people do with Joe Rogan and well think about how much this information Joe rogan's podcasts spews

They're getting ready for mass firings. California and New Jersey both have rules about how you do that. You can still do it, but it's gonna show up in the press and you can't cheat people out of unemployment insurance or agreed upon severance.

Also you have to report the mass firings. Texas lets you sweep them under the rug.

I'm saying don't move. You'll be fired in a year.

You can't race to the bottom

Ehh, I liked Universe a lot, and I never could get into the main Stargate series.

If Trump backed candidates win then Europe is going to have to do something but if they lose even if it's Republicans winning Europe will see that as a signal that they can back down.

The basic question is will America return to some semblance of sanity with the economy crashing and gas prices skyrocketing or will they just keep doubling down on more Trump. There have been several primary elections where Trump backed candidates won though. So it's not looking good. The basic problem is American voters either are obsessed with voting Republican even when it hurts them economically and a lot of Americans aren't allowed to vote because we do heavy duty voters suppression.

So the country is really going off the deep end here.

The thing is Europe can't really ignore a mentally unstable United States because we still have this massive military. I know it looks like we got our asses kicked in Iran but the only reason Trump had the back down even a little is that a draft and boots on the ground is still a bridge just a little bit too far.

All it takes to change that is one middle-sized terrorist attack and the American public will freak the fuck out and send their kids off to die in the desert again. Hell the last time when 9/11 hit we didn't even have to do a draft because so many people signed up. Now mind you Iran is a much bigger country and taking Greenland is a bigger deal so yeah we would need a draft, but you can get away with pretty much anything when people think that they are under attack

You need to look up what a mother fucking chesterton's fences.

Deregulating isn't going to create some magical world of competition and wonder and beauty. All it's going to do is what a handful of psychopaths abuse people's privacy and civil rights. Basically the exact same problem the United States has right now where finance Bros have used technology to do all sorts of fucked up shit and get us to where we are right now.

All Europe has to do if it wants to compete with Microsoft is take government money and dump it into software. That's it. Most of the software they need is already 60 to 80% of the way there. After that all you have to do is mandate the use of that software to interoperate with the government and with government contracts and everyone has to follow along because government contracts are worth way too much money to blow them off. It really is that simple and it's only corruption that prevents it from happening.

Every few years Europe threatens to dump Microsoft and Microsoft comes in and gives them tens of millions of dollars worth of free software and free support. This is been going on for at least as long as I've been paying attention and that's going on 30 years.

The reason we are here talking about this shit is because this doesn't look like another cycle of Europe pressuring Microsoft for free support, free software and discounts but instead they are legitimately trying to decouple themselves from America because America has gone bad shit crazy with right-wing extremism and the kind of laissez-faire bullshit that you're talking about when it comes to quote unquote deregulation.

What you're suggesting is basically Europe traveling the exact same road that the United States did which is the exact reason Europe doesn't want to buy software from the United States anymore. Counterproductive doesn't even begin to cover it. That would be batshit insanity.

Did you seriously write that comment or are you just a AI chatbot? Honestly can't tell the difference anymore.

You might want to look up where most telecommunications hardware comes from regardless of what the rules and regs say. Or fuck where do you think phones are made? Yeah some of them are made in India not anywhere close to all of them.

People will buy from dictators all day long as long as those dictators are predictable.