Fortunately, Trump has already trained his followers to accept that truth is irrelavant, and that they should worship everything he says as a form of religion, so they're already primed for Trump's tech bro billionaire contributors to take over their lives! Thanks, Peter Thiel, great puppet show! Jim Henson would be jealous...

Zuck is SO LIFE-LIKE, he could almost pass for a real human being... if it wasn't for that pesky uncanny valley.

That's reason AI is doomed, the old "Garbage In, Garbage Out" principle. AI will increasingly be trained more and more on AI slop, resulting in an inevitable spiral into mediocrity.

Any behavior you measure and reward people for increases. That seems like a no-brainer. Maybe they should consider rewarding people for actual accomplishements, and not for wasting the most electricity?

Personally, I subscribe to the 'Shoot the hostage" school of negotiating with criminals.

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

Communisim did fail. All developed nations are now to some extent socialist (included the USA). The Chinese use of capitalist economic incentives while still having a centrally managed economy is an interesting development that hasn't failed yet; currently China is building out renewable energy much faster than the USA is... which means the best place to site AI data centers is probably in the Bobi desert, not in US cities that already have electric and water shortages.

I still find it amusing that Zuck renamed the company to signal it's new obsession with being THE metaverse company, only to decide about a year later that they were actually an AI company. That being said, Meta Reality Labs is now focusing on robotics, not VR. The billionaire class is now in a race to see who can replace all their workers with robots first. Musk hallucinates he's going to win that race, but only because he does a LOT of drugs.

Meta massively overpays their workers, which must be a reaction to nobody wanting to work there.

I quit my position as a contractor at Meta Reality Labs when I finished the project I was originally hired to do an they reassigned me to maintaining old python code that simulated optics, because i realized my job had become training their AI to to my job for me. Now I'm working remotely from my beach house. Pays a lot less, but I don't have to drive 800 miles a week with regular gas over $6/gallon in Washington state.

To make sure all his neighbors know he owns a Harley! To be fair, I once had a neighbor rich enough to rent the house next to mine that did the same thing with his Mustang that had overly loud mufflers.

Only slightly less annoying than laws mandating electric vehicles make enough noise to warn ignorant pedestrians that they are coming, which results in quiet electric cars playing simulated engine noises with no off switch.

Most posters seem to be assuming it's a scam. I can't possibly think of a reason why they might think that. (A few million, yes, but getting it down to one is hard.)

However, that's almost by the by. It's rated for 5G. 5G is old. 6G is the new standard and WiFi 6 has been around for a while now. If you're actually serious about designing a new phone from scratch, and have not yet released it, you'd almost certainly want it to be 6G-capable. Nobody in their right minds designs for yesterday's standards, when they're going to be competing with tomorrow's products.

This, to me, is far far more important than whether or not it is real. If you're designing a product for a market that's on its way out, you've got a serious problem. If you're clamouring for a product that's designed for a standard that could be phased out by the time you see it, then you're not thinking straight.

Why does this matter, if the product isn't real anyway? First, we don't know it's not real, we shouldn't assume that. But, second, it means that nobody thought it was worth bothering with taking the potential customers seriously. The customers are merely meat with cash. That's not an attitude I can respect. Whichever vendor is making these phones is worthy only of my utmost contempt.

The problem isn't the population. Bedrock can handle more than that. London isn't sinking because of all the people (and London is huge!), it's sinking because the ice sheet that pressed the Highlands deep into the crust has been gone for the last 10,000 years, resulting in the entire island tilting back to where it naturally should be. You could move London's population into the Great Glen and it would not make the slightest difference - London would still be sinking. The ice sheets were a whole lot heavier than a few tens of millions of people.

(Ok, it would make a difference. If the rich people actually lived in Scotland, the transit system and public services would see a thousand percent improvement inside a week. If they were also forced to speak Gaelic, English would vanish in a month.)

Aquifers can be deep. The aquifer that supplies the town of Buxton in England is so deep that it takes rainfall 5,000 years to rech it.