this smells like payback for stuxnet...

Except that it was CCP policy of one child per couple that got their society into the situation they are now in where men between the ages of 18 and 40 outnumber women. And especially in the rural areas the problem is much worse. The CCP is largely responsible for this and also the lack of education and opportunities in the rural areas. While the cities boom, the rural areas are left to decay, although that's where the food comes from.

You bet. There are a lot of Make America Great Again rednecks in Alberta (Danielle Smith is only pretending to support Carney in this trade debacle). They went to Washington to meet with Trump to tell him how great he is. Maybe if he gives them guns (more guns since they already are quite well armed) they can take Alberta for him.

Yes. And no. AI is here to stay. Demand for hardware isn't going away. Companies and consumers are starting to dial in how they actually use and leverage the technology. Companies built on the hype around AI including hedge funds are going to definitely get a painful correction. AI is simply a tool and the faster companies see that, and learn how to use it correctly, the faster they will be able to profit from its use. It's not magic but it is powerful and useful.

Off topic but kind of funny to see the comments on here from people who've never seriously used it (in software development). And then the people who do use it and have realistic things to say about it, good and bad.

The failure of US capitalism invariably leads to the country rapidly morphing into a fascist dictatorship.
That was pretty easy because they know all about those dictatorships, they've been installing them everywhere for the past 80 years.
The US can close up all their tourist destinations, we're not coming anymore.

Sure you can withhold your password and they cannot keep a US citizen from entering. But they will take the phone and send it off to Israeli hackers to get your data. Theoretically after they don't find anything they will return your property to you, perhaps in several years. But I doubt they do that anymore.

And boy do they work hard at trying to make #3 stick when they decide they want to get rid of a person.

What he means is ARM boards and the SoCs that power them are in their own individual and incompatible worlds, intended for being embedded into a product. They were never intended to become PCs and run generic operating systems. Apple might use what is technically a SoC, but they have defined a complete platform for themselves from the boot loader on up to the peripheral hardware to support their OS. If Pine64 were to design a chip, a boot loader, a chipset, and an operating system to match with full hardware support and firmware from top to bottom, then they too would more like a complete, general-purpose computing platform rather than a vendor of various embedded (and largely incompatible) ARM SoCs. Because Pine64 cannot do this, their products remain interesting but not fully use-able, and that will never change.

Had Microsoft required UEFI and allowed the same user control over the secure boot process that they do on Intel, then you'd have something there.

Apple, well they are their own proprietary world, so no different from any proprietary ARM system as far as Linux is concerned. Asahi Linux notwithstanding. I had hoped at one time that Asahi Linux would actually fully support the hardware and make Apple products viable for Linux, but I've long since given up on that idea.

Intel and AMD battery life is pretty good now and I feel like ARM will soon have no advantage over them in terms of power and performance.

Apparently some cars come with always listening AI assistants now. I wish that was a bad joke but it's not.

Social media is like if someone took all the problems of usenet and amplified them to the point of unusability...

Writing music (or any other creative endeavor) is not just about mimicking learned patterns, but about experimenting until you create something actually new. Models are recombining patterns using deep learning, which can give the appearance of novelty without actually being genuine creations, unless there's adequate guidance and shaping by a human. The problem is that there is a way that real inspiration and innovation *feel* which becomes delocalized when the cognitive labor is mostly offloaded to a model and thus hard to recognize, especially if you don't actually have experience doing the creative act yourself. So people who don't know how to write music will make slop, and even experienced artists could end up with stuff that is mostly slop if they're not paying very careful attention.

Plus the social value of creativity is based on recognition of the effort involved in creating novel things; many people appreciate art because it reflects human experience and human effort, which can get muddled or lost with generative AI.

I have been writing music and studying computing since childhood and studying some machine learning since I was a teen, three decades ago. I don't think all generative AI is useless or offensive (though the resource overconsumption with the LLMs-in-everything fad is a serious problem, and I do believe there is a type of expected-usage violation / consent problem with many AI vendor training sets and products). The disagreements about deep learning and generative AI (exaggerated by a bubble-driven profit motive, unfortunately) will take work to solve because new social contract concepts will have to gradually be explored and tested over the coming years by billions of humans until a general consensus is reached on what fair use now means and how intellectual "property" ethics are navigated.

I think people are asserting a lot of things which amount to gazing into a crystal ball around these topics, but there are at least two things which I feel pretty sure of based on my experience: the human creative process is much more complicated than LLM/GAN training+prompting, and actual human creativity has value which a machine is unlikely to replicate effectively at least anytime soon â" though simulacra of creativity pass enough of a capitalist sniff test to make money, detracting from the livelihoods of artists already dealing with the nightmarish economic calculus of trying to make creative things while paying the bills in the contemporary era.

Of course, litigative copyright scalping companies don't add any value to society either and are effectively just another type of nuisance; Round Hill looks to be a hedge fund manager's project to make money off others' labor without actually facilitating human creativity. Cue the infamous "I believe everyone involved in this story should die" Norm Macdonald line... (which is much more applicable here than the original transphobic "joke"!)

The RAM crisis is but just one sign of the cracks in the system.

That's hilarious that the country was established in 1776 to counter communism.

Linux support for all ARM devices from any vendor (maybe except for Raspberry Pi) really sucks, honestly. Out-of-date kernel forks, distro forks, u-boot, device tree, etc. Unless you need an embedded system, there's no reason to by ARM. At least not until they all support one of the system standards like SystemReady, has UEFI, generic boot, etc.

Like a few others above you're falling back on the old, "but other systems are worse so you should be happy with what we have" fallacy. And even worse implying that criticizing the current system and calling for change is the equivalent of lobbying for some other system like a command economy or whatever you think communism is.

You're making a number of assumptions, some of which may not be valid. First you are assuming that the system you have is the system you think it is. Second you are assuming that it cannot be made better or changed any way, to serve the people of the United States better and with greater freedom and opportunity. Third, you are assuming that the system you have today is the same system you had 10, 20, 100, or 200 years ago.

For an increasing percentage of Americans, life is getting worse and worse financially, and also physically. Such people are vulnerable to ideologies that lead to poor alternatives, including (currently) fascism. The whole point of the United States, its economic system, its political system, laws, justice, etc, is to make possible and provide a means for its citizens (people!) to build lives, families, work to provide for themselves, etc. Full stop. Yet the system we have today is failing a significant percentage of the population and has changed significantly over the last decades. Cracks are showing and getting wider. How should it be fixed?