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Comment Re:Pepperidge Farm remembers! (Score 1) 25

... the average price for a family of four to spend a week at Disney has climbed to a mind-numbing $7,250 ...

Don't know if it's actually true, but people have posted (elsewhere) that it's less expensive to buy round-trip tickets to Japan and and spend a week at Tokyo Disneyland.

Comment Yeah, pretty much this. (Score 5, Interesting) 143

Disclaimer: European here.

4th epic heatwave this year in Germany right now. I'm currently in Karlsruhe and it's 37 degrees Celsius outside (too lazy to convert to bananas or whatever you guys use). Got an SUV rental and it's AC couldn't keep up this noon. Concrete on the Autobahn cracked open in the last heatwave and they had to close down to repair it. Right now NRW is seeing it's largest forest fire since ever.

I was up north on the island of Fehmarn at the start of the week. Summer was bearable there although I did get sunburn. Anything south of Bremen though has unbearable heat at noon. Not fun. The Rhine is at an all time low, you can almost wade through it ( this has never happened ) and Hungary is having an energy crisis because they had to shut down both of their fission plants because the didn't have enough cooling water. France is closing in an the same problem once again too.

Climate change is hitting us like a fist this year. Not fun.

Comment Re:Confusing Equity and Equality (Score 1, Informative) 131

That's the opposite of equity, which attempts to provide equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity.

Merriam Webster defines equity as:

fairness or justice in the way people are treated
often, specifically : freedom from disparities in the way people of different races, genders, etc. are treated

The Oxford Review expands on that and defines it as follows:

Equity refers to the principle of fairness, justice, and impartiality. Unlike equality, which emphasises treating everyone the same, equity recognises that people have different needs and challenges. Therefore, it involves providing resources and opportunities in ways that level the playing field for all individuals, especially those from historically disadvantaged or underrepresented groups. The goal of equity is to ensure that all individuals have the necessary tools and support to succeed, based on their unique circumstances and needs.

Comment Re:DEI is to blame (Score 1, Insightful) 131

DEI is systematic racism that blindly promotes minorities at the expense of white people, especially straight, white men.

Sure, 'cause white men have historically had such a tough time finding employment and advancement over people who aren't. /s DEI initiatives are an attempt, probably flawed, to ensure people aren't hired over others just because they're white men - which definitely happens. The words behind the acronym - Diversity, Equity and Inclusion - are actually good things that can, and often do, provide benefits in the work place, unless, of course, your products and services are only for white men. There's an argument for being able to do what one wants with their own company, which gets murkier when it's publicly traded or government funded, but discrimination is discrimination, which can go both ways. Some people are okay with discrimination when it goes in their favor, which is what we're seeing in the DEI backlash.

Comment Re:Why not a ban? (Score 4, Informative) 60

Comment Re:Heavy Lifting (Score 2) 66

Investors are chasing a company that achieves some kind of AI singularity. Let's set aside the fact that there's no reason to believe there is anything but diminishing marginal returns by making marginal refinements to current frontier models. Let's imagine someone hits the jackpot and gets, not even AGI, but a system that's as far ahead of today's frontier model are ahead of 2020's GPT 2.0 in performance.

Globally AI revenues are 150 billion, against a cumulative burn rate of 450 billion. A model that is a generation ahead of others would almost certainly capture the lion's share of that revenue.

If AGI magically appears as a Sam Altman has promised investors it will, a hundred million is way too low. Add, maybe, another zero to the revenues.

Conservatively, a safer assumption is that frontier models will get marginally better based on refinements in training and reinforcement and the other bits and bobs that go into these systems. The nobody is winning the lion's share of anything, at least overnight. But you have to define "safe". By "safe" I mean unlikely to lose money. But some investors are clearly defining "safe" as "having the greatest chance of owning a piece of the biggest thing ever."

I'm not following this super-closely, but if Anthropic is pursuing adding multi-step model based reasoning to their system, that could be the basis of a generational leap in capability. But if that is an approach that looks like it has a chance of working, then their competitors are no doubt pursuing the same thing. In that case you'd expect the revenue pie to grow as the scope of model utilty increases, but that growth to be split among several competitors. This could credibly result in a revenue stream for some of them that is as big as the entire industry's revenue stream today. But there's going to be hell to pay on the data center impacts end of things.

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