"If I go find an actor/actress that I like the sound of their voice of, and want to create a weird golem of a voice, what I'd do is get several 48khz 16-bit recordings from audio books of that actor, run it through the training (because I have their voice and the book they are reading) and then find a performance style of that actor/actress I want (from maybe a movie or or television show) and thus "skin" that voice to sound like that performance. That will give me a 95% reasonable sounding voice for all the words from the books they read, and a 10% accuracy on words that they never ever said before.

And of course you would contact the appropriate copyright clearinghouse or actors' association and pay the associated fees for using those voices, which the massive IP theft organizations known as "AI" do not.

That's what the big bosses tell us anyway. In a somewhat obscure corner of the human experience where I sometimes hang out there are ~5 web sites of varying ages that write and publish original and meaningful things. But if you search for that obscurity on Google you will now be directed to 847 "sites", "magazine articles", "experts", etc of which 842 are thinly disguised machine-rewritten versions of the 5 real sites - the kind of rewriting I would have instantly flagged as plagiarism back in my TA days - wrapped up in phony autogenerated web sites, documents, articles, etc.

Most people aren't authors or painters who earn a direct living from their creative work (of which there are very few), but most people put some amount of creative effort into their jobs and livelihoods. Whether it is a financial analyst in a cubicle who develops independent analyses of the prospects of an investment target, a graphic artist who creates flyers and web sites for small businesses, or an electrician who figures out a better way to route cabling through a standard spec house during construction they can all recognize that the self-styled "AI" vendors are just stealing their creative labor with zero compensation and feeding it into a spicy chatbot labeled "AI" which is going to be used by their bosses to put them out of work.

" Pack 9 million people into a "linear" city.."

The Chicago metropolitan area is a linear city of 9 million, more if you include the corridor up to Kenosha and Milwaukee. At its peak the city of Chicago was 3.2 million alone. However, it grew that way in the historic human pattern of part luck, part planning, part ignoring some of the planning, part haphazard human desire/greed/whim.

City regions that are created by force of one will and an ironclad design (Brasilia) seldom work - Canberra is the only one I can think of.

A direct line between County Cork and Loudon VA does not go through the east coast of Maryland on a spherical earth, that was the only point I addressed. Even if you wanted to maximize how much is laid in the ocean as opposed to land, there are still shorter distances that would land you on at least in Delaware. While I am sure there are logistical reasons to do it where they are doing, that is irrelevant to my point.

Yeah that sounds off. Probably mean digging at coastal shallower waters then just having it lay on the floor elsewhere, that's the standard.

That's assuming we live on a flat earth. A shorter line between County Cork and the US would have the US terminus much further north.

"We are crazy."

What's incredibly frustrating is how much of the craziness has been created and driven by Australians. Other countries want to push back against Trump? Go after the lunatics who fill his dementia-ridden head with all the crazy ideas, including their companies.

If something has never proven to have worked can it ever be said to have failed? A riddle fit for Bilbo.

"I plan on starting an AI company that just sits around and talks about AI companies.

Therefore I need at least eleventy-bazillion nVidia GPUs and three nuclear power plants worth of juice."

I am prepared to invest $2 billion into your startup. Please advise where to wire funds. Thanks you oh so much for this ground floor opportunity! /s

At some point people are going to realize that Ouroboros or a mobius strip takes you nowhere and just costs you money to keep circling forever.

(maybe the smart Wall Street money already has. Hmmm....)

There is a history of what we would now call industrial engineering and human factors going back at least as far as the first written records that shows that working more than a reasonable number of hours per week for any length of time leads to colossal decreases in productivity and quality, not to mention safety. If you have to work 18 hour days for two or even three weeks to get the crop in, yeah, that will work, but trying to keep human beings on this kind of schedule for very long leads to failure, burnout, and health problems up to and including death.

You can. With a browser plugin called "Short Stop".

I'm glad you looked up the real number as I usually see estimates of 65% of USians or something like that living in apartments (zero of which have chargers installed in the parking lot of course).

But what you are saying is that no progress can be made on the other 66% who can install a home charger until absolutely every possible case is covered, which is not out of touch but simply pro-Big Oil propaganda.

Here come the edge cases! Apartments! Towing a trailer from San Diego to Maine. Driving from Little Rock to Boise to return that tool you borrowed but being back in time for work at 0700. Nothing is decided until everything is decided.

Sure, whatever.