Yes and now. It was also the Age of Discoveries. That means that basically each ship crossing the oceans at the time also had a part time or full time scientist on board, who was measuring everything he could put his instruments on. The Royal Navy and its requirements for logs also demanded a lot of data to be taken daily, including air and water temperature.

It has happened under both.

Depending on the region you live in, it goes back until 1736 (e.g. Schoenbrunn, Vienna and Mannheim, Germany). In this year, several observatories in Central Europe agreed to take regularly measurements of weather data and keep a log of them.

And yes, that's the time when Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686 - 1736), Anders Celsius (1701 - 1744) and René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1686 - 1757) lived, each constructing his own type of thermometer, and defining his own temperature scale.

Nice post and an interesting comparison, but I think there's one big difference: live music remains hugely popular and a big business despite recording technology, but you don't see a lot of people showing off their arithmetic skills for profit. Today's mathematicians are more akin to composers.

There's also an interesting historical side to the analogy, as the separation between composers and performing musicians is relatively modern (and only really applies to classical art music genres anyway). And as you pointed out about Euler et al, modern math started out as a way to simplify practical calculations, such as the geometry of farming and city planning, or accounting. But this also shows a crucial difference: music has never been so much about practical utility as it's about esthetic or emotional experience. So while modern math has become a thing with its own sense of beauty, simply adding up numbers isn't very fun — though some might disagree.

FTFY.

It was Attachmate, which swallowed Novell and spun of for instance SuSE Linux before being itself acquired by Micro Focus. SuSE S.A. is now a separate company in Luxembourg, and maybe, they are holding the original UNIX licenses, as it would fit into their portfolio.

4% of wealth in America is owned by billionaires.

I never sold any power to the grid. I just offset some grid usage with my own power.

Where is that?

Financing is available for solar installations.

As I have paid 300 Euros for a pair of solar panels and a rectifier back in March, and despite the panels not being optimally mounted (straight upright, facing Southwest, and partly in the shadow from nearby trees), I harvested already 200 kWh as of today, I am pretty sure, "green energy" is not about twice as expensive as it should be. Even a badly mounted setup will return the investment in less than five years.

From the summary:

The entire camera weighs less than 3 pounds and contains a few grams of copper and less than a milligram of gold.

This is plain bullshit. Itâs that until recently, air condition was not necessary at all. Europe is very far to the north. Great Britain for instance lies between the latitudes of Vancouver Island and Juneau, Alaska. On the other side, Montreal, Canada is on the same latitude than Milan, Italy, and Toronto is as far to the north as Florence. Most of the continuous U.S. is somewhere between the Mediterran and the Sahara Desert. No one in southern Italy doubted the necessity of air condition in the Summer. For Germans or Scandinavians on the other hand, air condition was just a waste of space and energy, because it never was hot enough for A/C to make a difference, except in large office complexes with their large windows and basically no shadow. And they all have air condition. This year, nearly all European places have posted new local temperature highs. Europe today is hotter than it ever was in recorded history.

Last year, America's automobile exports were worth $54B.

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.

"NOAA" sounds like a Biblical character, the kind that would build an ark to save the believers when the global deluge hits. So it should be right up the MAGA alley. Then again, how would the deluge come about if you don't believe in global warming?