Is there room for consciousness to manifest in a brain?

If the data center is primarily intended for use by (exclusively or nearly exclusively) the people in the neighborhood, sure, it could make sense. I know this is quaint and out-of-date but one can imagine a neighborhood squid cache, NNTP server, modern Netflix cache, etc for the neighborhood. Have it be connectable by a high-speed neighborhood LAN, to share the 'hood's WAN.

Just a classic neighborhood network coop, but with some added caching services, which is what would cause it to be called a "datacenter" instead of a "router." ;-)

As if that would really happen. And that's sure not what this is.

Once again, I'm not shocked by the percentage laid off, but I'm shocked by the number of individuals. If 700 people was 14% of their workforce, then this company had about a hundred times as many employees as I would have guessed. Not that my guesses are particularly well-informed, but when I look at what this company's product appears to be and compare it to my own experiences, I can't help but make guesses that are apparently 99% off! (I'm that dumb!?)

What do employees at these large companies do all day? Why were they hired in the first place, or why weren't they laid off many years ago? I just don't get it.

I don't mean it as a put-down of their products, but on the surface it just doesn't look like their thousands of employees do anything bigger or more complicated than my dozen-developers-sized team (which is, itself, much larger than the teams I've been on in previous decades). Is everyone's productivity just .. eaten up by labor-not-scaling problems? Do I need to really read the Mythical Man Month instead of treating it as distant folklore that I'll some day get to?

Or is the answer in some other direction? Part of me thinks I should just drop it, and accept that I really don't know jack shit about the profession I've had for the last 40 years.

I can't really say it's bad for it to be doing these seemingly-bad things, until I know the answer to this: what is the app's intended purpose? Why would/should a person use it?

If it's intended to inconvenience/expose/punish users for trying to find out things about the White House, then maybe the application is doing the right thing.

Restore the repo from backup at the filesystem level, and the hash will be valid because it was valid at the time you backed up.

Even if this crazy minimum-age shit weren't happening, it's generally a good idea to give incorrect information. Have one birthday for site x and a different birthday for site y. Use one of your parent's birthdays here, and a celebrity's birthday there. Pollute the public data and cause confusion.

If minimum age laws help to encourage data public data pollution (all of which arguably shouldn't be public at all anyway), then at least one good thing will have come out of it.

Let's get it up to 84% of parents helping their kids bypass age checks.

do you think YouTube's subtitles are "appallingly bad"?

No, they're much, much better than having no generated titles at all, and by a lot.

mpv won't generate any subtitles for me; it can only show what's included in the data.

The LLMs weren't trained on a story about who won. How TF is it supposed to predict it in advance? That's not how LLMs work. Just train it on one more thing, a story about who won in 2026, and I'm sure you'll see its accuracy go up.

If you want to keep up, learn to ~~code~~ hablar los idiomas más de moda.

Which means the Swiss run the risk of losing their national identity over the coming decades.

Surely that would be lost in the noise. Don't most cultures lose their identities about every 20-30 years anyway? I'm not quite the same person I was 25 years ago, and I bet you aren't either. Yet we are the medium through which culture waves.

Take a longer view and think of 1926. WTF do you today, have in common with them? Some things, but not others. Reading about their lives is much like meeting someone from the other side of the world.

The amount of time it takes the cultural Ship of Theseus to change all its components, is equal to the average human lifespan. Though you can detect the change of culture whenever you think in terms of decades, in day-to-day life it mainly manifests as "ooh neat, a new 'exotic' restaurant has opened!" Twenty or thirty years later, it isn't exotic anymore.

But.. but.. I was drinking home brew.

I'm not really a pro-jobs guy (IMHO 100% unemployment is a fantastic goal), but I'll take a shot at this one.

Lay it out to me how data centers bring jobs.

Widget manufacturer wants to be able to take online orders, so they host an e-commerce site at a data center. Now they can take orders. They hire people to help make more widgets faster, in order to keep up with customer demand.

A data center is well-connected, so a VPS there makes for a good, fast seedbox. People can use it to torrent all their TV and movies, saving money that they're now able to spend more on hookers and blow. Sex worker and cocaine mule demand increases.

A televangelist wants to solicit indulgences on TV, where people in need of salvation can call in with their credit cards to buy indulgences. The problem: TV is semi-obsolete and many lost souls prefer internet streaming over broadcast TV. Solution: host the video in a data center. Now virtual parishioners, their souls having been saved thanks to the ease of watching sermons on their own time rather than the televangelist's allotted TV broadcast time, are free to engage in more economic activity instead of having to pray and meditate all the time. Instead of volunteering their time at a food bank or rape crisis center in order to ease their guilt, they're free to choose more economically productive things such as entrepreneurship, where they end up hiring workers to make them more money, which in turn they can send to the televangelist to become even more saved, resulting in a virtuous cycle.

A neighboring province has taken the lead on several money-making industries, viciously out-competing us. So we send quadcopter grenade-dropping drones, fixed-wing FPVs and other killbots to murder their workers, blow up their factories, etc, so that our businesses can become relatively more competitive and grow (hire people!). But in order to keep our terror campaign effective, we need a repository of strike videos so that we can review which targets were destroyed vs merely damaged or missed. To where do we upload this video? You know the answer: a data center.

Data centers are just another tide-that-lifts-all-boats tech that can support all (or most) other industries.

what if it isn't a scam.

If it isn't a scam, then the weird exceptions (e.g. enterprise equipment and phones) will soon be removed, the president will announce that he'll no longer accept bribes and is therefore shutting down all the bribery-focused projects (e.g. the ballroom, Trumpcoin) so that manufacturers no longer have any way to get themselves exempted through backdoor processes, and the president will remove any government-imposed trade barriers that interfere with US router manufacturers acquiring overseas parts and selling to overseas customers.

You might be right. These things could be announced any day now. We'll see.

Also if it's not a scam, then I think we're likely, though not necessarily, going to see government investment into things like pfsense/opnsense and similar projects, in order to bolster consumers' resistance to supply chain attacks and quasi-monopolies. But that's less certain than the obviously-necessary changes mentioned in my first paragraph.

From OpenAI's engineers' perspective, the purpose of ChatGPT is to write things that appear to be similar to what humans have written, or would write. The ethics of this perspective are that OpenAI should have no liability. ChatGPT is for novelty purposes only, and it's as dangerous as Magic 8 Ball.

From a different perspective (including, possibly, OpenAI's own marketing team's perspective), the purpose of ChatGPT is to help solve problems, give people advice, etc. The ethics of this perspective are that OpenAI should be liable for what it "says." ChatGPT is more dangerous than Magic 8 Ball.

But from a user's perspective, the purpose of ChatGPT is whatever you want it to be. The ethics of this perspective are that OpenAI's liability is hard to determine, therefore, this perspective is wrong and reality should be shoe-horned into one of the above perspectives. ;-) Well, ok, I guess ChatGPT is about as dangerous as a BASIC interpreter or a screwdriver or a rock or a 30 JuggaloWatt mining phaser, which can be anywhere from not-dangerous-at-all to hey-you-just-murdered-ten-thousand-nuns-and-orphans. Since this is the hardest case to analyze, of course we're going to go this way.

The President is the closest of all elected officials to the People

No, the president is elected by the states. Members of Congress are elected by the people.

Some have voiced an opinion that the president should be elected by the people, but so far, we have not yet amended the constitution to permit that.