Maybe originally, but now the demand for gasoline far outstrips the amount naturally found in crude oil. That's why they invented cracking.

If one day there ever were an excess of light components in oil, they could simply transform it into higher-weight molecules. Along those lines, one of the biggest uses for natural gas is for building polymer chains.

Yeah, the charging situation is interesting.

If you charge at home, so much cheaper than gas.

If you can't charge at home, so much more expensive than gas.

Well, sure, but you can say the same thing of so much in automotive tech...

When all those gaskets need to be replaced, when the transmission grinds itself, when the coolant system leaks, when the turbo goes, if the timing belt goes, every few months when you change the oil, etc etc.

Sure, it's a item worthy of being wary of and a good opportunity to improve, but it's not like ICE engines are nice and immune from expensive costs down the line.

In my lifetime you could open a bank account with just a name, ditto for renting an apartment, and pay for everything in cash.

This guy is screwed unless he's only a guest of a patron.

Crime was lower and people were more responsible back then too.

All this control grid surveillance still hasn't caught the Building 7 people.

Maybe it's possible to decide a course of action was a bad idea and reverse it?

That it's a competitive system is the problem. The world advances through cooperation.

Not exactly true. The world largely advances by Natural selection. Survival of the fittest. Allocating scarce resources, such as money, to the projects and people who prove the most meritorious or effective or valuable usage of the resource. Of course Collaboration has a value, but it's largely involving or between researches who already passed the bar. You gotta have people reaching a certain level before a degree of collaboration becomes of value.

> Apple builds the handset, the OS and the store

Remember, when iPhone came out there was no App Store.

That was a separate business that came later, competition was prohibited, and by prohibiting competition rents were extracted.

This is called "illegal tying" in the law.

They're gonna install malware on your device but heaven forbid your website sets the wrong cookie, then they're fining you 6% of annual revenue.

When did East Germany win?

Yep, all the biggest from the dotcom era were companies that provided the proverbial pickaxes and shovels, and we *mostly* see that here too (Apple largely being unrelated, Google actually a bit, but not wholly in the game of actually training models, mostly the big players are mostly providing hardware or infrastructure to all these.

The big cautionary tales that everyone remembers like pets.com and webvan had silly high valuations, but no where near the heights attained by Intel, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft of the time. It was just so many of those dotcoms sourcing from the vendors propping up their valuations, but the vendors remained viable businesses just as they were before.

Even OpenAI, the most hyped of the hyped purely AI plays is still relatively dwarfed by Meta. OpenAI would be an example of something more akin to the intrinsically dot-com startup. So OpenAI has probably done more for the market valuation of nVidia and Microsoft than themselves.

It's over.

we have to many Ph.D's and when you need to do this to keep your slot = the college system is broken.

They are students not PhDs. And you don't "need" to do this to keep "your slot". Nobody is entitled to a slot. What you have to earn is not owed to you.

It's a competitive system, and you have to maintain certain level of merit and academic progress.

There is a right way. Either follow the rules or quit, and go do something more productive. And somebody deciding to become a criminal does not mean the system is broken.

Of course pre-pandemic, it was around $1200/ounce, and it's been just insane since the pandemic set in until now...

True, still not at the peak, but speaking of adjusting for inflation...

Cisco from 1998 to 2001 had a crazy anomalous valuation that was the biggest of the big examples of the dot-com bubble run amok. That behemoth of a company had an inflation-adjusted market cap of about a trillion dollars. Microsoft was in same ballpark, with Oracle and Intel a bit less, but still big examples of the dotcom bubble.

This time around, Google is 3.8 trillion, Meta is $1.6 trillion, Microsoft is $3.6 trillion, Amazon is $2.5 trillion, nVidia is $4.4 trililon, Apple is $4.1 Trillion....

This bubble is just massively bigger than the dotcom bubble, with just one of the big players this time being valued even adjusting for inflation more than all the big players of the dotcom era put together, and there being a fair number more of them this time. It dwarfs the 2007 bubble in these top few players alone. When this pops, it's going to be mind numbingly severe fall..

from my overpriced Disney+ subscription was user-generated "AI" slop.

The article says a selection. Presumably terms will let them cherrypick videos they like, so it will probably be not slop, but whatever generations they deem high quality. Likely involving extra work by the end user, since actor voices aren't included for the characters.

Yeah, this is one area where LLM can certainly make one side more successful. A screw up means either the attack fails, which no worse than not trying or messing up the target system, which may not be the ideal outcome, but it's not like the attacker really cared that much about the target system...

You think the companies are deliberately keeping their models from being professional grade because of some sense of social responsibility?

That is hilarious. They are pushing as hard as they can and hyping it up even more than it is capable of performing. Any shortcomings on their part is not by lack of trying or somehow holding back.