...when your brand new phone refuses to be activated on their network, even though you bought it from them> No activation = no connection = app is useless. Can't call them either because, you know, at that point the phone doesn't work.
And yes, it has happened to me.

For T-Mobile, that works great. You have a customer who's paying you and you don't have to provide service for.

Of course, I guess the other assumption is you have access to another phone or something - either your spouse or your kid, or a work phone. Or maybe a landline.

Hawaiian eruption last a long time and the lava flows persist for years.

Your effusive eruptions last on average no longer than our effusive eruptions. The fact that Iceland also has phreatic eruptions doesn't change the fact that most of ours are effusive basalt, just like yours, with corresponding eruptive dynamics. Also, FYI, for a given total effusion volume, slow eruptions are easier to divert. Diversion is much more challenging when an equivalent volume of lava is effused in a short period of time. And it's not like you have vastly larger average lava flows than we do. The largest lava flow on Earth in the Holocene (modern era) is in Iceland (the THjórsárhraun - 900km2, 25km3, 70km underground travel followed by 130-140km on the surface). For comparison, Hawaii's largest holocene flow is the Ailaau Flow at 430km2, 4-5km3, and 40km.

If we want to limit to more recent flows (since Ailaau was fairly recent, in case you think Iceland stopped having big eruptions), Iceland's biggest *after* Alia'au was Laki (1783–1784 AD), at 600km2, 15km3, and 80km. It lasted for 8 months to 2 years, depending on whether you count the concurrent Grímsvötn eruption as part of it. So much gas was released from that huge volume of lava that despite us being nearly arctic (polar volcanoes have much lower near-term climate impacts than equatorial volcanoes), it caused a winter so severe that the Mississippi froze at New Orleans and ice was seen floating in the Gulf of Mexico.

We simply get bigger effusive eruptions than you, full stop. Not all eruptions, of course, both of us have a huge variance in eruption scales and dynamics. But trying to claim ours are somehow "easier" is just not in line with the facts. Also, Hawaiian eruptions tend to occur on terrain that slopes significantly more consistently toward the sea, aka where you want to divert lava toward; on flatter or less-consistently-angled terrain, lava "piles up" more and makes it easier to overtop berms.

There is a practical side that it is easier to move people and build coffee shacks

I'm not talking about "coffee shacks", I'm talking about whole communities and beloved places. In particular, I'm thinking about the 2018 Lower Puna eruption. Of course the homes near the vents in Leilani Estates were doomed, but there is absolutely NO reason why you should have lost anywhere close to as much as you did so far from the vents. Losing Kapoho Bay for example was simply cultural fatalism. I watched a person crying on the news saying she didn't understand why Pele chose to take such a beautiful place. It's not Pele who took it, it's your insane resistance against doing anything to protect yourselves. That was one of the easiest possible flows to divert. Most of the lava fronts moved at a crawl, you had warning long in advance of the eruption and a very slow eruptive rampup (didn't really take off until June), and you had a steep slope to the south into unpopulated areas you could have easily diverted it down. Losing all that was a choice.

"Oh, we can't!" is just an excuse for your fatalism that gives you an excuse to not put forth the effort to actually do it. It's not the 1940s anymore, we're not chucking surplus WWII bombs at lava tubes anymore. Lava diversion is a science and is routinely effectively done. There are limits, but you were nowhere near said limits for sites far from the vents. There are costs, but they are nowhere near the costs that you paid by refusing to act.

It looks very much like there were suicides as a consequence of a poor mental health system in the country. There's no logical reason to kill yourself for having to redo an exam. These cases nearly always have something far more significant going on mentally.

You realize a lot of these countries have the One Big Test(tm) that literally decides your fate, right? Basically at the end of your high school education, you take One Big Test and it determines your future. Do really well and you often get a full ride scholarship to an overseas university (basically any university you want to get to - UK, US, Canada, etc). Do well and you get a scholarship to a local university. Do OK and you might be able to get into university if you can pay for it. Do badly and it's either trades or that's it, you're a poor laborer.

It's often so big many of the countries demand complete silence while the exam happens - they will cut back traffic, cut internet access, stop flights, etc.

And yes, these countries have a LOT of teenage suicides. Many students succumb to the pressure - not just the pressure to do well, but pressure from family. In fact, many students have been known to be disowned by their family for not doing as well as they were expected to. (I.e., if you were expected to get the full overseas scholarship and only get local university scholarship).

Students will spend 18 hours a day being tutored and studying for the exam - literally all day and all night in the leadup.

It's one of the advantages of the American system - in that you get second chances. If you fail your university entrance exam, you can often take it again, usually the next year. Same with basically any critical exam - fail the bar, you can take it again the next time (6 months later, though). It's not consequence free - you have to wait for the next exam to be held, and you lose any time opportunities like jobs and such that might be waiting on successful completion. But you get second chances, because at least we've recognized that things happen. You might do poorly because a family member passed at an inopportune moment.

Many of those suicides happened because they put their work into studying for the exam - literally put their life on hold for a month or more and many cannot contemplate having to go through it all over again.

AI isn't going to make a profit, so they are probably looking for something that will.

I take native Hawaiian religious objections seriously. These are people who take a fatalistic "Pele will take what she wants, it's pointless to try to stop her" attitude toward lava flows running over their houses that seems utterly insane here in Iceland. We'll buy up every available water pump on the international market and walk on active-flowing lava fields to save a harbour for a couple thousand people. We'll keep running tourist sites right next to a volcano that erupts every couple months by building multi-story-high berms around it with giant bulldozers and cooling anything that tries to overtop to make the berms even higher. And it totally works . But Hawaiians will sit back and watch incredibly slow-flowing flows with easy diversion paths take out everything they hold dear. At best they'll point to some primitive failed attempts in like the 1940s as a reason to not try, but then when pressed, it often comes back to: "Pele will take what she wants to take."

Another example: geothermal drilling on the Big Island. Massive protests. Massive resistance, way beyond the token NIMBY resistance here. Meanwhile Hawaii continues to generate most of its electricity from oil, at great cost. Hawaii is the only other place (outside of Iceland) to have accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. In Hawaii they treated it as a major incident and immediately shut down the well. When we did it? Our reaction was, "WOW, we can produce REALLY hot steam from THIS well!", made it into a production well, and started planning to drill more.

I guess one major difference here is that in the early Icelandic cosmology, volcanoes weren't the product of a high-ranking creator goddess, but rather, Surtr, who was practically a demon and was fated to destroy the world. It's good to resist Surtr!

Except his complaint is not.

Yes, it literally was. The main public complaint of the weavers was that they spent their entire life learning their art, and then their bosses come in with a machine that they teach to replicate the patterns that they developed, churn out cheap "slop" versions of them, and fire them.

And here we're talking about profits, despite their huge scaleup expenditure. Theirs and OpenAI's margins on serving inference are ~40%.

It's almost impossible for a company undergoing a massive scaleup rate to turn a profit, let alone growing 10X annualized for 3 1/2 years running, but Anthropic pulled it off.

Apple used up their backlog of processors. It's why Neo shipment times have turned into months - Apple was shocked by how many people wanted the computers and sold way more in the first month than they expected to ever sell.

As a result their supply of processors has dried up.

It really isn't complex. Google does it just fine. You have an account picker in the upper right corner, and you choose which account you're using to interact with that app. No big deal.

Which doesn't really work as users routine confuse their accounts and upload files to the wrong account, and then confusion ensues when files are stored partially on a work account and on a personal account.

Microsoft makes it somewhat better because OneDrive ends up with different accounts show up multiple times. And YouTube started showing multiple profiles when you start it up, which is a better solution so you always log in to the right account every time.

The problem is it's hard to differentiate between accounts and you might be happily working away and then realize it was saving to the wrong account the whole time.

Of course, the fundamental thing still remains the same - even if those ex-Apple employees had access to confidential documents, they are still covered by the Apple NDA as those don't usually have expiry dates. So they're still bound to keep that information secret.

It's generally not the mass pulp that is much of a worry. It's the rare books that get digitized for AI then dumped

I mean, we have some of the largest AI companies digitizing books for their AI training sets. Imagine the human benefit if those archives aren't destroyed but kept.

Heck, it could even serve as an income stream for those AI companies to make books available for access.

Of course, we know when the bubble pops, all that data gets deleted and since those books were destroyed permanently which means some works might no longer exist.

The very least is we could have some of the biggest book archives be one of the legacies of the AI bubble that would be a positive for humanity.

Woke is what happens when you go to see a movie and instead of being told a compelling story woke ideology is proselytized

Recursion (n): See "recursion"

It's hilarious how obsessed you people are over a term that you can't even define and that none of you agree on. As far as I can tell, the only thing "woke" means today is "I'm A Right Winger, And This Is Something That I Personally Hate". I've seen people describe concepts as unrelated as "the concept of a metaverse" and "removing copyrighted materials to avoid lawsuits" as "woke".

An example of woke AI slop is Everything Everywhere All at Once

Um. What?

That movie was filmed from January to March 2020. You think AI video was a "thing" then? The movie premiered in March 2022. The infamously awful "Will Smith Eating Spaghetti" AI video was what AI video looked like in 2023. AI video was not "a thing" back when that movie was being made. What you actually hate is that movie's CGI.

Secondly, since when is "Jackass"-style "bro" stuff** famously leftist? Sexual gags are stereotypically "bro culture" and stereotypically disliked by feminists in particular and leftists in general. Don't get me wrong, you'll also find some people on the left who like that stuff, but the right tends to buy into it more (men tend to vote more rightward).

As far as I can tell from this, what you actually hate is (A) CGI, and (B) bro culture. Based on this, what you should actually consider yourself is an AI-supporting leftist.

That entire video sits firmly in uncanny valley.

I've shown it to about a dozen people in person without telling them it was AI first, and not a single person noticed. It's only "uncanny valley" because you've been told in advance that it's AI.

It's like my favourite social media hobby: when I encounter anti-AI people, I post things made by humans, generally masterpiece paintings or award-winning photographs, suggest that it's AI, and then watch them tear down how awful and fake and soulless it is. It's pretty hilarious ;)

So what you actually want is more taxes on the wealthy? If so, just say that. Don't hide behind arguments about copyright or that sort of stuff when that's not your actual motivation.

but while machine looms only put people out of work,

Machine looms, along with all of the other equipment of the industrial revolution, led to a massive boom of prosperity across the population as a whole. Machine looms in specific made clothing far more affordable to the average person.

One can criticize the politics of the early industrial revolution for not doing enough to funnel the wealth down quickly enough or to regulate the robber barons, but it was overall a massive benefit to quality of life of society as a whole.

LLMs are doing that plus going into systems that abuse them in lots of other ways.

And the industrial revolution made it easier to make bombs and bullets. That doesn't mean that we should all go back to medieval Europe where the average person lived on the edge of not affording their next meal and society had to dedicate almost all of its resources to basic production rather than things like education, medicine, science, etc. Or reject even more technology and ultimately end up back as paleolithic hunter-gatherers where 40-50% of people died before age 15.

Firstly, US courts have no jurisdiction in most places, so what.

The EU rulings thusfar have been even less restrictive - for example, the LAION ruling, which actually allowed scraping (within constraints).

And if even the US courts are ruling that training with US materials is legal, do you really expect a foreign court to ban training with US materials? And you actually expect that to do anything?

Wishing it wasn't doesn't change the fact that stuff written online has automatic ownership

First off, this is a myth. It's not "everything" that it is written that has automatic copyright, it is everything that is written that involves more than a de minimis standard of creative effort that gains protection. There is a huge range of things that fundamentally lacks copyrightability. It's not "everything".

Secondly, copyright does not make the owner a God to their works. It grants a limited set of rights. The boundaries of these rights get ejudicated by the courts. The very courts whose rulings we have been discussing above. "because...The Law" is what gets determined by the courts.

But open source AI is no such thing

Seriously, please stop what you are doing right now, go to Huggingface.com, and start browsing. This is a maddeningly ignorant statement.

Fifthly, do I personally care about open source AI? No.

Then you must love the idea of giant corporations and billionares controlling things far more than they even do today, because that is the future you get otherwise.

but I view current state of the art AI as statistical toys

LLMs work by chained logical inference.

Since the scanning technique is to slice off the binding, remove the cover, and then auto-feed the pages through a high-speed scanner, it destroys the books anyway, regardless of the "stupid law".