Agree I loved my Oculus VR back in the day. I imagine soon enough AI will advance to the point they can create a true "Holodeck" type app where you just describe environment you want to be in and it generates it on the fly. I'll buy another one the day they do.

Not sure about the US, but in Canada such a transfer-in-kind transaction would surely be done to avoid capital gains tax. That tax is not paid on a primary residence, and perhaps that's why him not residing in it is mentioned as a factor.

A massive amount of people who support wealth taxes, in California or otherwise, think that when someone is a millionaire or billionaire that means one thing only: they have a bank account with that amount of money just sitting there. Being used to buy stuff in the way they use their bank account. Of course that is in 0% of the cases.

Slow 56k lolnot after moving up from 14.4!!

Yeah, kinda same here in Canada. Zip drives came out when the first CDR/RW drives were being invented, and when we became middle class enough to afford anything it was an HP 2x CDRW drive which was cutting edge. 650MB per media was insane at the time beyond belief for what we have today.

Yeah, loving this thread for talking about actual nerd shit instead of politics, and hard disagree. These days in the 90s were something special no other generation will get to live through. My fam never had the money for a Zip drive but I made them go broke on other things - my quantum Bigfoot HD, my first 3dfx hardware acceleration card, and the cream of all - upgrading from 8 to 16 MEGABYTES of RAM which made my puter feel blazing fast. Advancements in those years meant something real and tangible. Nowadays, fuck it. I don’t even know what the clock rate of the modern CPUs I use are, but when I finally combined my family to spend a 1/10 of what their house was worth on a new Pentium 75MHz in mid 90swell, no one born in the years since knows that glory. Best investment ever btw that turned into a very, very profitable career in IT.

Easy - just design a motherboard and chip that heats up to 1000C, then you can use the ambient environment there for cooling!

I regularly ask AI for the right temp and time to reheat things in my air fryer, so that seems like a great use of this function and associated compute resources.

I am in one of the few jurisdictions in Canada which has (mostly) privatized liquor sales. It has led to far higher selection, better service, and lower prices than those who still refuse to. Hilariously enough, the prime argument of the govt unions who prevent the switch, is that we can’t trust private businesses enough to check ID and no sell to minors. There is no reason for the government to be involved in any step of liquor retail other than defining reasonable regulation. Every story you hear like this is simply taxpayer-parasitic unions have undue influence at some stage of the political equation.

I see this a lot on /. and I think it demonstrates a lack of understanding on AI. We have achieved a massive breakthrough in natural language processing - yet many think this immediately applies to the very structured and deterministic language of code. I have used AI for years and am (was) a programmer. In those years I’ve literally asked AI once for some code, on how to analyze some CSV data for trends, and sure it was half ass decent what it produced.

NLP (English or otherwise) is fuzzy and not to the exactness of code. This is where is excels and also why it struggles with law, which is basically the (supposed) structured and specific format of natural language. Alter your use cases; last night I picked up my guitar and asked AI “can you help me step by step to learn [solo from obscure rock song]” and by deity it nailed it, as it has so many times before. Use it to its strengths, and you will be more amazed.

Back on topic, I expect law and the ridiculous costs of lawyers to be torn apart in the next few years. This is one case it will be easiest to solve simply by verifying references. Law is basically a 3 year reading comprehension degree, on how to analyze semantics in language and summarize and present as a point. This is 99% solved. I know many lawyers, even married one. They have an ego around their skills which is undeserved, mostly around how much they are paid. But one thing I loved and plead for all to remember: the most embarrassing question to ask a lawyer is what their undergrad was. When anyone of you finds a difficult (read: science) degree along the answers, let me know.

I’ve seen you post this venting on articles on weight loss before and time for me to come out with a hard disagree. Allow me to serve up some reality and personal confession - despite my username, I’m a pretty thing person; I actually have a fully admitted thing for chubby girls. I’ve dated dozens of them (and married two) and thin girls as well. Just like the extra softness, so sure me.

More than one lives the lifestyle you describe, but both you and them made body weight out to be some sort of magical, hit-or-miss equation other than calories in and calories out. Have you discovered a perpetual motion machine where energy balance doesn’t exist? No, the problem is always (ALWAYS) completely denied components of the calculation. For example: one of the “fit” chubby girls I was with, we had a shared enjoyable “cheat” meal every couple of weeks, pizza. Not that unhealthy, and we can all read calorie numbers. By god, she would grab two of these creamy garlic dips though. A number of times, I ever so gently tried pointing out - for lords sake, you can have FOUR MORE SLICES for the equivalent calories in one of those dips. Well, at even the coming suggestion the wrath of god would come down, in the same tone as your post, for even having such a thought. I didn’t care, I was honestly trying to help.

Weight and fat stores is calories in a calories out. What literally else can it be? I know without a doubt now anyone who “can’t” lose weight knows what the energy imbalance part of their equation is, they just don’t want to give it up. Hers was pizza dips, what is yours???

Ehhh..I agree with you on many points - K&P was great, Colbert is a professional, and Colbert Report was hilarious, but the long downward spiral of his talk show is enough to give one pause. I’m sure he didn’t write it all but no doubt directed the material, and how could he not see the shift away from actually trying to be funny? We have enough sources to turn to for political adversaries, and what struck me was there always seemed a clear hilarious and non-partisan way to make fun of whatever Trump was doing, but it was also clear to everyone what they put out was incensed political opposition with god-awful attempts at humor taped on top. Let’s not pretend a lot of writers haven’t used major IP avenues to preach their own version of what they believe, rather than what is entertaining. Let’s hope it doesn’t go this route.

I actually agree. Art is important and like many artists, this guy is hilariously delusional. We also should give a lot of artists a break for their batshit beliefs and not throw out the baby with the bath water as so many modern “progressives” are prone to do.

This guy makes highly public, widely reported, and politically charged visuals as his art form. That’s cool, it is valid and meaningful art, maybe especially if you don’t agree with it. But there is a person behind what is being created. He’s demanding attention to his art and message. There are infinite ways, even with continuing to make his art, for people to not give a shit who you are. He knows what they are.

This sounds more like lashing out about your own capabilities and training rather than reality. Congrats on recognizing your own limitations I guess, even if it’s subconscious and manifests as such.

Change, and advancement in automation and technology, have been constantly altering the specific work and roles of humans for all of history. Shouldn’t we be used to that by now? I have humility in the sense I don’t believe myself to be intelligent- which funny enough is perhaps my greatest intellectual gift. But objectively my multiple science degrees would say otherwise. Point is, if you knew what I did day-to-day in my high paying job you’d say you’d say I was going the way of the horse buggy. I’m not worried at all. This has happened multiple times in my career. It’s always been ridiculously clear as to where I need to shift myself in the value chain.

Intelligence is not a gift, it is a skill and a motivation. We all possess a human brain capable of mostly the same things. AI has simply exposed the group of people working in knowledge industries who learned one ability (programming?) but have been faking it that they actually exercise their brain and understand concepts. They can see the writing on the wall and are lashing out on the tech that WILL replace the one thing they do.

Note I say programming since anyone in the field with the right critical mindset will agree with me here - writing code is but one but one small skillset in a much larger concept of systems and how those interact with people and organizations. The guy who spends his whole day thinking yo write one line of code should not be worried today or ever. The guy who understands little outside of the code he hammers out all day? He should probably start learning to be a plumber or electrician to replace that income.

As neat as the theoretical possibilities are, we have to learn to say no to these ideas at the start, it’s just knowing reality. The Canadian govt has never been able to implement a large scale application project without massive cost overruns and near-complete failure. No different from most other govts and even private companies. ArriveCan, Phoenix pay system, even the simply shit-canned gun registry database, it’s endless failures. We need to accept by now such a project proposal, as insanely valuable and possible it potentially is, will become nothing more than a conduit for crafty, scum-of-the-earth Ottawa lobbyist contractors to fleece the huge allocated budget then disappear. The requirements will be overrun with divisive political interests void of any intelligence. Just look at the ruling government and its ministers for the last decade, do you believe any of them competent enough to deliver anything let alone a massive IT system?

If anyone wants a funny (sad if Canadian) read, check out the ArriveCan entry in Wikipedia for a short summary. $60M (identified, true cost higher) for a simple phone app a few years ago that literally collects a few form fields before arriving at our border. Two real cozy buddies of the Liberal ministers started a fly-by-night corp and took it all baby. This is literally how every IT project Canada will ever attempt will turn out. So let’s just save our tax money now.