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Comment Re:Elon said (Score 1) 78

What a coincidence, the ideas of Stalin and Mao are not just popular, but being implemented by the DNC!

What ideas are those? Are you familiar with the policies of Stalin and Mao in any way, or are you just parroting something somebody else told you?

Comment Re: Unencrypted? (Score 1) 132

Or use streaming. One-to-one from the studio to Netflix. The studio gives Netflix the app with trivial authentication. Cheaper and easier than sending drives through the mail.

VFX studios are already doing this for their production pipelines. The processing happens in a data center; all the artists see is essentially a terminal window. Nobody can "walk off" with anything.

Comment Re:Can I pay him not to post? (Score 2) 215

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Comment Re:LLMs = human extinction? (Score 1) 70

So it's interesting that the summary mentions Geoffrey Hinton, with his 10% or 20% estimate of AI ending the world. In the consensus of the ML community 10 years ago, neural nets had less than a 10% probability of becoming as artificially intelligent as they are right now. Making a useful estimation of risk is impossible when probability is near 0 and consequence is near infinity.

Comment Re:Solar fricken roadways all over again (Score 1) 120

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Comment Re:Beat you to it! (Score 1) 49

Which is why OP used "cure cancer!" as a joke.

However, much progress has been made. I am alive right now because of a breakthrough cancer therapy that was FDA approved in 2011. (Well after Nixon!)

This fall I am going to get a therapy that mass-replicates your own immune cells in a lab for re-injection. It's so expensive (and has uncertain benefit) that it's not generally available in the UK or Canada yet. Automation will be a key to making it cost-effective.

It's such a complex area, I think information retrieval and computational science / simulation, or AI if you prefer, will help.

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