You and me may relish the idea of having our own nucular reactor, but I’ll betcha that many executive may feel skittish at the idea

Some years ago, an old aluminium plant has been repurposed as a data center in Beauharnois, Québec, by OVHcloud, which is located not even a kilometer from the Beauharnois powerhouse (at one time, it was the largest [Jeremy Clarkson pause] in the world). That powerhouse is fed by a 1km wide by 10m deep canal diverting nearly 90% of the St-Lawrence river through it (the powerhouse is 1 km long). Also Google is implementing a data center nearby. Another plus is the low temperatures during most of the year will reduce the need for air-conditionning

I'm lazy, but even I would do a daily backup if hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake.

Hundreds of millions were not at stake the day the hard drive was lost. He could have easily replaced it back then at a much lower cost.

The drive was lost in 2013. In 2013 the price of 8000 bitcoins ranged between $400,000 and $8,000,000US.

Even at the low end of that estimate, it's still more than the value of my house. Not doing basic due diligence like keeping good backups is massive negligence. Yes, his girlfriend shouldn't have thrown his hard drive away, but he was the one who put himself in a situation where he could lose that kind of money from a single mistake.

After reading theit dress code, it doesn’t mention Lycra, so I would have put flashy lycra like when I go biking.

Ha! I once spent three hours finding out how to do something I did in 2 minutes with ’Shop

GIMP could make significant inroads if it mocked Photoshop’s UI.

Millions of people are proficient with Photoshop, and they hit a wall whenever they have to work with GIMP, which really earned it’s name.

But nooooo. GIMP is marred by an arcane UI thought off by geeks who have no clue about professional workflow.

I remember taking three hours trying to do what takes 2 minutes with Photoshop. This experienced burned GIMP for me in a very durable way!

And never mind that people routinely kill each other because they worship the wrong kind of sect even though they are of the same religion

You're throwing the baby out with the bath water. Most people don't even have landlines anymore, so you'd make 911 mostly useless. Not to mention that there are many valuable uses of 911 on mobile phones, like calling for help after being in a car accident. The big thing is not to let people spoof their call's origin. There are actual use cases for fooling caller ID, but the damage caused by spammers and scammers far outweighs the benefits. If we make caller ID a reliable indicator of the source of a call again, it would make people wary about using their phones for illegal activity like calling in bomb threats.

This gets both parts of the solution: don't have emergency services overreact, and find and prosecute people who make false calls. Overreaction- sending in the SWAT team with hair triggers- is a key reason this is worse in the US than elsewhere, and we need to stop letting our police shoot first and ask questions later.

We also need to do something about malicious calls. This is not a harmless prank. At the very least it's harassment and abuse of government resources; at the worst it's (attempted) murder. If we start devoting serious resources to finding the perpetrators and prosecuting them, people will mostly stop trying this stuff because they'll fear the consequences. Of course it would help if we made our phone system harder to spoof, since faking the source of the call is part of the way perpetrators think they'll get away with it. Making calls harder to spoof would have a huge number of other benefits, too.

Yes, we did need a formal study. In the absence of proper scientific studies, it's easy for people to confirm their preexisting beliefs. If they a true believers that AGI is just around the corner, they claim the success of LLM proves we're almost there. If they think AGI is a pipe dream, they dismiss the success of LLM as fooling people with a souped-up autocomplete model. A scientific study can't actually answer the question of whether AGI is coming soon, but it can answer questions like whether LLM have done subsidiary tasks like building a coherent model of the world. When we learn that it hasn't, it affects our beliefs in whether AGI is coming soon or not.

40 years ago, there was this Amtrak poster which said "Maybe your next flight should be on a train"...

But I think Amtrak is already (or was) using Sabre, so plugging them into Google Flights is really no big deal.

Regularly changing your passwords makes sense if you're worried about people stealing the hashed password file and cracking it offline, especially back in the day when password length was restricted. Of course the main solution to that is to let/require people use longer passwords or pass phrases, which fixes a lot of password problems simultaneously.

It's a conveniently vague time interval. It's short enough that everyone needs to plan for how to incorporate Altman's company's services into their business, but not soon enough that he can be held accountable for it failing to show up on schedule. Also, hopefully long enough in the future to give people time to forget the prediction when it turns out to be wrong. In other words, it should be ready in time to use on our fusion-powered Mars colony.

I think the big mistake is not so much privatizing a public utility as privatizing a well functioning public utility for ideological reasons. If a public utility is doing a good job, don't sell them off just because you have a generalized desire to shrink the public sector. Very often, that ideological commitment to shrinking the public sector just happens to be funded by the people who want to buy the newly privatized business for less than it's worth. In the same vein, focus your desire to nationalize industries on ones that are doing the worst by the public, not on the ones whose owners are the worst class enemies.

Of course in this case there is an actual indication the industry in question is having problems. The utilities are bungling things in a way that makes the whole industry less efficient. They have promised they'll fix things real soon now, so maybe they should be given a chance, but it does give ammunition to the people who say selling them off was a mistake.

Is anything from our birth still in our bodies after a while?

The proteins in the lenses of your eyes are never replaced, and they gradually accumulate damage over time. This is part of what causes cataracts. There is probably some way of converting the degree of damage into an age estimate, but that has a couple of huge problems. First, the damage is probably affected by factors like exposure to UV light, so lifestyle might make a big difference. Second, you need to sample the lens to test it, so you can't do the testing until the person dies or is undergoing cataract surgery.