From what I just read on this, the whole "common sense" bit was the idea that wind power is not stable power. Power only comes when the wind blows. For an energy grid to be viable it needs a foundation in a more reliable power stream (hence fossil fuels) first, with wind on the periphery. I have no idea how much of an impact this really has, it's just the argument I read.

Separately, that billion dollars was a refund. The company already paid US the billion dollars before to get leases on the land to build wind power, but then other laws essentially blocked their ability to actually build the wind power there (and it sounds like it targeted foreign companies building wind power on American shores). So since the US government basically ruined their whole business plan, it gave them a refund as part of an agreement to adjust their resources to more stable fossil fuel power instead.

It doesn't sound like concern over birds was a factor at all.

I am sorry to point out the obvious but just in case it is needed here: one could also buy clothing made of natural fabrics like cotton, instead of polyester.

The only safe assumption is that someone, somewhere, will train up AI with no guardrails at all and immediately use it for crime. We cannot prevent this by trying to make OUR AI models refuse to do evil things. The criminals will just use different models.

The tech exists. The cat is out of the bag. We need to focus on how to adapt to a world that has it, rather than doomed ideas about trying to keep it weak.

We don't know the exact answer yet, but IMO, you're two-halves right.

The key difference is, humans aren't "trained" primarily via a clean library of tagged data (which in itself is a learned skill). We experience the world as a more-or-less continual stream of noisy data from our several senses. We self-train how to interpret (and primarily, filter) sensory data; and more importantly, how to derive new training data from it.

To be clear, I'm not saying we have so many neurons to support input filtering (though that's admittedly at least partially true). I'm saying we virtually can't run out of new training data. Every second we're alive, it just keeps coming in.

Except instead of pursuing policies that would help open models at the expense of Big AI, anti-AI people pursue just the opposite - policies that can cripple open source AI but have no realistic ability to meaningfully hurt big AI. It's so short sighted.

Actually, no, what they usually do is much more insidious: fingerprinting rather than watermarking. The fingerprint isn't actually included in the audio, it's included in a database. If they want to tell if the track was generated, they just try to match the fingerprint in the database. Can't filter it out of the track like you can with a watermark.

The two mainstream options (both about half a year old now, we're due for something better) are Ace Step-1.5 and Stable Audio 3 Medium.

Ace Step has full vocals with its music. See here for examples. The downside in my opinion (judge for yourself) is that it has Suno's flaw of sounding too "clean", "mainstream" and "uncreative", except even moreso (Udio was always much better than Suno at this, albeit "less well behaved" - but Udio is out of the game now).

Stable Audio 3 doesn't do vocals, though it has other useful features, like inpainting (great for fixing glitches in recorded tracks for example). In my view, it sounds a lot better. It can also be used to create sound effects. License is a bit more restrictive, though, if you actually care about that, but generally won't affect the average user.

Both are trained on fully licensed data and both are open-weights. So even if the devs released a version that included some sort of watermarking in the future (or someone developed a fingerprinting algo for the existing versions), you could just finetune them to break that.

TL/DR, if you want open source and want to just churn out a full track: choose Ace Step 1.5.
If you want open source and want to do instrumental tracks or to supplement manual work (such as your own vocals) or do audio editing: chose Stable Audio 3.

Sounds like a pretty good deal, actually. If this AI overlord is actually as enlightened as it presents itself as being.

Humans thrive best when raised in favorable circumstances, and most humans are denied this by the action of other humans. We think of ourselves as free because we can choose what field to work in and where to live and what groceries to buy and etc.; but every single one of us is beholden to human government leaders who see us as a means to their ends (and will not hesitate to force us off to die in foreign wars should they find reason, or impose other limitations on us to ensure that their bribers can continue to profit off of us), so simply swapping them out for a machine that has no self-interest and understands what it takes for humans to thrive and "feel free" could really improve things for us.

Current top models are already undertrained by multiple orders of magnitude vs their number of parameters. Not for lack of will or money, but for lack of data - We're already training top models with effectively the entire digitally-available corpus of human knowledge and need about a thousand times more.

That said, the huge Chinese models we've seen lately aren't single models, they're MOEs - Effectively a hive-mind of many smaller models working in concert. Bytedance hasn't mentioned that detail yet but it would somewhat mitigate the training issue. This is still absurdly over-spec'd though. There's simply no way to train it any more than all the rest starving for data.

Not just this month - They also had to revise May and June down by 103k.

It's almost like firing all the people responsible for compiling exactly this data and replacing them with political shills (if at all) was a bad idea. Whodathunkit?

If you are treating Windows devices as much like chromebooks as possible (autopilot deploy into S-mode; fairly draconian setup) you can get away with not too much IT; but at that point you really have to ask yourself why you are using Windows devices.

Most of the things you actually need windows for don't play all that well with that level of lockdown; and between chromebooks being cheap and defaulting to that level of lockdown without additional effort and the low end Apple stuff being nicer than wintel hardware that costs the same it's a bit tricky to make a strong case for running Windows systems as 'edgebooks'. You can; but it's not a super compelling option.

That's exactly why it's sort of disappointing to see him promoted away from actually doing stuff; and showing off a one of the less interesting "do Doom in a technically weird way" demos around.

Plenty of c-suite are just "meh, nothing of value was lost" when the suit fully engulfs the human; either they never seem to have done anything of interest or were popped directly out of some viscous spawning pool at McKinsey or whatever; but Russinovich was really good for nasty NT crevices work, so it seems a real shame for him to be vague CTO of cloud stuff. I don't begrudge him the money the promotion presumably involved; but going from actually interesting things to sending copilot to double booked meetings is kind of grim.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
      "(45:21) Interviewer: But theoretically, couldn't AI and biotechnology help you come up with a counter measure?
        Schmidt: Um, I had thought so, and that was the argument I made until I... I do a lot of national security work. And there's a term called offense dominant. And an offense dominant is a is a situation in a military context where the attack cannot be countered at the same level as the attack. In other words, the damage is done. And most people, most biologists who've worked in this believe that while the model can be trained to counter this, the damage from the offense part is far greater than the ability to defend it, which is why we're so worried about it."

And Mo Gawdat on ways to help prevent that:
"Ex-Google Officer: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before It Hits! - Mo Gawdat"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "AI Expert Mo Gawdat returns to The Diary Of A CEO to reveal why AGI has already arrived, why 30% of jobs will disappear by 2027, and why the most dangerous thing about AI isn't the technology - it's the people in charge of it.
        Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, founder of One Billion Happy, and co-founder of Emma.Love. He is a 4x international bestselling author, and his upcoming book 'Alive: A Human's Guide to Living in the World of AI', will be released in October 2026.
        He explains:
* How AI can give you a 400-point IQ boost, and why most people are wasting it
* Why Mo actually wants a machine smarter than all of humanity to take control
* Why Sam Altman said AI will "likely end humanity", and what he chose to do next
* Why capitalism breaks when AI replaces the workers who buy the things we make
* Why AI unemployment could trigger civil unrest before governments are ready for it"

Which all relates to my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

And also this essay I wrote: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
      "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Having lived through the 80-90s myself, there were indeed a lot of great things about them -- but don't forget living in the shadow of nuclear war and "The Day After" and also "Peak Oil" and "Club of Rome" fears of running out of resources. Advanced of technology like PV and EV and 3D-Printing have made a lot of new things possible (both for good and bad) -- and as Mo Gawdat says we need to upgrade our social perspective and political discourse to use them wisely.

Personally, I feel it is plausible that the direction we come out of any AI singularity may have a lot to do with our social direction going into it. So it is absolutely imperative to get our social house in order before developing AI -- and that means building a more compassionate, wiser, sustainable, and just world *first*.

I apologize if "purpose" was a poor word choice. The applicable test is whether or not it's being used verbatim or in a transformative way.

Political campaigns are inherently informative (in a "free speech" sense) and non-profit. While commercial use matters in general, it'd be a seriously uphill battle to claim a profit motive - even if they're spewing disinformation and raking in the cash.

No joke, there are fewer ads on broadcast TV than on (free) YouTube now. Broadcast averages 14 minutes per hour. YouTube is harder to find hard numbers but most sources imply it's around 20 minutes per hour - A whopping third of the total viewing time.

Of course, that depends on having something worth watching on (you'd likely be surprised how many channels you get, but they still mostly suck); and for those of us not using a GooTube-sponsored browser that breaks ad blocking, with uBlock Origin that figure drops to zero minutes per hour.

More practically - Broadcast TV is great for having something random on in the background, and it never pauses to ask if you're still watching. If you're trying to see something specific, though, it's no contest - Streaming is vastly superior in nearly every way.