No, this is not a fart reference as space does have a smell.

However: the thought of fart smell made me write this comment.

The purpose of depreciation is to track the actual value of the asset. The value of that GPU you bought in 2020, or your car, actually did decrease over time by any way you care to measure it.

You can try and play around with the depreciation rate for creative accounting purposes but governments tend to dictate one for taxes and you generally have to tell investors how you calculated your non-tax one. The bill also comes due whenever you eventually dispose of the asset.

Nah, 10 years ago they still had the same definition the GP is using: AI is a machine that can do things machines cannot currently do.

That does not change the fact that as soon as one develops a self-improving AI, the world will become a very different and probably very awful place.

Why? It's funny, a bunch of people believe AI is absolutely impossible because you can't create a soul or brains are magic or hyperdimensional pineal gateways or something. The rest seem to believe it can do anything including instantly becoming so intelligent it's magic.

So the answer to the GP's question is "yes."

I don't think you need AI for that either. LinkedIn was just as douchey before.

Improving capital is where that extra capital comes from.

Capital is the means of production, minus land and labour. It's fairly comprehensive to think of it as all the tools, procedures, etc. that make up a business, whether that business is one guy in the yard of his hut or a multinational corporation. It's reasonable to think of a business itself as a machine, and the machine is capital.

Improving capital means making it work better. Designing and building better tools and procedures to produce whatever you're producing more efficiently. If you take some funny rocks, bake them in a pile of mud you carefully designed, and pound them into swords, you've improved capital. If you buy a hammer, an anvil, a forge and some iron, and learn to make horseshoes, you've improved capital. If you buy some guy's smithy and figure out you can make horseshoes cheaper by casting or stamping them, and build equipment and procedures to do that, then you've improved capital again. You started with existing capital, assembled it into a machine and/or innovated a bit and ended up with a machine (which is capital) that produces something valuable its original parts did not.

The most basic feature of capitalism is the idea that the benefit from doing those things should go to the person(s) responsible, and by doing so will encourage people to improve capital. Related ideas are that anybody who wants to should be able to engage in that process and, almost always, that a free market determines value.

That idea is opposed to, for example, feudalism, where improvements you make will primarily benefit the lord, or communism, where they benefit the group. You figure out how to make horsehoes better or make a field produce more and you maybe get a nice thanks from the boss man, but the same ration as before.

Capitalism existed long before corporations, particularly modern ones, legal liability, or anything like that. Many people identify capitalism with things that are distinctly non-capitalist because they're frustrated with aspects of "capitalism" that aren't capitalist at all. Corporations, for example, are typically very similar to fedual systems internally, and both employees and employers expect them to be.

Running on a computer provided by friendly aliens, no doubt. Just like the pyramids.

Yes, changing how the device works after being sold is a reasonable argument. Most people, including the OP, get the reasoning backwards though. It was to extend the useful life of the device, not to shorten it. They could have gone the old way and just have the battery say fuck you after a certain number of charge cycles.

The "my device, my rules" argument leads to ridiculousness. They should stop with all the constant current charging nonsense. Let the user decide how fast they want to charge. And they could charge longer. The theoretical max for a lithium cell is around 5 V but they only charge to 4.2 V!

It would certainly make it more exciting to get on a plane or anywhere you're in close quarters with people charging their phones too.

Capitalism is about people benefiting from improving capital, which is basically private property rights.

Money != capital.

For the same price you can get a much more capable machine in the Mac mini

It's rough carrying your monitor around with you.

With the Neo you are not going to be able to do much more than browse the web, use web application, play simple games, and use it as fancy typewriter.

Heavens, what ever did we do before the 2020s? Play simple games and use fancy typewriters I guess. Although I do wonder where the first web app came from, the one that let us make all the other web apps.

Don’t they hate the government meddling in their affairs?

Yes. They love it when it meddles in other people's affairs though. Demand it in fact.

More like going from Slashdot post to Java. Truthy sounding but incorrect proofs that suck up people's time aren't just an AI thing. Mathematicians have been arguing for 15 years whether the ABC conjecture has been proven or not.

Internet says yes:

https://www.msmosquito.org/mos...