I am actually thinking about my next BMW (my current one is getting old). Knowing this, the iX3 is off the list.

BMW had a great control system, intuitive, possible to do many things without even looking. "Young people prefer" ? Really? The young people that actually buy your cars? Well, they'll learn and not prefer touchscreens anymore on the 2nd car.

To sum up, I broadly agree that one way or the other, much more sane and modest equipment will supersede the absurd designs of the bleeding edge high end GPU designs as they exist today. Beyond the facets you mention, they are fickle beasts to get working right with how they are designed hardware wise.

The push for concentrating in datacenters will continue, because there's much more money to be had to hold any facet of compute hostage for subscription revenue. See Microsoft Office, no need for that to be subscription only, and yet Office increasingly pushes the subscription model and diminishes the perpetual licenses.

While they may be contributing, I frankly think that would be a bad strategy if they had a good finger on the pulse of public sentiment here. Folks don't need convincing and are frustrated all by themselves.

On the flip side, Musk's social network announcing they are rooting out sentiment that gets in the way of Musk's ambitions and declares it to be foreign interference? Well, since there's no conflict of interest at all there, seems legit.

We do know that the companies are out talking to members of town councils and making them sign NDAs. We know that town councils after obligatory public comments and referendums are frequently going against the sentiment expressed *in person*. They are going hard on small-town corruption to get what they want without doing a thing to make the respective communities actually have *anything* long term to benefit from the inflicted stuff.

Now they could probably do things like some municipal 'permanent funds' to make the local populace interested, but the cheapest way is to just bribe a handful of people on a town council and gaslight the world to say the locals actually like the datacenters in their backyards.

Agreed. It was a bad administration, but if I knew exactly how badly his sore losing would have turned out, I sadly would have taken the lesser evil of a 2020 Trump victory.

I don't know how much of it was "Trump" using the time versus the reality of establishment folks distancing themselves (he was a loser facing litigation, traditionally considered the death kiss to a political career) versus the most vile sort of folks latching on to his scenario. Before he was surrounded by a blend of establishment and his nutjobs, after 2020 it was nutjob only. Folks like Stephen Miller being set to just have it their way without challenge.

So now his 'nutjob' crew has proven to the broader GOP that they can rig things to a single party system with repercussion and they are all in. The question is if there is a line that will not be crossed. Rigged maps are already proven, we will see about whether they will use ICE/National Guard for voter intimidation. We may not have to find out if they will overturn legitimate results if the other things work out well enough.

Global AI tech spending is said to surpass 2.5 trillion this year.

Sorry, Gates is a small fish in that pond.

For some definition of 'they', sure, there's always *someone* paranoid about the scenario.

However there's a fair amount more credible supposition over this one. Trump's sore loser reaction has paved the way for some dangerous moves.

In 2020, he only went to interfere *after* the fact, but he clearly interfered. When the results betrayed him, he sought to overturn them and when that failed he tried to ignore the electors and use their own anyway and as that failed he tried to get Pence to reject the election and as that failed he incited a mom to try to disrupt the proceedings. He learned that in a fair game he actually could lose and that was unacceptable and he was willing to do whatever it takes to replace a loss with a win.

Now he and opportunistic cohorts are already much more proactive about it. Every reason to anticipate any plausible excuse to rig or discard the elections as he has proven himself already willing to do so and is surrounded by a much more all-in administration than his first term. Already trying to mess with mail-in, already openly rigged the representative maps, already been working ICE and national guard troops to get the hang of domestic military operations. Stephen Miller once basically publicly fantasized about sending republican controlled national guard into democratic states against their will to make them bend to his will.

I do anticipate the election will be *held* and if and only if the results are a loss will they try anything like an 'emergency', but I absolutely expect ICE and national guards to be doing operations around strategic polling sites. Ostensibly about immigration or crime, but with the oh so coincidental side effect of voter suppression.

I get the feeling that Zuck is in a similar boat to Richard Dawkins and Kent Overstreet, who have gone off the deep end and believe they have LLMs which are effectively equivalent to human companionship.

Remember Zuck celebrated that people could have AI "friends" and employees could talk to AI impersonations of their management and it would be just as good as actually getting to talk to management.

Nothing quite as publicly really off the deep end as Overstreet and Dawkins (who both seem to have decided that their favored LLMs must be 'girls', which strongly suggests they needed to gender it to make their "crush" make sense for them), with Overstreet getting extra creepy points for insisting his LLM is essentially a teenage girl. I would not be surprised if he at least more privately holds similar feelings and thus doesn't view this as "apocalyptic" bad.

The two articles were probably written by two different ghost-writers.

AI isn't actually smart. It's an at best average intelligence thing with an insane amount of available knowledge. Like the village idiot with eidetic memory.

As soon as you do any work with AI that's not available as a ready-to-apply solution from its training data, you begin to notice how much you need to correct it, keep it on track, remind it of basic constraints you already mentioned five times, etc. - it's performing at a level I'd accept from an intern, but not from a co-worker.

What it does have is data. Tons of data. Any question that would take you and me half an hour on Google and Wikipedia to answer it can answer in 10 seconds. That's a great tool. It is not intelligence, however.

How is this "news that matter"?

Bill Gates is an old man who has zero AI credentials and has long ago become irrelevant. Not to mention his previous predictions of future developments are not exactly brilliant.

lol

Welcome to the 21st century, you might have to catch up on a few things. Start with Mozilla Media Engine and AVFoundation / WebKit Media Stack.

Your website sends me an H.264 stream (or whatever you decided you'll use). It doesn't need to know shit about my graphics hardware.

Complete bullshit. Even for fullscreen video, the website doesn't need to know my screen size. It should tell the browser "here are the resolutions I can offer you" and the browser picks one of those. All the website needs to know is if I prefer 1080p or 4K. And I might pick 1080p even if my screen is 4K because, say, the hotel wifi is slow.

Complete bullshit. None of these things break if I don't tell you my OS. I've got extensions in this browser that can fake my agent string and nothing breaks. Fonts? Are you kidding me? Be more specific, what exactly do you mean by that?

And there's no reason it needs to. What legit use case requires a website to know whether my GPU is an NVidia, AMD, Intel or whatever chip? A shitload of the capabilities are only needed for 3D scenes (like max texture size), which is 0.1% of the websites I visit - they can ask and I can whitelist just them. Why does it need my refresh rate?

Again: All of these things have a legit use case, sure. Often exactly one. That is rarely if ever used. There's absolutely no reason that EVERY WEBSITE can query information that only one website in a thousand actually needs.

You don't tell the baker, florist and car dealer your shoe size just because the shoe shop needs it to serve you, right?

Because I want to be irrelevant to the fucking ad industry. I don't want them to track me, profile me and try every trick in the book to manipulate me into buying shit I don't need.

Sure, the same way that putting a finger into another man's ass has a legit use case (prostate examination) - but that doesn't mean I want every man to do that to me all the time.

The point is that tech companies are exploiting the legit use cases by abusing them when you're not in that use case. Basically, they think they can finger up your ass whenever they want, because once a few years ago you consented to a doctor to give you an exam and maybe you will do that again in the future.

I don't mind it being capable of. I mind it doing all kinds of shit without telling me and without giving me a choice. For example, I absolutely do not want websites to access my microphone. Or even know that I have one. For the once-a-year case where I might actually use that, I can enable it.

The problem is the same problem that the cybersecurity field has been fighting for 40 years: Permit All being the default.

It doesn't NEED to know any of these things. My browser knows the window (not screen) size and if your CSS is well-formed, it'll manage or maybe your page looks shit if you build it shit. It needs to know my OS only if I want a download link, not on every page I ever visit. It doesn't need graphics capabilities unless it wants to bypass the browser rendering engine, in which case it should ask for permission or fuck off.

The thing is that we give up too easily and the major browser manufacturers (one of which is an ad company themselves) are complicit.

I want "fuck the ad industry" mode, where the browser generates random but plausible values for every non-essential information a website requests. Different ones every 5 minutes.

I would have figured this would have happened a long time ago, shocked it took until now to have a machine beat a human at running bipedal.

We aren't even the fastest bipedal animal.