Think back to 2+ years ago. January 2024. What sort of government did we have? What Administration was in office?

From the Wikipedia:

" and the Bureau of Land Management extended the auction to January 25, 2024 to allow for increased bids.[14] In 2024 the remaining reserve was sold to the highest bidder, Messer Group.[15] "

And, perhaps, you begin the effort by 0) migrating the documents, all of them, even archival docs, to earlier and earlier versions - reducing dependency on features perhaps not supported in your POA platform, and 1) testing against the POA and refining.

Drop-in replacements for Office do not exist. Nothing out there. So downgrade and find a POD that can be supported.\

Seems pretty basic, just costs in the preparation.

"they have been more then forward with their intent to replace us all with AI and robots"

Citations needed. Focus on the word 'all'.

I get the anger towards technology displacing human workers with no apparent plan to re-employ them elsewhere. But this is just the latest in a series of such revolutions. AI isn't replacing plumbers any time soon. Unless the AI can direct robots to manufacture housing with preassembling utilities, but that's a fantasy away from happening.

I was repairing desktop calculators for a while until they became too cheap to bother. I repaired typewriters and older, more proprietary word processing systems, until PCs took over. Then I went into the PC service and support business. And the PC networking business, because networking was a thing. Then an ISP, because the Internet was seriously sucking the air out of the world. Then I migrated into support and customer service, which after 17 years became much less demanding of head count, and now I've retired, 50 years after those nixie tube calculators sat before me and my soldering iron. There is more after this particular bubble. Watch. The real threats are philosophical, disguising as politics and religion, of which they are neither. Ideas spur more killing, because it is in the end all ideas.

Watching chip fabs, housing, and so.much.retail being built around here, I think you got to get out more. Data centers are experiencing another in a line of booms, as new tech spawns new needs. Most of the complaining about data centers seems to be more hate the rich, with AI the current boogeyman for that. And many construction trades are shorthanded.

Besides, Microsoft is probably admitting they are going to do fine with 3/4 of the head count they had yesterday, and that's rarely a bad business decision, unless you subscribe to the theory that they never really knew what they were doing, which explains the billions. Not.

SO narrowminded I'm genuinely surprised you can use words with more than 2 syllables.

> Respectfully, that's not what banning "tasks that require significant effort or time, or would typically be performed by a cleaner" means.

Respectfully, you need to read a little more carefully. Those items are generally, but not strictly, prohibited. The criteria is "reasonable" and "significant amount of time." Words like "reasonable" and "significant" need to be legislated over between AirBNB and the hosts on a per-case basis.

Case in point:

> And basic cleaning has been a pretty standard clause right from the beginning

So what constitutes "basic cleaning" and at what point does it become a "significant effort?" Is cleaning the dishes you used really that big a deal? Collecting your trash and putting it in the can outside when you're done? These are not property maintenance tasks like you implied in your original post either (" literally-condemnable shack").

What is explicitly prohibited: "Hosts may not communicate new house rules or requests in other sections of their listing page or after booking, including by message, signs in the home, or in person." There is no room for debate here; hosts must be upfront with all of their requirements. That's the real meat here and the real underlying problem; it's less about doing your own dishes and more about penalizing you for not doing them despite never having been told to.

> AirBNB / VRBO / whatever gets a cut of every dollar. They benefit from junk fees,

Apparently not as much as they benefit from cracking down on them, apparently, because that's what they're doing when they say "Hosts are generally not allows to.... Impose fines or other penalties on guests."
=Smidge=

> This has nothing to do with taking out the garbage, and everything to do with making it impossible to be an "absentee landlord" (or at least hiring a cleaning service)

This is about not being able to stick extra requirements into the agreement after the space is booked, which prevents property owners from sticking guests with extra fees for not doing things they were not told they had to do.

=Smidge=

That's why it is using it to look over drafts. You take the AI output and then go through its suggested edits or concerns. Essentially it functions as a very fast, half-way decent proof-reader. For example, my spouse looks over a lot of drafts of things I write, but if I give her a 15 page paper, there's good work on the first 8 or 9 pages, probably a joke on page 10 about my notation, one or two comments on the next page, and then a few comments on the bibliography. Claude is not as good a proof-reader as she is, but Claude doesn't poop out after a few pages. And Claude is much faster. So reliability goes up without having to rely on the AI being reliable itself.

And sometimes it catches subtle things. For example, not too long ago, I gave a paper draft to Claude, and it noted in the bibliography that the journal volume number seemed unlikely given the year; it turned out that the volume was correct, but I had actually written the wrong journal down in the entry. Another time, Claude noted that one entry in a bibliography was from a "borderline predatory" (its words but it wasn't wrong) journal, and since I wasn't using it for much other than as part of a list of "hey, here's prior literature" and the paper in question didn't prove anything interesting, I discussed just dropping it from the citation list. Claude then without me asking, pulled up preprint I already had on the arXiv and noted it saw that paper cited there and suggested we remove the paper there also. I didn't do so, but this is the sort of thing that it can suggest. One still has the human make the decisions, but the input itself is useful. And for the most part, verification by a human for most issues is much faster than finding the issues one self.

Not really. It turns out that specialized models do not do as well as large general models. This is essentially a variant of the Bitter Lesson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson. In this case, there's other reason for it also. There's a lot of reasoning science and math discussions in non-specialized training data. For example, one paper I wrote with two coauthors started as a Reddit discussion. But there's also just a lot of subtle interaction that specialized models don't necessarily get. Math is easier to understand if one has a good command of physics. Engineering is better if one has math and physics. Etc. And sometimes a technique gets directly pulled over. For example, in the large OpenAI paper drop, one of the graph theory problems relied on a trick involving a weighing on the graph that involved complex numbers designed to cancel, where the trick came from a physics context that did something similar. A math specialized model would have been unlikely to find and import that trick.

Right, and the line here isn't clear. One take on NFTs is that they are nominally a tech but functioned purely as a commodity bubble. Or that NFT is a tech but it was used to make commodities which had a bubble. And the line between tech and commodity was blurry historically. When Spain entered the "platinum age," that was based in part on how to make nearly pure platinum was a tech, but the platinum itself was a commodity.

Since per a token output seems to be getting better also for open-weight models, this suggests this is more than just a business decision. And some of it is specific changes; we know that larger models with more training data for example will often produce higher quality output. But also aside from scaling, there have been architectural improvements. For example, one insight that occurred was that having lower precision weights which allowed more weights was often a positive tradeoff. That lead to changes in both the software and hardware ends, as the GPUs were modified as a result. Similar, there's been changes in what functions are used for the feedforward function.

You would think the video of a French woman standing outside her market, pleading with the mob to stop looting her own space, pleading that she supported them, spoke in favor of their continued residence in France, and watching these criminals ignore her. Nope, her support was neither necessary nor appreciated, the mob intends to win by violence.

But, while you might think on this, the Leftists dare not think, for to do so is to expose the perfidy of their leadership and their utter failure to discern plain facts.

England may be lost. France has time. The rest of Europe is waking up, though many nations are feeling trapped, it seems, and cannot respond to the invasion. And, given the nature of the invaders, it will be blood that decides this.

Lots of profitable corporations out there seem to refute your claim.

Let's translate that accurately...

greed = profit

immoral = cheating

success = survival

MBAs are taught to succeed, by the rules until the rules fail them, then without (hopefully) getting caught. Employees, materials, information, technology, all these are resources to be used to generate profit.

Corporations do not exist for any purpose than to continue their existence, and, usually, derive a profit from their activities, whatever those may be, while continuing their existence. Shell and holding corporations are specialized forms of corporations, generally structured to accomplish specific purposes.

To decry corporations, and those who lead, manage, or support them as exclusively immoral and/or in opposition to the good purposes of society at large is simplistic at best, and generally misguided. You may not like the corporate method of organizing a business venture, but there are limited options. Because the concept of 'corporation' is for me interchangeable with the concept of 'company', which is literally translated into 'group or gathering'. How you succeed in accomplishing things that require more than a few people in some other fashion is something I cannot fathom. Companies/corporations are not new, and neither are their abuses.

But feel free to point out my naivete, and how horrible the world is because of it and whatever you proclaim is evil, and state your case for not being a willing part of it. We all want to live, so we are all caught in the web of society, and make our way either as best we can, with or without regard for the success of others.

The business case for LLMs is a bit broader than that. They don't need to replace that many workers if they make enough workers more efficient or more reliable (such as simply having LLMs look over drafts). There's also at this point, clear usage cases for scientific and mathematical research but that's using the very high end models, and admittedly is a pretty small market, not enough to justify massive expenditure at this level. The tulip example is interesting; what you are touching on their is the distinction between a "tech bubble" (like railroads or internet) and a "commodities bubble" (tulips, housing, Beanie Babies). Note that the degree to which the tulip bubble was real is questionable. See https://theconversation.com/tulip-mania-the-classic-story-of-a-dutch-financial-bubble-is-mostly-wrong-91413, and the line between a tech bubble and a commodity bubble itself can be blurry (see for example Bitcoin and NFTs). One of the difficulties here is that the LLMs keep improving, and the cost per token is going down, and the amount one can do per a token is going up. But that's happening in part due to massive investment in both infrastructure and research. How sustainable any of that is is unclear.

As if 99% of the sites you're visiting aren't 'spying' on you also.

Including *this* one*.

* - /. has some features that suffer when a decent ad blocker is active in your browser. So, if I want to expand comments, I have to disable my preferred ad blocker. Kudos, &%%holes.

There are at least four problems with this. First, linear algebra is from a math standpoint insanely powerful. For example, all of representation theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representation_theory is using linear algebra to understand groups. Much of the study of modular forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_form involves understanding the behavior of modular forms over SL_2(Z) which has heavy linear algebra elements to it. People who see linear algebra as somehow a weak thing are often people who took a single semester of it and didn't do much else with it.

Second, the idea that these AI systems are just linear algebra isn't accurate anyhow. While there's a lot of linear involved, a major part of how transforms like LLMs work is the intervening non-linear layers, which use ReLu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectified_linear_unit, Softplus, or a similar function. So, summarizing this as just linear algebra isn't accurate. It is linear algebra with some spice.

Third, even if this were somehow just linear algebra, that shouldn't therefore be a reason to think that there's any limits to what is going on. At the end of the day, the empirical success is what matter, and systems which can do things like prove the quasi-Riemann Hypothesis or solve other major math problems are pretty impressive regardless of what is under the hood. So, if one does think this is just linear algebra, that's not a reason to dismiss the systems but a reason to increase your estimate of what can be done with mere linear algebra.

Fourth, slowing down connections like this may make crashes *less likely.* In particular, the main way we could have a serious bubble here is over-investment. Delays including power grid delays force bottlenecks on the investment level, and make that sort of problem less likely.

We may be in a bubble here. Certainly some elements look very bubble-like. In the late 1990s, during the dot-com boom, one had people making perfectly normal businesses but just tacking on "on the internet" to it and it would get millions of dollars of funding automatically. See for example pets.com . And we're seeing some of that now; we've had a whole bunch of businesses see their stock price shootup just because they mention AI. So we may be in a bubble, and it may crash now, or might crash never or decades from now. (Arguably the US had an 80 year automobile bubble that didn't crash until the late 2000s which then forced the auto bailout.) But the other thing to keep in mind is that a crash does not mean the tech goes away. In 1873, the US had a devastating collapse of the railroad bubble, and yet railroads continued to grow, with the amount of track not peaking until around 1910 https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter5/rail-transportation-pipelines/rail-track-mileage-united-states/. Similarly, although the internet bubble burst, by 2015, one had more internet use than even the most internet hyping person in 1998 would have likely dreamed of. A bubble bursting does not mean the tech itself goes away.

The set of problems that only a human can solve is getting rapidly smaller. The set of puzzles that a human can solve, that an AI cannot, and which take a small amount of time for a human and aren't highly inconvenient may already be empty.

The 16GB version has that printed on the board. You can't count on the jumper resistor to tell you, for obvious reasons.

This could be help if they did print RAM capacity on every board... But then they would not be able to take raw boards, solder on RAM, set the jumper, and poof, board for sale. This way, they manufacture bare boards in quantity, and the 16GB is a different board, IIRC, 5 jumper positions unlabeled, where the 1,2,4,8 boards have 4 jumper positions and are usually labeled. Fewer SKUs.