The Generative AI companies did their thing. It was overall very impressive, even if they massively overstated its usefulness. ChatGPT is a great early demo of this infantile, currently-almost-useless-but-very-promising tech! Now someone simply (heh) needs to get the compute requirements down two to four orders of magnitude.

If companies like OpenAI can (and want to) work on that, great! Or others can build on the work that's been done up to now. I don't think anyone will miss the current companies, though they might currently be employing people who likely have a leg up (thanks to their familiarity with the subject) on addressing the compute resources problem.

But whenever (if ever) it gets done, people are going to run it on their own machines, not your servers and jail. Lock-in has always been, and will always be, an adversarial force to be eliminated by progress. If that means OpenAI's long-term plans won't work out, well, too bad.

Nazism isn't an internet insult. It was an actual, real thing that happened in this world, with an actual, real ideology, and the core of this ideology was racial-based social Darwinism.

It depends on how it was designed, and the operating conditions. Steam catapults have their issues too- making freshwater from saltwater occasionally has hiccups and contaminants can enter the steam system, causing corrosion and erosion. The advantage of steam is that the catapults themselves are mechanically fairly simple, the steam source is external so the hardware embedded in the deck isn't too complex. Electric catapults have lots of electrical hardware at the point of use, including many coils of wire, any of which can suffer an insulation failure and presumably put the whole catapult out of action, or at least degraded in output. The expense is also an issue as linear motors are more expensive and each full-size US carrier has 4 of them.

That's not unusual for military aircraft.

BTW, re: the Congo in particular: the most common traditional type of fishing is basket fishing with woven funnels suspended in the rapids. You sure as hell better know how to swim if you want to do that.

Famous angler Jeremy Wade referred to the local Congo fishermen as nearly suicidal, just diving into the rapids to get nets unstuck and the like.

SIGH.

There were 10 people chosen and people with dark skin in the USA make up about 1 out of 8 Americans.

1 in 8 is 12,5%.

African-American without mixed race in 2024 is estimated at 46,3M, or 14,2%
With mixed race, that rises to 51,6M, or 15,8% of the population.
Some hispanics have dark skin, some light. In 2023 there were 62,5%, representing 19% of the population (though there's a small overlap with black - doesn't affect the numbers much).
In 2023, Asians were 25,8M people, or 7,7% of the population. This is again a diverse group with mixed skin tones (for example, the Indian subcontinent)
In 2023, there were 1,6M people (0,49%) of pacific island ancestry and 3,3M native Americans - again, mixed skin tones.
People of Mediterranean European ancestry often have so-called "olive" complexions.

With a strict definition of dark skin, you're probably talking like 1 in 6 or so (~16,7%). With a looser definition, you could be talking upwards of 40% or more of the population.

The chances of the 10 people to be a perfect representation of the racial demographics of the USA is quite small.

Here are the actual odds of selecting no dark-skinned people at different population percentages being "dark skinned", by one's definition of "dark":

15%: 1 in 4
20%: 1 in 8
25%: 1 in 17
30%: 1 in 34
35%: 1 in 73
40%: 1 in 165

Then consider that NASA astronauts are required to pass a swimming test

It is not a test of swimming prowess, just of an ability to not drown. You have to be able to do three lengths of a 25-meter pool without stopping, three lengths of the pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes, and tread water for 10 minutes while wearing a flight suit. This is not some massively imposing task. You don't have to be Michael Phelps to become an astronaut.

and as a general rule those with African ancestry tend to have less stamina in swimming than those with lighter skin

Yes, white athletes tend to have an advantage in swimming. A 1,5% advantage. While a 1,5% advantage may be of good relevance at the highest level of a sport, it's hardly meaningful in a "can you tread water with a flight suit on" test.

Think of the different races as just really big families

That is not how genetics work, and is instead the pseudoscience that drove fascist movements, and in particular, Nazism.

There is far more genetic diversity within a given "race" than between them. Certain genetic traits tend to have strong correlates - for example dark skin and sickle cell anemia - but that's not because races are some sort of genetic isolates, but rather for very practical reasons (dark skin is an adaptation to not die of skin cancer in the tropics, and sickle cell disease is a consequence of a genetic adaptation to not die of malaria which also happens to be found in such climates). But the vast majority of genes don't have such strong correlates.

The concept of "race" as a distinct biological category is not supported by modern genetics.

If we are to ignore skin color and just put one big family up against another big family on swimming ability then just due to random mutations, perhaps some Darwinian selection way back in the family tree, one family will swim better than the other

The main "racial difference" in swimming ability in the US is "inherited", that is, parents who don't know how to swim tend to not teach their kids how to swim. As a result, white children are 56% more likely to receive swimming lessons than black children. One can expect that to directly correspond to an advantage in adulthood. But again, the ability to tread water is not out there knocking 90% of astronaut candidates out of the race - especially given that astronaut candidates tend to be athletic and motivated to learn new skills.

People with light skin tend to have ancestors that had to go fishing for their protein

Utter tripe. Fish consumption has no correlation with skin colour. How much fish do you think your average herder or plains horseman ate? And fish is massively important in much of Africa - in coastal areas (Gabon, Ghana, Sierra Leone in particular note), along the Congo (it's literally the world's largest river, people have been fishing it since time immemorial), Lake Victoria, Lake Chad, the Niger Delta, etc etc. What sort of racist stereotype world are you living in where black people don't fish?

Having a large candidate pool relative to the number chosen makes it easier to show bias and still get high-quality candidaes, not harder.

How dark?

#e0ac69 should be good enough, but maybe #c68642 just to be sure.

Also, these people were already in the pipeline before Trump was sworn in.

I can see the argument that Nvidia has no obvious advantage in LLMs that would make them want to set up their own operation; it's basically everything else about the situation that would make me jumpy if I had bet on Nvidia.

"Investing $100 billion in OpenAI's spend $100 billion on Nvidia stuff initiative" sounds, at worst, like a slightly more legal version of the trick where you shuffle stock around between business units or stuff the channel and book that as sales because you suspect that your real sales numbers will disappoint; and, even if it's not quite that dire, Nvidia being willing to get paid in faith rather than in other people's money (or shift the stock to one of their customers that actually has money) looks very much like an indirect price cut, which gives the impression that either demand is outright softening, and Nvidia has units that it can't simply immediately shift to customers who are actually paying cash right now; or that Nvidia feels the need to help fill the gap between OpenAI's seemingly unlimited appetite for doubling-down money and the, sooner or later, limited supply of VC nose candy.

That said, it's not entirely novel; Nvidia's current holdings are something like 90% Coreweave(under 10% of Coreweave's total shares; but Coreweave shares are the bulk of other-company shares Nvidia holds); and they have an agreement with them obliging them to purchase any unused capacity through 2032; so they've been expressing confidence in AI-related companies and/or trying to keep the music going by paying some of their more fragile customers' bills even before this.

It could be that Nvidia isn't even trying to diversify; but the history of bad things happening when people underestimate correlated risks also doesn't make me feel great about the situation: Obviously it's going to be a bad day at Nvidia if 'AI' cools; stock price will take a hit and they will be left holding at least some inventory and TSMC and other vendor commitments; but it's going to be a worse day the more of their hardware they sold in exchange for stock in 'AI' Nvidia buyers, rather than in exchange for money, since the fortunes of those companies are going to be fairly closely correlated with Nvidia's own, albeit likely to swing harder and have further to fall.

For a minute there I thought you were talking about Millennials, since all of these very things were said about them when they were just entering the work force.

As I recall, the very same things were said about Gen-X too.

I don't know if it goes much further back than this, though there is an interesting quote from a famous old guy named "Socrates" that goes like: "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

Kids these days....

Oh yes. When Nvidia is paying $2 to get you to buy $1 of their chips it's definitely a bubble.

Buy the way, ask AI how many record high closes has the S&P 500 set this year and write it down. The repeat the question later today, then a couple times tomorrow, and so on. This is exactly the sort of thing AI should be good at, but instead it spits out random numbers so far between 2 and 29.

 

I get the unpleasant impression that we are doing a corporate reenactment of that period in European history where basically everyone was ruled by Habsburgs who were incestuous and incompetent in equal measure.

Can you use the hardware without any Meta services? Can you use competing hardware with Meta's services? And then beyond just services, can you fully replace the whole software stack?

Any "no"s above will make the utility dubious, such that there's little point in spending much time getting to know the product (except for RE purposes). OTOHs "yes"s will indicate that these types of wearables are starting to become viable.

Perhaps more troublingly; they'll allow facebook to see what the people you see do.

My good-faith advice to anyone who is considering letting zuck into their refrigerator just to solve the crushing problem of what to cook with available ingredients or whatever would be "probably not worth it"; but that's ultimately a them problem one way or the other.

The trouble is that much of the pitch here is that you are supposed to provide footage as you wander around; merrily making the you problem everyone else's problem as you do so. And, yes, 'no expectation of privacy, etc, etc.' but there's a fairly obvious distinction between "in principle, it wouldn't be illegal to hire a PI to follow you around with a camera while you are in public", which involves a typically prohibitive cost in practice and "you paid them to upload geolocated footage, nice going asshole", where the economics of surveillance change pretty radically.

If people want to outource their thinking to facebook themselves I'd have to be feeling fairly paternalistic to intervene; but given that the normalization of these is, pretty explicitly, about facebook having eyes on everyone I can only hope that 'glasshole' continues to be a genuine social risk to any adopters.