Books, plural, I admit. But the books that a child's parent reads to them, plus graded readers like McGuffey or Dick and Jane or Hooked on Phonics or Random House Beginner Books, plus something like Macmillan's Dictionary for Children, plus what a child reads for pleasure by graduation from elementary school, are still orders of magnitude less text than what an LLM consumes during training.

Trying to make that make sense:
Foreign students with a sufficiently rigorous associate's degree (2 years) could transfer to a US university for two more years to earn a bachelor's degree.

A broken clock shows the correct hour 8 percent of the time. Even if a politician is as actively dangerous as President Trump, I feel no shame in agreeing with up to 8 percent of their platform while expressing sheer disgust at the other 92 percent.

Generative companies require consistent power supply for inference (queries against the model). I don't see how they'd require quite as consistent power supply for things like training a model. Training can be deferred until power is cheap.

I've concluded that the reason polyester took off is that natural fibers are flammable and therefore prohibited in children's sleepwear and loungewear in Slashdot's home country (16 CFR 1615-1616). See Consumer Product Safety Commission's page about this ban

Thank you. Your post sent me down a research rabbit hole, such as medieval "towns" being defined by the right to host a flea market for surrounding villages, and historic gazebos called "market crosses" that serve as information booths, and a 10th Anniversary Stadium that doubled as a market square in post-communist Warsaw, Poland, and some open-air market promoters (such as YLNI in Fort Wayne, Indiana) seeking to distance their producers' markets from the sort of flea markets that attract non-professional vendors, and some professional vendors operating on a touring basis at a different market each weekend, and asking people from parts of Europe how much it typically costs to set up a table at a flea market.

Takeaways:
- Like the chips in Japanese stored value cards, European payment cards' chips allow small transactions to be authorized offline and batch-captured hours later.
- Flea markets largely replace garage sales in much of mainland Europe, and the promoter may be providing electronic payment service.
- Now I understand the third act of James Halliwell-Phillipps's short story "The Three Little Pigs", where the wolf meets the pig at an outdoor market, slightly better.

I had in mind the CrowdStrike outage of July 2024. It caused a local bike shop to close for the day because they could accept no payment, and I had to find another bike shop not using CrowdStrike to get my tire looked at.

True of the person buying something or sending money. However, the person receiving money through a card payment still needs an Internet connection.

I was not aware of that.

Which means you need to store enough stuff that you can afford to rent a table for a day, and you can't have one member of the household watching and the others performing household tasks (such as cooking and cleaning) while there are no customers. How often does each neighborhood hold a flea market? Or do customers in a particular city need to go out of their way to attend a flea market that might be on the other side of town?

I am unfamiliar with flea market customs in European countries that might affect the viability of electronic payments smaller than a euro. "Flea market" on Wikipedia didn't give even a ballpark estimate for where they are held, how often, and cost to rent a table. What keywords should I put into DuckDuckGo to learn more about this? I tried europe bans garage sales which returned irrelevant results about the transition from petrol vehicles to electric vehicles.

High-stakes gambling, whether on casino games or on the outcome of sport matches, has never needed a lot of local computing power. JRA PAT (Japan Racing Association Personal Access Terminal) was an application to bet on horse races that ran on a Super Famicom with a 3.6 MHz 16-bit CPU, 128 KiB of RAM, and 64 KiB of VRAM. The same machine hosted Vegas Stakes, an application that simulated casino gambling.

In the city, maybe. In rural areas outside the service area of cable and fiber, the penalty is nearly a second of speed-of-light latency to and from the geostationary satellite and the data transfer overage bill from the ISP at the end of the month. Likewise for work done on a laptop while riding public transportation to or from home: if it isn't completely local, you incur a mobile hotspot/"tethering" bill from your cellular ISP.

If the work version is called an XStation, is the gaming version called a Playbox? The marketing departments of Sony and Microsoft might have something to say about that.

Thin clients have been around at least since X terminals in the early 1990s.

One could do a useful thin client that "just" runs X, VNC, or RDP on 256 MB of RAM and a cheap ARM processor. This isn't enough for (say) a development workstation unless you're using tools made for RAM capacities typical of 2003, which means no Visual Studio Code with LSP-driven tooltips.

I provision my development workstations for a heterogeneous load. When a task is constrained by throughput of one resource, such as compiling a large program using a lot of CPU, I temporarily switch to another task that uses a different resource. This could be system library updates (which are network and disk bound), updating doc comments of the code that I wrote (which is thought bound), or reading documentation (which is network and thought bound).

Between the first and second shrinks, on what machine would high school students taking a programming class do their coursework?

A cash register needs electric power but not Internet access. It can cache the prices of all products on shelves at the start of the day. If electric power is known to be unreliable in a particular region, the store can run its registers on a backup battery or a generator or even put a price sticker on each item.

I couldn't find that in the article. The heading said "5 min read", but the body was only about 250 words, ending at "announcing that a payment has gone through."

That depends on the size of a transaction. When a transaction is close to 1 USD, such as at a garage sale, the flat portion of the bank's fee (around 0.30 USD plus 3% of the total) is a sizable fraction.