Doesn't ANYBODY but me remember that "Napster" was actually RealNetworks? You know, the old Real.com that was the Internet's first scale, commercial streamer? Real became Rhapsody for several years. Rhapsody had no name recognition, so they bought the Napster name from it's owners... BEST BUY.

It gets weirder. Rhapsody had been Sonos' partner streaming service - and Rhapsody is also... I HEART RADIO. Now the whole Napster lot got dumped in the lap of venture capital vultures.

From TFA:

In her car? Of course that'll kill her. Was she not capable of opening the door and stepping out?

What do you think of the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was perhaps engineered in the USA as a DARPA-funded self-spreading vaccine intended for bats to prevent zoonotic outbreaks in China but then accidentally leaked out when being tested by a partner in Wuhan who had a colony of the bats the vaccine was intended for? More details on the possible "who what when how and why" of all that:
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/...

If true, it provides an example of how dangerous this sort of gain-of-function bio-engineering of viruses can be (even if perhaps well-intended by the people involved). Also on that theme from 2014:
"Threatened pandemics and laboratory escapes: Self-fulfilling prophecies"
https://thebulletin.org/2014/0...
"Looking at the problem pragmatically, the question is not if such escapes will result in a major civilian outbreak, but rather what the pathogen will be and how such an escape may be contained, if indeed it can be contained at all."

My worry with SARS-CoV-2 from the start (working in the biotech industry at the time, including by chance helping track the evolution of SARS-CoV-2) was that so much effort would go into researching the virus and understanding why it was so transmissible and dangerous (mainly to older people) that such knowledge could be misused by humans to make worse viruses. Sadly, AI now accelerates that risk (as in the video I linked to).

Here is Eric Schmidt recently saying essentially the same thing as far as the risk of AI being used to create pathogens for nefarious purposes and how he and others are very worried about it:
"Dr. Eric Schmidt: Special Competitive Studies Project"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I don't know if "enthusiastic about the tech" completely describes my feelings about a short-term employment threat and a longer-term existential threat, but, yeah, neat stuff. Kind of maybe like respecting the cleverness and potential dangerous of a nuclear bomb or a black widow spider?

A related story I submitted: "The Workers Who Lost Their Jobs To AI "
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...

Sure maybe there is some braggadocio in Hinton somewhere which we all have. But he just does not come across much that way to me. He seems genuinely somewhat penitent in how he talks. Hinton at age 77 sounds to me more like someone who had an enjoyable career building neat things no one thought he could working in academia who just wants to retire from the limelight (as he says in the video) but feels compelled to spread a message of concern. I could be wrong about his motivation perhaps.

On whether AI exists, I've seen about four decades of things that were once "AI" no longer being considered AI once computers can do the thing (as others before me have commented on first). That has been everything from answering text questions about moon rocks, to playing chess, to composing music, to reading printed characters in books, to recognizing the shape of 3D objects, to driving a car, to now generating videos now, and more.

Example of the last of a video which soon will probably no longer being thought of as involving "AI":
""it's over, we're cooked!" -- says girl that literally does not exist..."
https://www.reddit.com/r/singu...

On robots vs chimps, robots have come a long way since, say, I saw one of the first hopping robots in Marc Raibert's Lab at CMU in 1986 (and then later saw it visiting the MIT Museum with my kid). Example for what Marc Raibert and associates (now Boston Dynamics) has since achieved after forty years of development:
"Boston Dynamics New Atlas Robot Feels TOO Real and It's Terrifying!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Some examples from this search:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=robo...

"I Witnessed the MOST ADVANCED Robotic Hand at CES 2025"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Newest Robotic Hand is Sensitive as Fingertips"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"ORCA: An Open-Source, Reliable, Cost-Effective, Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand - IROS 2025 Paper Video"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

What's going on in China:
"China's First Robot With Human Brain SHOCKED The World at FAIR Plus Exhibition"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Lots more stuff out there. So if by "long time" on achieving fine motor control you mean by last year, well maybe. :-) I agree with you though that the self-replicating part is still quite a ways off. Inspired by James P. Hogan's "Two faces of Tomorrow" (1978) and NASA's Advanced Automation for Space Missions (1980) I tried (grandiosely) to help with that self-replicating part -- to little success so far:
https://pdfernhout.net/princet...
https://pdfernhout.net/sunrise...
https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...

On who will buy stuff, it is perhaps a capitalist version of "tragedy of the commons". Every company thinks they will get the first mover advantage by firing most of their workers and replacing them with AI and robots. They don't think past the next quarter or at best year. Who will pay for products or who will pay unemployed workers to survive for decades is someone else's problem.

See the 1950s sci-fi story "The Midas Plague" for some related humor on dealing with the resulting economic imbalance. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by humankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. ..."

Related on how in the past the Commons were surprisingly well-managed anyway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In Governing the Commons, Ostrom summarized eight design principles that were present in the sustainable common pool resource institutions she studied ... Ostrom and her many co-researchers have developed a comprehensive "Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework", within which much of the still-evolving theory of common-pool resources and collective self-governance is now located."

Marc Andreessen might disagree with some of those principles and have his own?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" is a 2023 self-published essay by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The essay argues that many significant problems of humanity have been solved with the development of technology, particularly technology without any constraints, and that we should do everything possible to accelerate technology development and advancement. Technology, according to Andreessen, is what drives wealth and happiness.[1] The essay is considered a manifesto for effective accelerationism."

I actually like most of what Marc has to say -- except he probably fundamentally misses "The Case Against Competition" and why AI produced through capitalist competition will likely doom us all:
https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti...
"Children succeed in spite of competition, not because of it. Most of us were raised to believe that we do our best work when weâ(TM)re in a race -- that without competition we would all become fat, lazy, and mediocre. Itâ(TM)s a belief that our society takes on faith. Itâ(TM)s also false."

I agree AI can be overhyped. But then I read somewhere so were the early industrial power looms -- that were used more as a threat to keep wages down and working conditions poor using the threat that otherwise the factory owners would bring in the (expensive-to-install) looms.

Good luck and have fun with your project! Pessimistically, it perhaps it may have already "succeeded" if just knowing about it has made company workers nervous enough that they are afraid to ask for raises or more benefits? Optimistically though, it may instead mean the company will be more successful and can afford to pay more to retain skilled workers who work well with AI? I hope for you it is more of the later than the former.

Something I posted a while back though on how AI and robotics and provide an illusion of increasing employment by helping one company grow while its competitors shrink: https://slashdot.org/comments....

Or from 2021:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
"According to a new academic research study, automation technology has been the primary driver in U.S. income inequality over the past 40 years. The report, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, claims that 50% to 70% of changes in U.S. wages, since 1980, can be attributed to wage declines among blue-collar workers who were replaced or degraded by automation."

But in an (unregulated, mostly-non-unionized) capitalist system, what choice do most owners or employees (e.g. you) really have but to embrace AI and robotics -- to the extent it is not hype -- and race ahead?

Well, ignoring owners and employees could also expand their participation in subsistence, gift, and planned transactions as fallbacks -- but that is a big conceptual leap and still does not change the exchange economy imperative. A video and an essay I made on that:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...

Anyway, I'm probably just starting to repeat myself here.

... already has waymo cabs than it has space on its streets.

"Fake it till you unicorn? Builder.aiâ(TM)s Natasha was never AI â" just 700 Indian coders behind the curtain"
https://techfundingnews.com/fa...

"Why Experts Worry Weâ(TM)re 2 Years From An âoeAI Black Deathâ"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"huge piece" should be "huge missing piece".

I saw that type when reposting some of that content here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/singu...

Thanks for the conversation. On your point "And why want it in the first place?" That is a insightful point, and I wish more people would think about that. Frankly, I don't think we need AI of any great sort right now, even if it is hard to argue with the value of some current AI systems like machine vision for parts inspection. Most of the "benefits" AI advocates trot out (e.g. solving world hunger, or global climate change, or cancer ,or whatever) are generally issues that have to do with politics and economics (e.g. there is enough food to go around but poor people can't pay for its broad distribution, renewable energy can power all our needs and is cheaper if fossil fuels had to pay true costs up front including defense costs, most cancer is from diet and lifestyle and toxins which we are problems because of mis-incentives like subsidizing ultraprocessed foods, etc). I am hard-pressed to think of any significant benefits from AI that could not be replaced by just having better social policies (including ones that fund more human-involved R&D).

=== Some other random thoughts on all this

I just finished watching this interview of Geoffrey Hinton which touches on some of the points discussed here:
"Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We've Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It is a fantastic interview that anyone interested in AI should watch.

Some nuances missed there though:

* My sig is a huge piece of his message on AI safety: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." (As a self-professed socialist Hinton at least asks for governments to be responsible to public opinion on AI safety and social safety nets -- but that still does not quite capture the idea in my sig which concerns a more fundamental issue than just prudence or charity)

* That you have to assume finite demand in a finite world by finite beings over a finite time for all goods and services for their to be job loss (which I think is true, but was not stated, as mentioned by me here: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-... ).

* That quality demands on products might go up with AI and absorb much more labor (i.e. doctors who might before reliably cure 99% of patients might be expected to cure 99.9%, where that extra 0.9% might take ten or a hundred times as much work)

* That his niece he mentioned who used AI to go from answering one medical complaint in 35 minutes to only 5 minutes could in theory now be be paid 5 times more but probably isn't -- so who got the benefits (Marshall Brain;s point on wealth concentration) -- unless quality was increased.

* That while people like him and the interviewer may thrive on a "work" purpose (and will suffer in that sense if ASI can do everything better), for most people the purpose of raising children and being a good friend and neighbor and having hobbies and spending time making health choices might be purpose enough.

* (Hinton touches on this, but to amplify) That right now there is room for many good enough workers in any business because there is only one of the best worker and that one person can't be everywhere doing everything. But (ignoring value in diversity) if you can just copy the best worker, and not pay the copies, then there is no room for any but the best worker. And worse, there is not room for even the best human worker if you can just employ the copies without employing the original once you have copied them. As Hinton said, digital intelligence means you can make (inexpensive) copies of systems that have already learned what they need to know -- and digital intelligence can share information a billion times faster than humans.

My undergrad advisor in cognitive psychology (George A. Miller) passed around one of Hinton's early papers circa 1984. And George (who like puns) joked "What are you hintin' at?" when I used "hinton" as part of a password for a shared computer account. Hinton and I must have overlapped when I was visiting CMU circa 1985-1986 but I don't recall offhand talking with him then. I think I would have enjoyed talking to him though (more so in a way than Herbert Simon who as Nobel Prize winner then was hard to get a few short meetings with -- one reason winning the Nobel Prize tends to destroy productivity). Hinton seems like a very nice guy -- even if he worries his work might (unintentionally) spell doom for us all. Although he does say how raising two kids as a single parent changed him and made him essentially more compassionate and so on -- so maybe he is a nicer guy now than back then? In any case, I can be glad my AI career (such as it was) took a different path than his, with me spending more time thinking about the social implications than the technical implementations (in part out of concerns of robots replacing humans that arose from talking with people in Hans' labs -- where I could see that, say, self-replicating robotic cockroaches deployed for military purposes could potentially wipe out humanity and then perhaps collapse themselves, instead of our successors being Hans' idealized "mind children" exploring the universe in our stead, like in his writings mentioned below).

While Hinton does not go into it in detail in that interview, there is why his intuition on neural networks was ultimately productive -- because of a Moore's Laws increase of capacity that made statistical approaches to AI more feasible:
https://www.datasciencecentral...
" Recently I came across an explanation by John Launchbury, the Director of DARPA's Information Innovation Office who has a broader and longer term view. He divides the history and the future of AI into three ages:
1. The Age of Handcrafted Knowledge
2. The Age of Statistical Learning
3. The Age of Contextual Adaptation."

Also related to that by Hans Moravec from 1999 (whose lab I was a visitor at CMU over a decade earlier):
https://faculty.umb.edu/gary_z...
"By 2050 robot "brains" based on computers that execute 100 trillion instructions per second will start rivaling human intelligence"
"In light of what I have just described as a history of largely unfulfilled goals in robotics, why do I believe that rapid progress and stunning accomplishments are in the offing? My confidence is based on recent developments in electronics and software, as well as on my own observations of robots, computers and even insects, reptiles and other living things over the past 30 years.
        The single best reason for optimism is the soaring performance in recent years of mass-produced computers. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the computers readily available to robotics researchers were capable of executing about one million instructions per second (MIPS). Each of these instructions represented a very basic task, like adding two 10-digit numbers or storing the result in a specified location in memory. In the 1990s computer power suitable for controlling a research robot shot through 10 MIPS, 100 MIPS and has lately reached 1,000 in high-end desktop machines. Apple's new iBook laptop computer, with a retail price at the time of this writing of $1,600, achieves more than 500 MIPS. Thus, functions far beyond the capabilities of robots in the 1970s and 1980s are now coming close to commercial viability. ...
      One thousand MIPS is only now appearing in high-end desktop PCs. In a few years it will be found in laptops and similar smaller, cheaper computers fit for robots. To prepare for that day, we recently began an intensive [DARPA-funded] three-year project to develop a prototype for commercial products based on such a computer. We plan to automate learning processes to optimize hundreds of evidence-weighing parameters and to write programs to find clear paths, locations, floors, walls, doors and other objects in the three-dimensional maps. We will also test programs that orchestrate the basic capabilities into larger tasks, such as delivery, floor cleaning and security patrol. ...
        Fourth-generation universal robots with a humanlike 100 million MIPS will be able to abstract and generalize. They will result from melding powerful reasoning programs to third-generation machines. These reasoning programs will be the far more sophisticated descendants of today's theorem provers and expert systems, which mimic human reasoning to make medical diagnoses, schedule routes, make financial decisions, configure computer systems, analyze seismic data to locate oil deposits and so on.
        Properly educated, the resulting robots will be come quite formidable. In fact, I am sure they will outperform us in any conceivable area of endeavor, intellectual or physical. Inevitably, such a development will lead to a fundamental restructuring of our society. Entire corporations will exist without any human employees or investors at all. Humans will play a pivotal role in formulating the intricate complex of laws that will govern corporate behavior. Ultimately, though, it is likely that our descendants will cease to work in the sense that we do now. They will probably occupy their days with a variety of social, recreational and artistic pursuits, not unlike today's comfortable retirees or the wealthy leisure classes.
        The path I've outlined roughly recapitulates the evolution of human intelligence -- but 10 million times more rapidly. It suggests that robot intelligence will surpass our own well before 2050. In that case, mass-produced, fully educated robot scientists working diligently, cheaply, rapidly and increasingly effectively will ensure that most of what science knows in 2050 will have been discovered by our artificial progeny!"

Uh... it even has its own Wikipedia page: women, life, freedom.

It was pretty much all over western media for a while. Before some B-stars affair, divorce or whatever became more important

According to some sources. Other sources say the opposite. I guess we need to wait and see.

Afraid that the Iranian people finally rise up against the Mullah regime? Control of communications is high on the dictatorship 101 list.

Maybe. I don't keep track of OpenAI headcount. Someone who knows what it is can divide "billions" by number of employees and see how that pencils out.

I suspect that Microsoft is also making some pretty decent coin leasing them Azure stacks equipped with Nvidia hardware.

Perhaps a good idea for small generators as well. Because the cumulative effect can destabilize the system. But from TFS:

That sounds like a violation of regulations and contract terms. Now multiply that by hundreds of little roof-top installations and then figure out how you will monitor, let alone enforce such terms.

People paid money for their panels. When the sun is out, they are highly motivated to push as much power as they can for a better ROI.

Will we have to rewind them before returning them?