We don't see a progress towards UBI even inside individual countries and with AI we will need it on international. What people in Europe or Africa will do when all jobs there will be replaced by American or Chinese AI companies, where they will get money for UBI?
Apple can give employees an iphone which will have an iCloud account in apples’s corp domain and can be used only for work. Many other companies do this.
It's not an evidence but if they do believe the end times prophesy about Imam al-Mahdi they may want to speed-up his arrival by attacking Israel. IMHO people in the west often making a mistake trying to interpret actions of deeply religious people from a secular viewpoint and making an assumption that they must have only or mostly non-religions motives.
It's a good news and a milestone to celebrate but if we count all energy and not only electricity and not only developed world then the progress is not as fast unfortunately [1].
Not a long time ago I've seen a post arguing based on the data [1] that renewables are irrelevant and should not be taken seriously and fossils will the main source for the lifetime.
> The poor don't pay any federal taxes at all so you can't give them a tax cut
Even if we exclude poor there are many options how to split taxes between different income brackets, how to tax salaries vs capital gain, how to split taxes between individuals and businesses, how to avoid loopholes e. t. c. (e. g. in the UK I see small business struggling because of rising taxes while multinationals pay little taxes by moving profits offshore and reporting no profits in the UK).
It's a difficult tradeoff. By taxing more and more it's easy to send the economy into the death spiral so to grow the revenue without killing the economy you need economic growth. Cutting taxes will not give the growth aromatically but carefully designed tax system with low taxes where it helps should be a part of the strategy.
In practice though tax cuts usually make rich richer without helping the economy to grow (because of lobbying/corruption).
I doubt Russian nuclear ice breakers have naval escort. Until recently they operated within the coverage of on-shore long range SAM systems (but most of these SAM systems were moved elsewhere recently e.g. to protect oil refineries so Northern Sea Route is no longer protected).
If you live in a brick/stone hours you can still go a long way by maximally ventilating house at nigh and during the day keeping sun out (shutters, awning e.t.c) and keep ventilation minimal. It would not help if the nights are warm (so you'd need AC) but there are still many more days with cold nights and by using shutters and timed ventilation you can reduce AC energy use.
AC full on without other measures and passive thermal control techniques are no only two available options, one can combine them.
Modern economy cannot exists without economy of scale. It's unfortunate is that if you want something else than millions of other people the price likely will be prohibitive - small scale production is not viable economically, especially for high tech components and devices.
> I don’t think it’s true that the capabilities to make these devices are lost.
I think they are. Not all knowledge is captured in documentation and blueprints. A lot of knowledge existed only in brains of now retired people. And even blueprints are lost when companies go out of businesses.
For a lay person (without background in finances) what AI companies are doing looks very similar in spirit to what Enron did and Enron actions were deemed not legal.
If LLMs is just another technology then low end will eventually win. The bet which I guess many AI investors are making is that LLM will allow recursive self improvement which will lead to development of super-human AGI. The company which will get there first will rule the world thanks to an immense power enabled by AGI. There will be no 2nd or 3rd AI company, the 1st one will wipe the rest out.
Old generation DIMMs are not that much cheaper and supply is limited as old generation are taken out of production to free capacity for newer chips. DDR2 is already more expensive than DDR3, likely because it is no longer produced but there is still demand (to replace/upgrade memory in older hardware).
Outsourcing never ended but it did happen in waves. Right after ZIRR ended but before the AI panic multiple companies started to layoff in developers in western countries and double down on outsourcing to India. During ZIRP they employed more people in the US/EU and less work was outsourced.
May be LLM resume screening is a symptom of a bigger problem - with tens of candidates per vacancy employers can screen resume badly and even throw half of the resumes away and still hire someone qualified.
Threads are not free - they allow to use more CPU cores but if you load is not too high than with a single thread memcached uses less CPU than with multiple.
What we see in quotes is not the price of oil being shipped right now; it is usually a one-month futures contract. Traders expect that by this time, Hormuz will reopen. If it does not, they will lose money, but the actual price could be much higher.
If memory shortages were not caused by AI then may be (but still unlikely). In the current situation even cautious in the past companies are switching to “move fast and break things” mode to not fall behind vibe coding competitors. When the velocity is the top priority there is no time fo efficiency.
Web browsing is the most resource intensive task given how bloated modern websites are. It’s easer to imagine a cheap phone with a set of optimised native apps but the problem is tech giants are not interested in reducing footprint of their apps at the same time actively hostile to 3rd party clients.
Surprisingly high number given that people are being told by tech CEO that AI will replace all white collar jobs soon and a few years later AI guided robots will replace all blue collar jobs too.
Many managers are more bullish on AI and less able to recognize slop, they are unlikely to recognize quality crisis. And they are the people who decide who belong to the industry and who is not. As a result we will get an escalation of enshittification and people will start to forget that slop is not the only option.
AI investors bet on the high return in the next 10-15 years, they have no reasons to care if everything which require semiconductors will become much more expensive in the process.
Gas prices vary across the world, mostly depending on if it's only LNG imports (high prices) or local sources (much cheaper, e. g. the US) or a mix (e. g. Europe but since 2022 it's heavy reliant on LNG which pushes prices up). Coal prices also vary. Guess we cannot compare gas and coal prices globally, only withing a specific region.
A big threat for illustrators is not LLMs per se but slop acceptance. We've seen the same with machine translation - it was (and to some extent still is) worse than human translation but people accepted it because it's free. I recently seen and ad on a street which caught my attention - it was a photorealistic image of a taking off plane. It looked off and when I looked at details it's become clear it's AI generated - the 1st giveaway - stationary turbines on a flying plane, an angle relative to the runway is wrong, small details, especially in the background are off. Someone prompted LLM, seen the result and decided it's OK to print this advert. IMHO they would be better off with buying a stock image.
In regions where winters are dark windy places tent to be not too far away. If both solar and wind both overbuild to the extent it makes sense (say 5x for solar and 2x for wind) and batteries cover a normal daily cycle you probably will need to burn gas on 10-20% of days which is not net zero but way way better than the current situation.
It's a good news but I didn't expect that coal is still on the 1st place and not really trending down. I though coal was largely replaced by gas years ago...