dTal

I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords...

Tinfoil hat:

If I were sitting on a big pile of valuable data I was legally forbidden from selling - perhaps to a rogue state willing to pay big bux for it - I might be tempted to engineer a "breach" for plausible deniability. Oops! These things happen!

From Room 641A to Snowden, the speed with which the narrative shifts from "that's conspiracy nonsense" to "we knew it all along" is neck-snapping.

Every. Single. Time.

OpenTrack uses it for its AI headtracking, which works extremely well.

>According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, nearly 1 trillion liters of water were consumed by AI data centers in 2025

I'm sorry, what? "Palantir" wasn't bad enough?

Anyway this is silly propaganda as usual. USA gets through over 300B gallons daily. Irrigation alone is over 100B of that. Most of that goes to corn for animal feed. You're not allowed to get all high and mighty about AI water use if you still eat meat.

Describing life on Earth as "a cruder version of humanity" is uh a choice. Your parrot snark is hilarious because that actually happened with Alex the African Gray - and indeed it took people a long time to accept. Your comment amounts to an anthropocentrism practically biblical in its hubris.

Curious logic. Does Google want you to use it or not? Do they want to be paid for tokens or not? why segregate open and closed?

It's not parameter size - there is apparently such a thing as "Gemini Nano", which famously is downloaded automatically by Chrome. How similar is it to Gemma E4B? And how strange - you have the weights, but you don't "have" them?

Why? You think an obvious scam is easy money for you? You think you're smarter than the next retail investor? Why?

Don't give your money to Elon Musk, he doesn't need more.

My reading is that in the suburbs you typically buy, while in urban environments you typically rent because all the land is already owned by someone who is making a killing off it; they aren't going to sell because that would be slaughtering the golden goose. And that prevents almost everyone who isn't a landowner from getting ahead, because as soon as you figure out a way to make a surplus, poof the rents go up and absorb it. Oh sure, individuals who perform better than average might be able to press their advantage; but class movement is impossible because it is always "priced in".

I am not sure that this phenomenon is unique to cities, in fact, but rather an inevitable endgame to the idea of owning land in perpetuity. It creates a permanent class divide.

>If there was hope, it must lie in the proles

Have you stopped beating your wife?

For the purposes of this thread, "this stuff" consists of:

>It's absurd that modern phones can talk to satellites hundreds of kilometers above, but not to other phones a few meters away in the same room, airplane cabin, train car etc.

Common everyday filesharing, not meshnet fantasies.

Reminder that "$2 million worth of OpenAI tokens" is meaningless and codes for "as much access to OpenAI infrastructure as Sam Altman feels like letting you have".

That's not at all true, phones have both WiFi and Bluetooth, both of which are perfectly capable of communicating peer to peer. Bluetooth file transfer worked 20 years ago. Wifi is physically capable but the software usually requires one phone to be the Daddy and host a hotspot, because god forbid an IP subnet exist without routable internet i.e. the mothership. There is a standard, "Wi-Fi Direct", that solves this - it's been around since 2009 and everyone implements it except Apple, so naturally nobody uses it.

Perhaps you mean p2p phone calls. Fine - although I have a hard time believing that the 900 Mhz radios capable of talking to a tower literal miles away are physically incapable of talking to each other. They're just programmed not to. In any case, the inconvenience and unreliability of sending files 3 feet, vs the streamlined experience of sending them via a corporate datacenter thousands of miles away, demonstrates that this is not about hardware. This is about software, and by extension about control.

The Register is great at these:

"EFF dinks HP Inc finks in rinky-dink ink stink"

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2016/09/27/eff-dinks-hp...

You're quite wrong.

You can, in fact, print perfectly well in any thermoplastic, including PVC (although it's unpopular due to toxic fumes). Nor is strength neccessarily an issue. In fact you can 3D print polycarbonate parts strong enough to scratch-build a drone - props and all.

No - the reason you wouldn't want to print parts for your kitchen sink isn't because you can't, it's because you rarely need such parts, and when you do you can simply buy off the shelf parts for next to nothing. A printer simply does not justify its overhead for most people. It's like having a lathe: useful if you're seriously into manufacturing or crafting, but not worth it if you want something pre-designed. There's just not much that it wouldn't be easier to just buy.

Looks like singularity panic is having a bit of a moment on Hacker News. In the past day:

Accelerando (2005) (antipope.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159241

Too Much Is Happening Too Fast (theatlantic.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163631

We've made the world too complicated (user8.bearblog.dev) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158065

I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis (twitter.com/mitchellh) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379

Leaving the Physical World (eff.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084012

What an obnoxious website. I'm not clicking through your silly javascript animated slideshow one sentence at a time just to read an article.

Reddit is as bad as the others, now.

ipython-qtconsole seems very underappreciated to me.

>it really doesn't need to be local

I urge you to reconsider this attitude. If AI has a tenth the significance people claim, you're signing away your life; your ideas, your privacy, your very sovereignty of mind, all under someone else's control and revocable at any moment. Don't move your brain to the cloud.

Imagine an alternate timeline where we never had personal general purpose computers, only dumb terminals to access corporate servers on subscription. Don't vote for that world with your wallet, today.

Don't be a cloudhead!

Just because we'll have to pay for the hardware, doesn't mean we'll have meaningful control. Look at what happened with phones - weak and limited slaves to the mothership, secured against pesky users with powerful encryption, yet costing more than a vastly superior laptop; quasi-mandatory platforms for highly addictive experiences, centered around the flow of information.

And now with LLMs we can create even more fabulously addictive experiences, even more finely tuned information flows, even more treacherous servants. I very much doubt that we'll be allowed full control of it all. Every effort will be spent to centralize power, and every effort will be spent to extract as much cash as possible from us for the privilege.

>By the way, this post was totally built with the help of another language model which is not Claude!

Yeah, it shows.

My god, a "web" of documents - it's brilliant! The best part is the documents can even be on different domains, world wide!

As with headphones, you can always just not wiggle it! Or arrange so that it doesn't rotate once it's fully inserted. There's nothing magical about the contacts in a USB connector.

I would caution against deriving too much of your philosophical worldview from a scifi book about posthuman vampires that has been deliberately engineered to make a philosophical point that is most certainly not a consensus.

For alternative viewpoints: Daniel Dennett considered philosophical zombies to be logically incoherent. Douglas Hofstadter similarly holds that "meaning" is just another word for isomorphism, and that a thing is a duck exactly to the extent that it walks and quacks like one. Alan Turing advocated empiricism when evaluating unknown intelligence. These are smart cookies.

For what it's worth, it'd be pretty easy to design an RJ45 compatible connector that didn't have that flimsy plastic latch.

The cables fail from bad design.

The connectors are great.

USB-C is very far from a perfect connector. The female side still has a fragile plastic tongue that can break. They also reliably wear out with use, both the cables and the socket. We've all seen them fail. Actually all the USB connectors do eventually, because they all rely on a thin piece of sheet metal not bending when lateral force is applied. And, reversibility notwithstanding, they are still hard to fumble into place compared to (say) RJ45, or 3.5mm TRRS.

I have no love for Apple and their proprietary nonsense, but even lightning is a strictly better connector than USB-C - easier to insert, less fragile, better wearing. Still too many wires though.

I wish we'd used something like TRRRS, and stuck to 4 wires. Very robust, any orientation, easy to fumble in blind.

Uh this is apocalyptic for computer security, no?