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Usually these appeal mostly to people in the field. I've tried to take many people to computer museums but generally they aren't interested unless they are software engineers themselves.

Russia, China, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan and India are also non-signatories, among many others. The ICC exists mostly for political statements.

Ultimately this isn't "AI's fault". As the article points out, clueless executives who don't understand the capabilities and limitations of specific LLMs push the technology on workers so they can say they are "using AI to improve efficiency".

Many/most people don't read for a mental workout.

I gave Firefox a chance as my PDF reader as it has a pretty efficient engine. But that didn't work out as I don't need to read PDFs often so every time it launched, it ran an update that added 10s to reading the PDF... :/

My current main browser across desktop and mobile is Brave. Pretty happy with it. Overall more efficient and with a better UI than FF. I've used FF for many years, but I feel it's simply not as good as competitors anymore.

True, but these aren't becoming best sellers. It's a bigger problem for Amazon than for readers in a sense, as they need to implement a good way for people to filter out these offerings so customers don't simply walk away and go back to physical bookstores (perhaps a blessing in disguise).

> It's difficult to point out what is better about the more recently written stories, but somehow they are more appealing (in some aspects)

For starters, the use of the language. Even a book written 20-30 years ago can feel a bit off in word choice and idioms. I know many people are into that, but for others it just increases the cognitive load of reading.

Does it significantly reduce cavities and gum disease? In other words, what's the effect of the AI water jet on dental health?

A small window to how we used to spread deep computer topics in the 90s. No substacks or X posts. Very cool.

I imagine that they haven't done a peer-reviewed scientific study of their ability to notice generative art.

We can replace their statement by "I'm a visual artist and at generative art is often blindingly obvious.... To me....". In other words, they can notice some or most generative art but other people familiar with art can't, or at least can't as often as they do. I think what they are trying to say isn't too changed by that.

In my opinion, it was early 90s. In my parent's opinion, it was early 60s. I wonder what my grandparents thought...

In other news, Exxon sees growing oil demand in the foreseeable future.

I understand the spirit of what you're saying, but "unassisted humans" isn't a good yardstick. There's hardly anything "unassisted" humans understand today... We require plenty of assistance from computer tools in most scientific discoveries.

Sure thing, but do you see these as "easy money" or simply doing a friend a favor?

You could have given him the bill for his immediate expenses and later give him the difference. Or pay him a beer or a lunch to make up for it. I'd never take advantage of a friend in need like that.

And as you said, "it was an easy 15 bucks". You were very aware of what you were doing: easy money off your "friend", instead of friends not minding a few dollars missing here or there.

Anyone has had a good experience using SteamOS on one of those $200 N95 PCs from Amazon?

But that's fine too. If the complexity of the natural world is just emergent behaviors, then emergence itself never ceases to amaze. Because one wouldn't normally expect that our "cold" physical laws could lead to the variety of life.

They export good music too (Bjork and Sigur Ros)!

TIL. Life never ceases to amaze.

It's great to see Intel attempting a strong comeback. It looks like this chip will work well for those $200-$300 mini PCs sold on Amazon.

You are confused about your dates. 2027 is and has always been the year of Linux on the Desktop, so hold tight.

It's okay if Legal does that. The idea isn't to prevent companies from owning copyrighted works long-term, it's to prevent the waste of abandoned works. There are thousands, if not millions, of works that could be cleanly reused under my proposal.

I don't disagree with the spirit of your argument. I'm just saying that my proposal would be a lot easier to put in practice than anything that hurts companies. The strength of the proposal is exactly that companies will mostly shrug while creating a very clear legal separation of what's "active copyright" and what's an "abandoned work".

By the way, this would also apply to the GPL (and other copyleft licenses).

That would be a tough change... An easier one, which is how things used to be, that everything enters public domain IF not renewed after X years (let's say 20). Abandoned or complex IP would just become public domain unless the owners themselves figure things out and demonstrate interest with the renewal process. Even a modest fee would lead to a huge gain without much friction for the true rights holders.

I haven't yet been able to properly internalize the horror of this scene. Maybe because we're exposed to so many images from disaster and action movies/videogames, I got somewhat desensitized to the "graphics", so to speak. It's like my brain is denial.

At the same time, I know this is real and a tragedy in an unimaginable scale. Every "little walking figure" is a full human being with dreams, fears and a rich life story.

I'm afraid that at one point it will just hit me super hard.

> There's obviously a lot we can optimize here, but if you're charging what the WSJ or The Economist charges, you'd better be delivering similar value.

Gosh, watching paint dry has been a better value than reading The Economist in the last 5 years or so.

That aside, I had good results with Luna. I'd be interested in hearing about a comparison that takes into consideration response time (not TPS), cost and performance of the popular models at different settings. That chart has some of that. For instance, is Luna Max a better value than Terra Medium?

I agree but I'm not sure if I'm biased given the nonstop negative comments about AI texts, on top of every text having the same style (which would be equivalent to a human writing every page on the Internet).

Would we think this was poorly written if we read just this one text 20 years ago? I don't know the answer.

I had an idea for an experiment. Take a decent text, any one, and ask AI to rate it. Then patch that text by replacing words for ones that AI likes (honestly, load bearing etc) whenever possible and ask AI to rate it again to see how the evaluation changes.

You could be right and my statement is speculative/provocative. But I'm far from sure that AI Music would hurt that many small musicians. Please keep in mind that we've seen this story before... Record albums (CDs, cassettes etc), Electronic music and even MIDI were at one point seen as a threat to small musicians but the market only grew as a result.

Is AI a bigger threat to musicians than, let's say, Spotify? That commoditized music to a degree we had never seen before. It would be fair to ask "does the world need ANY music to ever be made again?". To me, the answer is a clear YES, but the amount of music available on Spotify is so mind-boggling (I heard a "1 million new tracks a year" figure somewhere) that it already appears to be impossible for a professional musician to survive. Yet, they do. So there's something off in the assumption that AI will wipe out small musicians.

Copyright payouts (especially from streaming) are a small fraction, often negligible, of the livelihood of a professional musician. Keep in mind that in a world with free models, anyone could create AI music without silicon valley's involvement. My assumption is that "bad" music would be replaced by AI, while "good" music would not because AI simply wouldn't be able to deliver the goods.

Now, if AI could literally replace every musician, that would obviously be bad. But I don't think that banning it would solve the problem. If society as a whole is so against AI music that banning it is politically popular, it's because they don't like AI music to begin with - nothing to fear, then.

This is actually an insightful comment. People defending strong copyrights think they are protecting the little guy, but in fact they are defending the few winner-takes-all creatives.

Banning AI music may only protect the very same people. Perhaps AI music will mostly hurt mass-market, ad-fueled artists while leaving the little guy who toils away in live bar and night club shows untouched. It could paradoxically increase the value of human connection in music consumption.