mr_toad

> dont increase the price of the product?

Literal empty shelves. And resellers on Ebay making bank.

Google and Amazon have tied up all their capital (and then some) in data centre investments, they don’t have more money to spend on fabrication. Plus they have a lot of experience running data centres, and zero experience running fabs.

You don’t lower your prices on the off chance a competitor might enter the market in the future. You wait until they have invested capital but before they start making profits and are at their most vulnerable.

> Iron weapons aren't any better than bronze ones

Bronze is harder and more corrosion resistant, but forged iron (and especially iron that has been reforged) has a higher yield strength and is lighter, allowing longer lighter weapons. Compare the profile of bronze age and iron age swords in any museum and you can see that the bronze blades are shorter and wider that the iron weapons, and they would be considerably heavier.

Seems to be pretty much in line with human reaction times?

> In other words: only <20% of pur neuron budget goes to higher cognition (thinking, language, seeing, hearing). 80% is spent on motor skills.

Probably why robotics is harder than making a language model.

“He is President” works when it’s clear which position you’re referring to.

“He is doctor” sounds wrong because there’s rarely just one doctor.

There are dozens of lakes in England, and a few in other english speaking countries with the word mere in their name.

In my experience with databases the answer is never never, and never always, and it’s almost always sometimes and maybe.

That would have been right around the time that airlines were transitioning to jet aircraft. Back before jet travel it could take a whole week to reach the far east.

> They've never said that

You know that humans can lie, right?

We also spent a lot of money fixing non-critical systems that would have had next to zero impact if they’d failed. A middle manager not getting their sales report on time is not critical.

But at least with Y2K some effort was made in identifying actual problems. We didn’t just stop using computers because we were too scared of them. This latest round of AI panic is horribly vague and the problems are very poorly articulated.

There are many technologies that have killed and hurt a lot more people than nuclear weapons that are not monopolised by governments.

Cars and guns are two examples where ‘wanton usage’ can (and has) killed millions of people. Obviously they need regulation, but total control, even if it were possible doesn’t strike me as ideal.

Much much bigger. Visiting it now is quite sad.

> The waymo vehicle called the cops

Waymo called the cops. It’s not clear if it was the vehicle, or a human in the company. I suspect the latter.

Long tail works well when the marginal cost is near zero and most of the upfront costs are born by someone else.

They must bend and flex, or they will crumple. Soon they will congregate, enclosed within the fold.

> But these perceptions itself stands on top of consciousness.

There’s plenty of evidence for unconscious perception.

It was a New Year’s resolution that was broken by the next morning.

Current levels of solar panel coverage on Earth are approximately 0%. If we ran the entire Earth on Solar power we’d need ~ half a million square kilometres, around 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface.

No graphics output. And so loud you wouldn’t be able to hear your game either. Also they use about 1kw of power, so you’d only want to run it in the winter.

> And with typical main sequence stars lasting under 10 billion years

For mid to large size stars, yes. But Red dwarf stars are expected to live for trillions of years.

The biggest costs and sources of delays to building high speed rail in the UK are legal challenges from people who don’t want any construction to take place anywhere near them.

The browser can easily handle millions of calculations and then render a million DOM elements so quickly that you won’t even notice it. The problem is when you try and do this hundreds of times very second.

The irony is that obsessing over smoothness and frames per second is what causes this in the first place.

“It goes without saying that if any of the turbine fragments had entered the passenger cabin, there would have been injuries, if not fatalities, even if the plane later landed safely.”

They got lucky.

> Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions

Learning French has been eye opening, in that many grammatical structures that are optional in English are compulsory in French. Abbreviations for example: “it is” or “it’s” are both valid in English, but in French you’re not supposed to say “ce est”, you have to say “c’est”.

Linguistic diversity has been used as a casus belli, at least indirectly. It’s something that populations will take up arms for, so it’s probably worth tiptoeing around.

> So we'll need neural methods which can be learned

Data is a problem. LLMs had the advantage of the whole internet to train on. Robots don’t have that corpus of information. And real time learning seems to be something that everyone in AI is studiously ignoring.

I guess they assume that nobody with a personal domain cares enough to sue them over this.

Somewhat off topic, but Oracle database connection strings seem to be a form of Lisp. It makes me wonder why they would choose that.