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My expectation is that government has already stepped in quietly and worked out an arrangement where they have unfettered access to the most advanced/dangerous models, and the public's access will be continually throttled from now on in various ways.

If this has happened (or is about to happen), it is difficult to predict what the ramifications could be. But I do believe we are entering another Cold War in this way. And I don't trust our leaders to always do the right thing, to put it mildly... even if they created a purely benevolent superbeing that only wants to reduce human suffering and make the world better, I don't think they'd listen to it over the other superbeing which simply wants to make sure all of its owners' perceived enemies get pwned.

Things could get very ugly and we should have responsible adults with critical thinking skills at the helm. It does not appear this is currently the case, or that the electorate is willing/capable of doing much about it.

I would very much like to know more about your educational approach with regard to:

> When I provide a demo of e.g. local AI, say in LM Studio showing the console of it rapidly flashing through thousands of words

Because I am one of those individuals very interested in doing more to actively inform my family, friends, neighbors and fellow citizens facts about AI. I've actually considered doing talks at local libraries for senior citizens (or whoever), etc., and trying to build up a systematic way to get more other folks doing the same.

This really elegantly sums up two of the most major areas of research in the field right now. I expect people are going to hammer at both problems for a while. It will be interesting to see how much useful stuff is built as a result.

Yes, it's all about the amount of money invested right now. Justifying that was always going to be tricky, and it still is.

The compute capacity, however, is here to stay. There will be a seemingly endless line of people queued up to buy it at pennies on the dollar if this whole thing blows up financially. And they will use it!

Or, you can do like one of my former bosses, and just rattle off a list of 60+ major projects which would require a team of 10 to make any reasonable progress on in the near future, then pin it on one underqualified person, refuse to provide a proper budget, and continually press them about why targeted deadlines are being missed.

Yep. 1998 was when the first HD broadcasts started in the US, and it took a few years before everyone switched over. Before then, everything was 720 × 480 at 30 fps, and before the mid-80s (and for many shows for a long while after) the sound was mono, not even stereo.

Data requirements for this would be far, far lower than what is considered standard now.

I prompted it with "How uncontrollable flatulence taught me to handle business curveballs" and I was definitely mildly amused by the results. So much detail.

Depends what you mean by "used to". The 17th century or before? Sure.

However, I would argue that in the US, we "used to" have far better separation prior to the 1970s, and even better than that before the 1930s. It has significantly deteriorated over the past 100 years, and the deterioration has continuously accelerated during my lifetime.

That is a position of privilege not everyone has, and it is almost certainly temporary for those who do have it.

With the additional detail and the numbers you provided, that seems reasonable. Steepness of hills is definitely relevant, haha.

Minor nitpick with your first sentence: I do not believe "anyone with a bit of training" is an accurate way to describe what is required for pedaling a bicycle at 20 mph for 5 solid hours.

At a time when I was in better shape than the average person, the most I ever worked up to was 40 miles, and it was brutal. In my entire middle-aged life, I have met exactly one person who believably claimed to have done 100 miles in a day. I'm sure it's easier than many/most people think, but not 'anyone' easy, with just 'a bit' of training.

This is the part of the thread I was looking for.

Obviously the whole question is how a robot cleaner compares to a human.

As you point out, the potential for robots far outperforms humans in multiple categories (although clearly not all by any stretch).

I'd say pricing around that of a lower end new car - or nice used one - seems about right to me. In terms of justifying the price, another thing I haven't seen discussed much is the competitive advantage this can provide. If you're spending less time cleaning, that's more time for other things.

> the poweruser toolbar style

These can be great for discovery. But one must-have for me is a unique keyboard shortcut assigned to each button on the toolbar. Because if I use a feature often, I would 1000x rather use the keyboard to invoke it than have to drag a mouse to click a button.

I also wanted to see more about the temperature control aspect and was scanning the article for it. Some quick additional searching elsewhere turned up possible effects such as reflective surfaces, thermal mass, and moisture buffering.

It seems to me it's more about Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, Project and Teams now. With Entra and Intune, of course. All kinds of 'control and monitor your employees' stuff has been going on there for a while. I think that's more of the moat than a spreadsheet and a word processor.

Unless it's a shared document, no one cares if you use LibreOffice or whatever else, as long as you can provide requested formats when copying others that aren't mangled.

Indeed. It already has. In particular I remember several extremely offensive slop pictures and videos being posted by someone in the White House. And I'm certain that's just the tip of the shitberg.

I have no idea what to do about the government interference. There's probably not a lot anyone can do.

However, your last point is quite a strong one. Corpos aren't just going to stand there with their collective pants down, and there's not a lot anyone can do to stop them from protecting themselves. There are ways they can get what they want without getting caught.

Remember when the US tried to ban strong cryptography in the 1990s, and how well that went? They may have more leverage with AI because it's a bit harder to hide large scale computing usage, but I don't think it's impossible at all.

Yep. I initially looked into it as a potential avenue for sustainably producing some of my own food, but the math absolutely did not make sense.

Growing a bunch of potatoes in a barrel would be a lot more bang for your buck with that goal in mind. To really optimize costs and labor, though, as you say, you need a greenhouse and/or a big old field, just like always. There are no small-scale shortcuts. Not yet, anyway.

It makes me a bit sad that even with modern tech we haven't really made it much easier for people to produce their own food. But it's a reminder that our food production requires large scale collaboration and cooperation. Maybe that's a good thing.

The LTO-10 can hold 30 TB of highly compressed data on one cassette, and will last at least 30 years without degradation (probably longer under optimal conditions). This is still useful for many things. It does take almost a full day to fill up a tape, though, so if you're trying to back up a lot of stuff fast you're probably just going back to SSDs.

The M-disc is a better option for most use cases-- but if you have a ton of data that needs archiving, the tape involves less human labor and less physical space, which is I guess how the high prices are justified for those 'niche' applications.

> I don’t have XM radio

Well, that's where a lot of this type of content is (seemingly, at least) alive and well right now. Satellite appears to be here to stay, and can provide tremendous value on long drives. Particularly if you're doing a lot of them.

I'd love to see more FM stations return to human DJs, and human curated playlists. But until/unless that happens, we still need somewhere for those skills to be utilized and refined.

Look into the Adbusters organization. I'm not sure I agree with them on everything, but they have created some excellent satire over the years and been involved in prominent protests.

> Can we expect that level of commitments from our governments or corporations?

Clearly, right now we cannot. This is one of the worst obstacles to progress in these areas that I see, and I don't see any obvious way to fix it.

The situation we're currently in would've been utterly unfathomable to me 30 years ago. I have lost a great deal of the hope and optimism I held in the past. Interstellar exploration is but one of many fields where we are suffering due to short term thinking.

> nor did the calculator play with our emotions

It seems to me this here is the dangerous 'force multiplier' for destructive outcomes.

It's one thing for a kid to become obsessed with a fictional character. It's a whole different playing field when that character can talk back, remember things, and potentially surface all kinds of subject matter which cannot be predicted and could at times be harmful.

Not even remotely the same level of impact. I think we're almost at the point where LLM education (as in, teaching awareness of the basic tech and its shortcomings) needs to start in Kindergarten.

The C64 was very similar in performance capabilities to the NES, and they share some chipset lineage.

It really was a time of a step change for multimedia software.

The C64 was the first modern, affordable, multipurpose consumer computer with decent sound and graphics (and tons of software, including desktop publishing, business stuff, etc.)-- the NES was the first console doing the same, with of course more of a focus on games. Many of which people still play today.

Offtopic, but if by "Dragon Wing series" you are referring to the Death Gate Cycle by Weis & Hickman, it has been beloved to me since I read it as a teen in the 90s. I have gone through this entire series at least 3 times despite not usually re-reading books, and I feel like it holds up.

I think it also influenced a lot of work which came afterward.

I kept trying to find 'the people who have it all figured out' for way too long. I was in my mid-20s before I able to start letting go of it.

I'm still angry and upset that there are so many entities which prey upon this natural human tendency and twist it toward fruitless, bizarre ends.

If you know what you're doing, you put anything important on an M-disc.

Everything else is prone to random flaking. Some discs last much longer than others, but there is not always an easy way to know in advance unless you do a deep dive on the state of manufacturing at the place and time it was made (if such info is even available).

Environmental conditions can also have an effect.

I think most people who have crossed paths with a lot of optical media over the years are aware of this, but your average consumer? Probably not.

Let's also not forget that humans are more than capable of creating tons of 'slop' far worse than any current SOTA model would create, and I would argue the majority of what people write is in this category.

Models are still improving, and if you can't tell whether one was behind what you're currently reading 100% of the time (which I'm sure you know you can't), the distinction no longer matters except in very specific cases, and you have to go to a lot more effort to uncover that distinction.

> blandly plausible filler material

The real salient point, in my opinion, is whether we can get generative AI to create game content which is not this, but rather novel, engaging and interesting with a solid gameplay loop.

I'm genuinely curious and think it's a cool area to research.

> I love the feeling of uncovering the little pieces of story and wondering if I've got it all and how much more there is

To me, this is great too, and it's why I still enjoy reading fiction.

However, having conversational NPCs which can behave in complex ways isn't just about a story any longer, it's about a more accurate simulation. I want to see where the non-deterministic machine(s) can take me. I want to poke and prod and discover new mechanisms. I want to make my own story.

Once I was quite religious. I was discouraged from reading fiction by elders because they said it is a "waste of time" and "basically lies". In this way, whether it was written by a human or a machine is irrelevant if I can't tell the difference. I would have a qualitatively different response if I knew whether a human or bot wrote it, but in the long run I'm not sure it matters in cases where I don't know.