I just don’t understand the motivation here. Why are they helping us?

Wait… I just got it. The Chinese government actually wants us to fall behind in the “AI arms race”… Oh my God, the Chinese are actually bullish on AI… They’re just as dumb as we are.

They’re trying to hurt the US by discouraging us from pursuing AI tech. LOL. wow. Just wow.

Yeah uh… “No China, don’t do that. This hurts so much, please stop.”

Yeah, that would probably be a put use of resources.

Ok you want something as rich and interesting as skyrim, so I’m assuming open world games are your jam.

There are three games you should play.

1. Red Dead Redemption 2 - it’s a Western, the world is very believable, and it makes you feel like you’re really part of it. You can follow the main story line, or you could spend your days hunting and fishing. You could travel from town to town playing every poker game you can find. You can conduct train robberies, breed horses, really, there’s just a whole lot to do.

2. Cyberpunk 2077 - this is RDR2 but in a scifi dystopian future where the corpos own everything, sex is for sale on every billboard and every ad break, and the only justice is what you can achieve on your own. You’ve got a ticking time bomb in your brain and no time to fuck around. In this world where you can’t trust anyone, somehow what really matters are the friends you make along the way. (seriously)

3. The Witcher 3 - from the same studio that made cyberpunk, the Witcher 3 is truly a masterpiece of storytelling. The one caveat I have for this game is that it starts hard, almost “souls-like”. But get past that first rough hour and there is an extremely rich world with a seemingly unending collection of stories to become a part of. This may be the most skyrim-like of the games listed here, but you’re in for a treat, because this is a much better game than Skyrim.

All three of these games are gonna make you feel real feelings, they’re all actually better at telling stories than Skyrim is. The Witcher 3 in particular loves to live in the grey zone, it’ll make you make ethical choices that matter, and you probably won’t like any of the possible outcomes. But this is a good thing!

So that’s what that means. I always wondered.

Please! Think of the GPU!

And oh… The RAM… that poor fucking RAM never had a chance… Did it have a family?

The article is making a big deal about the huge price disparity, which I get. But on the other hand, this is basically true about all missiles. As a rule, missiles are cheaper than the vehicles you destroy with them.

I’m sure you could find a few exceptions, but in general missiles are much cheaper than aircraft, and a “kamikaze drone” is just a guided missile.

That’s really interesting. I’ve never really thought about it in this light, but a search engine’s job is generally just to point you at a bunch of information that could be what your looking for. But they don’t generate any content, so as a result they aren’t really liable or in any way responsible for what you find, they aren’t telling you anything.

But a generative AI, well those are very much their words, they don’t have any link to hide behind, they are absolutely responsible for anything their AI tells you. This explicitly exposes them to legal risk in a way that they never were before.

I hope that in the rest of the world our courts can all make similar rulings. When people search for information you should not be allowed to generate something and provide them that answer as if it were a fact, without taking responsibility for it.

When does quality not matter?

Like, I guess you could ask it subjective things? Recipe ideas, art projects for kids, things where you can’t actually provide a wrong answer…

And by making their user’s initial impression one that might be wrong, they effectively poison people’s thought processes as they sift through the rest of the actual results. Is that a better experience for the users?

And just to be absolutely clear, my understanding is that giving your users the best experience possible is what’s going to result in retaining the most market share. Search is free, users will happily use a different search engine if a particular one doesn’t work or annoys them.

So here’s my conclusion: this method of using AI in search is not only frustrating for users, but also bad for Google. For the sake of their users, they should stop. For their own sake, they should stop.

Actually, yeah. That offloads the responsibility to the parents. I think that solution actually works…

Yeah, it’s like the French are trying to prove something.

Right there with ya.

I saw that, and you’re right, I wasn’t answering that question. What I was saying was that I thought the question was irrelevant and ignoring a bigger issue.

What these articles never say is how many hallucinated bugs the LLM found that either weren’t real or were actually exploitable.

It literally wouldn’t matter if it did.

The fact that it found exploitable bugs means that these bugs need to be addressed. To be clear, I care much more about the security flaws and fixing them than how they were discovered.

i’m not sure what the exact reason is why we aren’t doing this already, but i suspect it has a lot to do with ease-of-use and price being significantly on the side of chemicals

Well the reason we don’t have nuclear thermal rockets boils down to budget cuts at NASA and environmental/safety concerns around nuclear. We made significant progress on two different nuclear rocket designs before they were scrapped for entirely political/budgetary reasons. And by budgetary reasons I don’t mean that the program proved to be too expensive or difficult, I mean that NASA’s annual budget was year after year and they simply had to drop some projects.

That’s not true for spaceships. for launch, chemicals are available and cheaper / fire up faster. for mid-flight, solar panels are available.

Chemical propellants are great for launch, but the advantage of nuclear for deep space missions are really immense. The additional efficiency means you can make shorter trips, bring more supplies, and have more redundancy for equipment failures. It also provides the possibility of bringing the entire craft back home for future missions rather than simply expending it.

And as a power source, solar is fine around earth. But for trips further out, like to Jupiter, well at that distance your panels would only get about 4% of what we get here around earth… That’s just not going to cut it for crewed missions.

Honestly, spacecraft are probably the absolute best use case for fusion power. They’re one of the few contexts where the energy density is extremely important and the high cost is still worthwhile.

We’ve done that. The ISS has been occupied for the last 25 years uninterrupted. The space station can go months between resupplies. In other words, we’ve shown that a crew can survive in a spacecraft without aid from earth for months. With some mission specific planning, I don’t see why we couldn’t manage a 6 month mission.

Probably because of Mario and Zelda. Which is 100% legit.

Power and propulsion aren’t in the top 5 problems?

Well enlighten me, what’s more important that we haven’t figured out?

That said, fusion (and fission as well) isn’t really a great buffer because you don’t really want to be switching it on and off. It’s so expensive that it’s only really economical to run it constantly 24/7. So while fusion could be an awesome and perfectly consistent base load, it doesn’t solve the energy variability problems.

Ultimately utilizing renewables just requires some amount of energy storage and/or quick to activate gas generators.

Well, it’s not really an “efficiency” number.

For instance, we’re definitely concerned with efficiency when burning gas, we want to get as much energy as we can out of it per unit of fuel. But with fusion, the fuel cost is negligible, so you can treat it as essential free and in infinite supply. And because maintaining the magnetic containment simply costs electricity, you basically just take the net excess power as the output rating of the plant.

Probably the most useful way to compare these two technologies is by cost per MW. That said, early fusion reactors will not be in any way cheap. Working fusion may be around the corner, but it will in fact be a long time before fusion is really “a good choice” economically.