That’s exactly what I’m getting at. AI is about pushing the boundary. Once the boundary is crossed, it’s not AI anymore.

Those chess engines don’t play like human players. If you were to look at how they determine things, you might conclude they’re not intelligent at all by the same metrics that you’re dismissing ChatGPT. But at this point, they are almost impossible for humans to beat.

AI as a field of computer science is mostly about pushing computers to do things they weren’t good at before. Recognizing colored blocks in an image was AI until someone figured out a good way to do it. Playing chess at grandmaster levels was AI until someone figured out how to do it.

Along the way, it created a lot of really important tools. Things like optimizing compilers, virtual memory, and runtime environments. The way computers work today was built off of a lot of things out of the old MIT CSAIL labs. Saying “there’s no I to this AI” is an insult to their work.

Censoring topics is the least of the issues with the AI bubble.

It’s really difficult/expensive for a home user to do a 3-2-1 backup properly. Especially if you’re pushing beyond a few TB.

My NAS uses a pair of SAS drives, and they make noises at boot up that would be concerning in a desktop. They’re quite obnoxious. But I keep them in part of the house where they don’t bother me.

When the cache isn’t full, yes, that’s true. Copy a file that’s significantly bigger than cache and performance will drop part way through.

I’m guessing that only works if the file is smaller than the RAM cache of the drives. Transfer a file that’s bigger than that, and it will go fast at first, but then fill the cache and the rate starts to drop closer to 100 MB/s.

My data hoarder drives are a pair of WD ultrastar 18TB SAS drives on RAID1, and that’s how they tend to behave.

Right, I think the future isn’t Intel v AMD, it’s AMD v ARM v RISC-V. Might be hard to break into the desktop and laptop space, but Linux servers don’t have the same backwards compatibility issues with x86. That’s a huge market.

It was also a big surprise when Intel just gave up. The industry was getting settled in for a David v Goliath battle, and then Goliath said this David kid was right.

There’s some streaming video sites that deliberately block Firefox. It used to be that Firefox didn’t support the necessary web standards, but now it does. The site put up blocks telling you to use Chrome, and never got around to taking them down.

And I am on the National Shitposting Council that oversees Lemmy.

Language

WinRAR did make piles of money by focusing on the commercial market. They really didn’t care if home users went past the free trial period, but they did care if you were a business.

I don’t know what WinAmp does, or ever did.

It’s more likely to survive the company if it’s FOSS. The app was dormant for a long time.

Thanks, Sam Harris.

I read “The Moral Landscape”. 90% of it is pretty good, but he’ll randomly drop “and that’s why we need to be worried about Islamic takeover of western Europe” into something completely unrelated. He spends a lot more time complaining about Islamic fundamentalist than he does the Christian fundamentalist who actually have political power in the US (and to a lesser degree, western Europe). Then you get to a chapter that’s all about religious influence on society, but it’s all about relatively relaxed Christians who have Ph.Ds in some field and show up at scientific conferences.

You might expect a word somewhere about the fundamentalist Christians who control roughly half of Congress, but no. It’s all Muslims and Christians who make it a more personal thing.

Have you tried sprinkling a random reference to “sky fairy” in your post? Teenage atheists think they’re clever every time they hit that one.

Their eggs are a rich snack for fish. The reason they’re a rich snack is because their mom sucked blood.

That said, we can probably kill off the one species that causes malaria. Other species will move into the gap.

There’s one specific species that causes malaria. Getting rid of that particular one would probably do more good than harm. Their place on the food chain can be filled in by others.

The Samsung Galaxy is 15 years old, and it was excellent. First Android device I felt had decent performance. I think my first one was an Galaxy S III, which would have been 2012.

The Zenphone that’s out now uses a Snapdragon. There’s probably a good reason for that.

For space efficiency, yes. Bikes are actually better than walking for CO2 output. Your food has a CO2 cost, and bikes are really damn efficient at turning your food calories into forward momentum. Ebikes are even better on a per mile basis, but their higher manufacturing cost mean they never catch up to lifetime CO2 output of a regular bike. Still, whatever gets more people on bikes is a win in my book, ebike or otherwise.