Etern4l

I can relate to that too well. Most salesmen are probably best approached as essentially conmen. Almost got tricked into an unwanted and, as it turned out, flawed purchase recently. The typical boiler room sales manoeuvres were a big red flag from the beginning, yet my inner idiot talked me into ignoring them. Managed to pull out eventually but lost the deposit and had to worry for weeks about potential further costs. Mentally taxing for sure. Anyway, I have only had one or two brief aftersales experiences with Apple and would rate those reasonably high, other than that no issues with any Apple device we have had. The same cannot be said about Android, which I had been with since the beginning until last year. Literally every single one suffered from some issues (not even including the cessation of updates). Samsungs? Terrible battery life. LG? RMA, then fell apart. Nokia? Fell apart out of warranty. Sony? RMA, then screen split off. Etc. On the iOS side there is of course Apple Care+.

Speaking of which, I was actually looking at the Pixel 7 Pro at the time of last upgrade, with a view to install a reasonably well known degoogled pixel-only OS. Decided against that for the following reasons: * Lack of trust in the custom OS, and the third party app store * Instant and irrecoverable warranty loss * Loss of camera functionality * Strikingly lacklustre display compared to the Galaxy S and the iPhone Pro * The camera was not actually in par with the above either, although that was perhaps in part due to the screen They priced the device competitively though, so it’s interesting that Google decided to now remove that incentive. They are getting bolder, more desperate for the cash, or both - even of they improved the phone to the point where it is more technically competitive. Everything else being equal they make a lot of extra money on each unit through data monetisation. Anyway, should Apple stray from their current path, the custom degoogled Android route would need to be revisited.

Well, we are more tech experts than conspiracy theorists, which makes you sir just a (fairly combative in defence of your naivety, as we all to well know based on the history of postings going back to NBR, I might add) member of the ignorant masses. Of course the truth is often very unpleasant, and people just prefer to avoid it and numb themselves in various ways instead of facing it. Very mature (edit: the immature image posted earlier disappeared) BTW one rather silly mistake people repeatedly make (often due to the lack of any sensible arguments) is the assumption is that pushback against big tech’s data harvesting, including through devices such as the Pixel, has something to do with a need to „hide something”, presumably illegal. It’s about privacy, as in the right of control over private data such as family photos, tax returns etc. so they may remain private instead of being used by virtually everyone able to afford the data to be able to profile people for various reasons, including political.

I would go a step further and assume they are monetising any data they can access, with well documented consequences, including the funding of the catastrophic AI/AGI research.

Have found no mention of this „password encryption” and the consensus seems to be the storage is not private. Their FAQ seems pretty opaque on this. Even if user password is used to encrypt the data at some point, they have a way of decrypting it.

What similar feature would Google offer to the consumer product market and seriously hamper their "consumer-is-the-product" business model? The need to be able to access people's data in order to be able to exploit it. A quick search suggested they do offer end-end encryption to the enterprise though, no surprise there: their Workspace stuff would get very limited uptake without this.

Just a quick sanity check: Apple news subscriptions, Health etc are all optional, and Readly is available on iOS…

To be fair, “Copilot” definitely has a better ring to it than “Send Us More of Your Data”.

Nobel Prize Winner Cautions on Rush Into STEM This highlights yet another existential threat to our civilisation: the Wall-E/idiocracy scenario where humans devolve into docile idiots engaged in endless amusement.

SBF lawyers would certainly submit whatever they can, although the time to submit relevant evidence was during the trial. The prosecutor’s office would have been unlikely to even initiate a weak secondary case. Ted Bundy’s trials spring to mind here. He was tried and sentenced to death in Florida, then a second trial followed. There are two issues with a single trial: 1. The injustice involved 2. A risk he manages to successfully appeal and walk scot-free, get a retrial / reduced sentence etc. Noted an interesting point from YT commentariat: the second trial was supposed to revolve around or involve the topic of p… donations. The plot is thickening. /. got it right. “SBF Spared a Second Trial”. It’s not a good look and compromises DoJ’s integrity, even though the second trial would potentially result in unwelcome blowback. They should be apolitical otherwise this will just fuel the populist narrative. https://m.slashdot.org/story/423277

Makes no sense. Why would a second trial affect any orders of restitution or sentencing in relation to the first trial? Double jeopardy presumably is not the issue, as there would be no talk of a second trial in the first place.

I’ve been a fan of Kingston RAM on the grounds of compatibility and reliability but looks like they are on a downhill trajectory lately. Last to the market with a monstrosity of a product.

Thanks for sharing, enjoy bro. I am not sure why this flew under my radar. Sadly it’s a discontinued product, so one can mostly hope it gets resurrected in some form.

Doesn't smell right - another trial would mean an opportunity for further convictions. Not clear how pending sentencing on the back of the first trial factors in here, should be independent from any other proceedings. Mom and dad + network hard at work behind the scenes I guess.

Congrats! What an insane SSD. And the reliability? 27 PBW! https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/147526/intel-optane-ssd-905p-series-1-5tb-2-5in-pcie-x4-3d-xpoint/specifications.html It's bizarre and shameful that Intel discontinued this gem. What's your real-life usage experience so far? BTW how much RAM does the system have?

Catching up with The Mandalorian now. This is the way, Disney!

Yes, but this is a result of Kissinger's myopic laissez-faire policy that America has happily executed for decades, with no shortage of current corporate US cheerleaders including the likes of crooked Musk. The idea was to prevent Russia and China from becoming close allies, a policy which - as we know - is close to a complete failure. Anyway, the word from the shareholders is that the money has been good, which is the American way of measuring success. Yet again we find that naively optimising profits does not always lead to great long-term outcomes. The genie is out of the bottle now though: they are to competitive, rich, and technologically/scientifically advanced for someone with an intellectual and moral capacity of the a Putin-loving (likely for a good underlying reason, he is a street-smart New Yorker after all) disinfectant-injecting guy to be able to successfully address the problem without blowing up the Western world. Check this out: China has a 'stunning lead' over the US in the research of 37 out of 44 critical and emerging technologies, new study finds BTW if you happen to visit Walmart, let us know what percentage of non-agricultural items of interest are not made in China (30% apparently) - now imagine all those goods need to be produced domestically in a country with 4% unemployment or all the production has to be moved to other countries. How much time and money would it take, and what would be the impact on inflation? Sure, three cheers for the headline-grabbing tariffs, but need much smarter and broader overall set of policies and a person in charge intellectually and morally capable of delivering them (in a country where most politicians are in the pockets of big business or worse). Referring back to the current subject matter: is this 4090D thing supposed to convince anyone that Jensen Huang is wholeheartedly supporting the US government policy? It's just a clever ploy to supply China with discounted 4090 units. If the hardware is to be used for science, the 10% lower core count is basically irrelevant. It's a joke, and to any NVidia supporters in the democratic parts of the world: the joke is, or ultimately will be, on you. Food for thought, good luck to us all in 2024 - apologies for not having anything positive to say on the topic du jour.

Thanks for the note @ryan and appreciate the kind words. I would suggest a review of the thread would provide fairly exhaustive answers to those questions, either directly or in the materials of reference. One point though: it's not "this new AI", it's a continuing development of these systems, mostly by big tech (that we know of) that could lead to serious existential threats down the line, as opposed to the plethora of issues and threats already present and impending (including things like autonomous weapons). I think it is important to highlight both categories in this thread, in order to keep track of the evolution the technology, which - at the cutting edge - occurs almost exclusively in the terminal direction of AGI (whether that is intended and very apparent or not). If people have specific questions about the nature of modern AI, it feels right to answer them here as well in order to clarify the picture.

There wasn't even that much of a hype, as initial reviews provided immediate reality check for those who would need it and be open-minded enough to receive it, while people familiar with Bethesda games were immediately clear on what to expect from the latest product: good to occasionally great tech, with writing and design lacking (which defeats the purpose of an RPG game IMHO)

They don’t care about the consequences.

Oh, I was just trying to disambiguate the difference between chess and AI (in response to your AI prompt below), and explain how the concepts are related. Apologies if this was not accessible or perceived as arrogance. Remember that, while the language algos are very impressive, they do not match every aspect of human performance. It's debatable how well they actually understand the content. The moment we have nothing to add or are unable to improve on a web tool's response, vast swathes of human population will become economically redundant, marking the end of human civilisation as we know it. This is the main goal pursued by big tech, with our monetary support. To clarify further, the particular part of CoPilot's response which I believe to be problematic was: The issue with this sentence is that AI is conceptually different from chess. The rest of the response is fine. BTW This highlights one of the main issues issue with using generative AI: if we don't have enough knowledge or time to validate AI's output, we are prone to being misinformed (or worse, i.e. manipulated). Anyway, I suggest we try to keep things friendly and refrain from unnecessary personal angles, lest our dear @Reciever will be forced to intervene yet again. That said, I definitely appreciate the well-meaning career advice 🙂 Yes, different concepts. I would say, Apples (chess), Orchard (life) vs Fruit Pickers (chess algorithms very specialised) and Farmer (modern AI algos, more generic - can do broader farming, although maybe a bit slower at picking), but perhaps there is some room for improvement in terms of prompt wording as well. For example the following questions might have guided the bot better: "Does modern AI work like chess engines?", or "What does AI have to do with chess?".

Not an amazing response from Copilot there. Chess is a game, a problem, whereas AI refers to a class of computer algorithms and systems, some of which can be used to attempt to solve chess. What general public tends to mean by AI today, namely systems built on top of LLMs (such as Chat GPT), can actually play some chess but are not great at it. The two best chess algorithms/systems are Stockfish, which uses more of a traditional tree search approach to AI, and possibly Alpha Zero as a close contender. The latter uses algorithms present in state of the art "modern AI".

Well, how do you rise to the top of the capitalist hierarchy? Generally by scr...ing people along the way: Twitter violated contract by failing to pay millions in bonuses, US judge rules

The current systems don't work like chess engines (although research is in progress to move things in that direction), but the analogy is in the right ballpark. A single "brain" is simultaneously a great doctor, graphics designer, musician, analyst, lawyer, mathematician, software engineer (crucially, this could lead to self-modification and self-replication), biologist, military commander, knows how to build any known and some unknown weapons of mass destruction etc... We cannot compete with entities which know everything, just like chimps and even neanderthals could not compete with us. Sure, it's not full AGI yet, and there is no great general purpose robotic shell they can use, but Altman, Hassabis, Zuckerberg, Musk, etc. are hard at work on this. Unless the effort is stopped and banned, with the activity correctly labelled as crime against humanity, they will eventually reach their nefarious greed and power lust-driven goals. The chess analogy has another layer of depth: most humans (unlike good chess players) are very myopic, we act on impulses and tend to only really have the capacity and propensity to take care of our immediate needs. The consequence is that most people rarely think ahead, and generally struggle with long-term planning - and so are unlikely to care about this issue or see the danger coming.