Should've asked for the two songs to be: What's New Pussycat, and It's Not Unusual.

Fun fact: Victorinox has been operating since 1884 and has never had to lay off an employee.

To avoid this they set aside profits during boom periods to supplement recessionary periods

What a novel idea.

https://labor411.org/411-blog/this-company-has-never-laid-off-an-employee-100-of-which-have-been-with-the-company-for-over-40-years/

Every time I see a headline like this I'm reminded of the time I heard someone describe the modern state of AI research as equivalent to the practice of alchemy.

Long before anyone knew about atoms, molecules, atomic weights, or electron bonds, there were dudes who would just mix random chemicals together in an attempt to turn lead to gold, or create the elixir of life or whatever. Their methods were haphazard, their objectives impossible, and most probably poisoned themselves in the process, but those early stumbling steps eventually gave rise to the modern science of chemistry and all that came with it.

AI researchers are modern alchemists. They have no idea how anything really works and their experiments result in disaster as often as not. There's great potential but no clear path to it. We can only hope that we'll make it out of the alchemy phase before society succumbs to the digital equivalent of mercury poisoning because it's just so fun to play with.

Remember kids: the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.

Actual quote from Adam Savage on an episode of Mythbusters.

Maxim 43: If it's stupid and it works, it's still stupid and you're lucky.

I mean, this is definitely going to be a disaster but I think the title and article here are a little misleading. The author implies that Warner Brothers is spearheading (and paying for) this venture, but I just read through the buzzword salad of a press release and it barely mentions them. The project is driven by an independent company that licensed the ready player one IP from WB. The whole thing very carefully avoids any details about money changing hands, but my guess is either that WB is getting paid, or they've negotiated a cut of any theoretical future profits. Of course, the chances of there ever being profits are slim to none, but I'd say at worst they're net $0 on the deal, and at best they actually made some money by getting paid up front. They might suffer some reputation damage if it becomes a real catastrophe, but as the author of the article mentioned they are billions in debt, so its probably a risk they're happy to take.

You say that like they havent been? The price per kWh for lithium batteries has been consistently falling for over a decade. I see no reason to believe that this tech wouldn't result in further price decreases if it could be built at scale.

There's a recent video from Hank Green outlining the very compelling argument for abandoning coal power in strictly economic terms. It turns out that even if you ignore the big picture environmental impacts like global warming and acid rain, and you also ignore the localized impacts like air pollution and chemical waste, and you ignore the other negative externalities like long term health effects on the workers, then coal is still hard to justify because natural gas plants are simply more profitable.

Not to say that we should be ignoring any of those things, but just to make a point about how impossible it is to make a good faith argument for coal in today's world.

https://youtu.be/IfvBx4D0Cms

I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.

Relevant XKCD

Suddenly I want to see a super smash bros knockoff where all the playable characters are public domain, and every January 1st they release an update with new characters that lost copyright protection in the past year.

If the developer wants to fight this and Rossman wants to back them, then more power to them both. Obviously Bambu shouldn't be allowed to get away with this. But it does seem unfortunate that the best case scenario would be the developer winning the right to continue doing unpaid work to make their aggressor's products better. Perhaps an alternative would be for a more FOSS friendly printer company to offer a free replacement for the developer's Bambu machine so that they can instead contribute to a platform where their work will actually be valued.

It's a movement driven in no small part by rage. By people who looked at [the financial crash of] 2008 - who looked at the system as it exists - but concluded that the problems with capitalism were that it didn't provide enough opportunities to be the boot.

All credit to Dan Olson's masterpeice video Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go watch the whole thing again.

If you were actually hoping to buy one but the rounded corners are a dealbreaker, then you may be interested to know that the DIY edition lets you mix and match the older display with the newer motherboards. Looks like opting for the older display even saves you $130 on the purchase price.

For what its worth, Slotin in particular knew the consequences. If i recall correctly, he had a reputation for being a bit of a "cowboy" when it came to experimental protocol. I believe the lab even had specially made tools for handling the core, but Slotin insisted on using a screwdriver because it was easier.

The sample data shared in the article includes

"c": "ES", // Country code,

ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.

At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within OPs laundry room?

Your thoughts are very similar to mine. The usefulness of machine learning to bridge the gap between the endlessly messy real world and the strictly regimented digital one can't be overstated, but throwing all your problems into an LLM chatbot is never going to yield good results. Case in point is the AlphaFold project which used AI to basically solve one of the hardest problems in modern biochemistry. They didn't do it by asking ChatGPT to "please fold this protein for me" they did it by assembling a multi-disciplinary team with a deep technical understanding of the problem and building a fully custom machine learning system which was designed from the ground up for the sole purpose of predicting protein structures. That's applied AI. All these so-called AI startups who's product is basically a coat of paint and a custom system prompt on the ChatGPT API are nothing more than app developers chasing the latest trend.

Incidentally, I had a very similar experience to your "Exchange Server / Exchange Online" problem. I was asked to make updates to an old VBS code base, and VBS is a language that I have neither experience with nor interest in learning, so I was using a chatbot to try and save a few minutes on some super simple beginner level questions. It kept confidently spitting out answers for VBA code, which is similar to, but very much not the same as VBS.

I'm reminded of a quote from an old Tom Scott video. He's visiting a modern reconstruction of a Neolithic long barrow. Tom points out that the sun lines up with the entrance on the summer solstice, then it cuts to the owner who says

I think a lot of people would assume that getting the alignments of a monument like this... would involve complex calculations, a sharp pencil, and computing power. But in fact, you can do it just as easily by getting up at the right time with some sticks.

I read something a while ago that really put all these "ancient mysteries" into perspective: Modern humans with modern brains have existed in our current form for at least tens of thousands of years. During that time we've seen huge advancement as a society thanks to the accumulation and sharing of scientific knowledge, but any individual human today has no more brainpower than one living 10,000 years ago.

In other words, if we can sit around today and brainstorm a dozen different ways to build a pyramid with nothing but ramps and levers, there's absolutely no reason to think that the smartest builders in ancient egypt couldn't have come up withl the same ideas or better.

Attributing these achievements to aliens, or divine intervention, or anything other than raw human ingenuity is a disservice to our ancestors.