Companies try to maximize green per red. By paying less, and getting the same, they maximize that, year after year until (in a temporary and unforeseeable setback) you leave for… Bluer pastures, apparently.

There are different sorts of companies, and the more they think of employees as a number of years of experience plus a stack of skills, the more susceptible they are to believing that replacing humans with other equally skilled humans is a productive way to spend their time.

Have you tried turning them off, then turning them on again?

I think we’re still headed up the peak of inflated expectations. Quantum computing may be better at a category of problems that do a significant amount of math on a small amount of data. Traditional computing is likely to stay better at anything that requires a large amount of input data, or a large amount of output data, or only uses a small amount of math to transform the inputs to the outputs.

Anything you do with SQL, spreadsheets, images, music and video, and basically anything involved in rendering is pretty much untouchable. On the other hand, a limited number of use cases (cryptography, cryptocurrencies, maybe even AI/ML) might be much cheaper and fasrer with a quantum computer. There are possible military applications, so countries with big militaries are spending until they know whether that’s a weakness or not. If it turns out they can’t do any of the things that looked possible from the expectation peak, the whole industry will fizzle.

As for my opinion, comparing QC to early silicon computers is very misleading, because early computers improved by becoming way smaller. QC is far closer to the minimum possible size already, so there won’t be a comparable, “then grow the circuit size by a factor of ten million” step. I think they probably can’t do anything world shaking.

You can buy high (97-99) CRI LEDs for things like the film industry, where it really does matter. They are very expensive, but can pay for themselves with longer service life, and lower power draw for long term installations.

The CRI on regular LED bulbs was climbing for a long time, but it seems as though 90ish is “good enough” most of the time.

You can just issue new certificates one per year, and otherwise keep your personal root CA encrypted. If someone is into your system to the point they can get the key as you use it, there are bigger things to worry about than them impersonating your own services to you.

A lot of businesses use the last 4 digits separately for some purposes, which means that even if it’s salted, you are only getting 110,000 total options, which is trivial to run through.

Don’t joke about this, the college professors will hear you.

He only believes in the first 22 words of the first amendment. If you want to speak about what he has done, or (far worse) gather with others that share your beliefs to speak extra loud… straight to jail.

Inflation is wild. Just a few decades ago, you could get this kind of thing for just an arm and a leg.

The problem when photon containment breaks like this is that we can never be 100% sure which photons were SUPPOSED to be there, and which ones leaked out. We’ll need a dedicated team of particle physicists with very small tweazers to have any hope of sorting out this mess.

So you’re saying my proposed imperial units depend on where you are, and who is using them, for what purpose? That just sells me on them as imperial units even more. :)

Thank you for the details.

From smallest to biggest:

Bits (basic unit)

Bytes (8:1 reduction)

Words (4:1 reduction)

KiB (32:1 reduction)

MiB (1024:1)

GiB (1024:1)

TiB (1024:1)

PiB (1024:1)

A normal amount of porn (237:1)

What we have done is invented massive, automatic, no holds barred pattern recognition machines. LLMs use detected patterns in text to respond to questions. Image recognition is pattern recognition, with some of those patterns named things (like “cat”, or “book”). Image generation is a little different, but basically just flips the image recognition on its head, and edits images to look more like the patterns that it was taught to recognize.

This can all do some cool stuff. There are some very helpful outcomes. It’s also (automatically, ruthlessly, and unknowingly) internalizing biases, preferences, attitudes and behaviors from the billion plus humans on the internet, and perpetuating them in all sorts of ways, some of which we don’t even know to look for.

This makes its potential applications in medicine rather terrifying. Do thousands of doctors all think women are lying about their symptoms? Well, now your AI does too. Do thousands of doctors suggest more expensive treatments for some groups, and less expensive for others? AI can find that pattern.

This is also true in law (I know there’s supposed to be no systemic bias in our court systems, but AI can find those patterns, too), engineering (any guesses how human engineers change their safety practices based on the area a bridge or dam will be installed in? AI will find out for us), etc, etc.

The thing that makes AI bad for some use cases is that it never knows which patterns it is supposed to find, and which ones it isn’t supposed to find. Until we have better tools to tell it not to notice some of these things, and to scrub away a lot of the randomness that’s left behind inside popular models, there’s severe constraints on what it should be doing.

Yeah, but then you have to limit your fashion selection! Imagine restricting yourself to wearing a hat over some silly fear of death.

“You wouldn’t put on a tricorn hat, would you?”

I actually would, if I could find a nice one…

“…and leave your job to sail the seas?”

… That’s an option? I didn’t even consider-

“And you certainly wouldn’t drink rum, and fire cannons, and carry a saber and tell silly parrot related puns.”

buys a tricorn hat

The quote of him in the article doesn’t sound like it’s a complaint. I think only the headline is pushing that angle. 200 pounds sounds pretty reasonable, given it has to be worth his time to get to the recording, listen to any feedback/change requests, etc.

I consistently don’t buy games that aren’t ready by being a patient shopper, and watching reviews or gameplay before spending money. If you consistently jump on the hype train, buy a copy before knowing anything about the state of the game, and then “complain” to fix it, I have news:

10/10 AAA publishers would rather have $60 and a complaint than $0.

Due diligence is the solution, publishers are now very practiced at weathering criticism.

Last time I tried freecad, the geometry solver was incorrect, so it would sometimes create two (or more) shapes from a fully constrained part. Since learning about openSCAD, I’ve seen no reason to give it another try.

I’m an extremely wealthy arabic numeral, and all my wealth is tied up in high quality French made cookware. If you pay shipping, I’ll deliver a truckload of cookware to your commercial warehouse facility, and you can keep one pallet as payment.

I accept Steam gift cards, Bitcoins, and pork belly futures.

Where’s my underappreciated, but definitely real “cone rhymes with gone, but not with scone” gang?