This is the most nothing article on the subject that I've seen - in fact it might be an ad for the company mentioned which I will leave out to avoid also being an ad.
Orignal Star Trek did an episode on this - "A Taste of Armageddon". The war was a video game - fought on a computer. But if the virtual bombs hit your area, you were declared dead and had to a report to a disintegration chamber. If you can get past the dated special effects - the concept is the same.
This is like the future after the scenario I describe happens. But I diff, is that we keep the game, but change the medium. Humans are war oriented by nature, like chimps, but I think as the world becomes more connected, the cost of destroying one place is causing impact on other..yet there is a desire to resolve conflict in violent way.
A state actor will do those things if they're willing to be overt about their actions. Many aren't, both for the sake of preserving their image, and due to tactical concerns (e.g. you don't want to kill the golden goose).
The author mentions Packard-Bell which always just had the whiff of 2 legit companies and was enough to trick uninformed shoppers at Walmart that they were buying high end. Remember in 1999 if you didn't read Computer Shopper the only thing you knew about PCs was what you saw in TV ads.
My parents got a Packard Bell computer for a deep discount (maybe free?) for signing up for N years of Prodigy internet. It was one of my earliest computers.
I didn't realize until right now that it had no relationship to Hewlett Packard. I guess I always assumed that it was HP's budget line.
I remember seeing the department-store Packard Bell PCs on shelves. Packard Hells, I called them. About half of the display models were busted. I'm surprised that uninformed shoppers could remain uninformed after seeing that.
I worked tech support at an ISP and despaired when someone with a Packard-Bell called in. First, they'd let you know it, as though they were telling you they had a high-end Real Computer. Second, you instantly knew it'd have a cheap POS LT Winmodem that would only train up to 28.8 if the wind was blowing in the right direction, and would buffer underrun if the user tried playing an MP3 while they were downloading something.
Those shitty modems were infamous. IIRC they were also the sound card on the box and had serious issues with interrupt conflicts. It took three wizards and a dead chicken to get Doom to run stably in an online deathmatch.
Railroads, e-commerce, and AI - all useful, all were (or may be) credit/stock bubbles. Railroads however have a much better depreciation schedule than GPUs.
He isn't arguing that AI is useless. Only that Nvidia is propping up a massive financial deck of cards and that all the giant numbers being tossed around are fantasies.
The “iPhone moment” wasn’t a result of one thing, but a collection of different bits that formed an obvious whole — one device that did a bunch of things really, really well.
LLMs have no such moment, nor do they have any one thing they do well, let alone really well. LLMs are famous not for their efficacy, but their inconsistency, with even ardent AI cultists warning people not to trust their output
Am I reading this correctly? Existing routers in houses can only get firmware updates until the end of March 2027 then they need some kind of approval? How is that more secure?
Whats the average time it takes to build a solar plant versus a coal one? I would assume solar is a lot faster to first production?
reply