I am curious who buys generative AI services? The consumers seem to be people making memes or questionable porn with free services. It can’t prepare food, unblock drains or tile a bathroom. You can’t use it for anything like medicine, law or engineering where you could be professionally liable if it fucks up. How is it sustainable?
The social aspect might be underappreciated. My guess is people are mainly introduced by family and friends and it becomes a big part of their identity. It becomes difficult to separate the individual elements.
Micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS) are extremely successful. You have them in your phone and lots of other devices. It turns out semiconductor manufacturing techniques could be leveraged to make some useful devices but that is about it. There is obviously a lot happening at these scales in biology, semiconductors, materials science etc but the grey goop of nanobots turned out to be a fantasy based on extrapolations that don’t seem to hold up well with physical materials thankfully. One less thing to worry about. Now we only have climate change, pathogens, war etc. Hopefully the machine learning bubble will blow over in a similar fashion, genuinely revolutionary in some areas but increasingly difficult/uneconomical to scale into others.
They are in linux forums spruiking chatgpt/copilot as well. Mods deleted my comment the last time I told them to get lost. The rampant commercialism is so frustrating. The FOSS community has done so much to empower users/developers and give everyone the tools to learn, grow and customise their systems with amazing documentation and access to source code. And it is going to be Disneyfied within a generation with the fruits of our labor locked up behind billionaire controlled subscription services in flagrant disregard of our copyright and licences. Our kids won’t know how to tie their shoelaces without paying Nadella, Altman and their shareholders for instructions.
Request a GDPR export and you will get your entire comment history. There are tools that can read that history and delete all the comments. I did encounter errors deleting a small number of comments which may have been due to the subs being privated. I deleted the problem ones from the json and the rest got deleted. I manually checked a sample of the 12 years of comments to confirm the accessible ones were being deleted.
I have a very pragmatic view on capitalism. It isn’t inherently good or evil. Social democracy provides the best compromise where regulated capitalism generates wealth and funds innovation while responsible democratic government protects employees and the environment and provides services that have a strong social benefit.
Unfortunately social democratic policies are undermined in many countries and resisted in others to the point where some young people become frustrated and look to answers in hateful extremist politics which really is a horseshoe.
Regulated capitalism can direct capital to innovation in low/zero emission technologies and disincentivize investment in polluting technology very effectively,. More effectively than a corrupt command economy could do it. Fossil fuel companies have fought against interventions to push the market towards alternatives but the biggest failure has been on the political class and voters who haven’t done enough to push the market in the correct direction. Photo voltaics, storage technology and wind turbines have received a lot of investment and are growing rapidly despite the work of the big polluters to stall action.
Windows gamers and reviewers seemed to not realize AMD cpu performance was nerfed on Windows until the latest gen AMD release. From time to time there have also been issues with Windows scheduling for Intel cpus. Including a competing OS in comparisons allows reviewers to sanity check stuff like that. Wendell had the most balanced reviews because he was presenting cross platform and productivity along with Windows gaming performance. When Microsoft held a monopoly that sort of reviewing wasn’t possible. You had no idea if Windows was nerfing particular platforms or why.
Overall Linux gaming might be worse or some titles really bad but lets get it out in the open. It will be good for all consumers because it will drive improvement.