Microsoft are bullet proof. Their share price will take a big hit, and an exec or two will take a golden parachute, but they'll bounce back very quickly. The bigger problem is that along the way they'll balance the capex with multiple rounds of cutbacks and layoffs in other departments, and that's before they're finally forced to layoff everyone actually connected to this AI nonsense (who isn't a senior manager or c-suite; they'll all be fine).

1. It was covered by glass, unclutch your fucking pearls already.

2. Van Gogh is my favorite painter, and I would still rather have a habitable planet for future generations than have Sunflowers. If you're more mad about this than you are about what big oil and gas companies are doing, sit down and have a good hard think about where your priorities are. I do not give a shit if you "agree with their message but not their tactics" or if you "think it makes the cause look bad" or whatever other bullshit you want to spew to cover your ass right now. Ultimately, if this caused you to feel a greater sense of righteous anger than the wholesale destruction of our environment for profit does, you are part of the problem. I'd rather side with the people who are trying to make a difference, even if I don't like how they do it, than side with the people plundering our world for personal gain.

This, exactly.

Cops love up push lines like "Getting off on a technicality" when mistrials happen. They can get fucked. It's not a "technicality", it's the police violating rules that exist to ensure that people are judged fairly and they convictions are only found in cases of genuine guilt. Those rules fucking matter, because they're one of the very few things that prevent the police from abusing their power.

Hannah Guiterrez isn't "getting off with a slap on the wrist." She was convicted of manslaughter. That's a really serious charge. If that conviction is overturned, it will be because the justice department did an absolutely piss poor job of following some really basic rules. Any outrage over that should be directed at the people who fucked up a perfectly good conviction by thinking they could just trample over people's basic rights without consequence.

I mean, the sad part is that Britain policing started out with some really good ideas. It's actually worth reading Robert Peel's principles of policing by consent sometime. They are an incredible blueprint for how to create a police force that serves the people.

Welcome to British policing.

"We have determined that this was indeed a hate crime, and therefore we'll be doing nothing. But if it happens two more times we'll congratulate them on the hat trick and offer to enroll them in the police academy."

Oh, absolutely. Altman is going to plunder this sinking ship for everything it's worth, and then bail into a CTO position somewhere else. All the C suite at OpenAI will win big no matter what, everyone else there will get fucked.

Least shocking news ever. This has clearly been in the works for a while. Not that it'll matter at this point, given that the notion of OpenAI making any profit is kind of a pipe dream right now.

This is mostly just a play to get investors to sink more money into covering their absolutely insane cash burn for another year.

Fuck yes, more Slay The Princess. One of the most brilliantly creative games I've played in years.

This pearl clutching very much reads to me like he was looking for an excuse and this was the first one that turned up.

And it gets even worse when you consider how little usable roof space the Cybertruck has.

I mean, I feel like that's several steps past the bigger issue, which is "Where the fuck are you going to find a supercharger?"

I'm a big, big fan of electric vehicles, but using one in a warzone is just unbelievably stupid.

Generation X by Douglas Copeland

Virtual Light by William Gibson

The Ocean at The End of The Lane by Neil Gaiman

Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just "swap out" the video they’re streaming

You're forgetting that the "targeted" component of their ads (while mostly bullshit) is an essential part of their business model. To do what you're suggesting they'd have to create and store thousands of different copies of each video, to account for all the different possible combinations of ads they'd want to serve to different customers.

Because it's much more expensive. What they're talking about here is basically modifying the video file as they stream it. That costs CPU/GPU cycles. Given that only about 10% of users block ads, this is only worth doing if they can get the cost down low enough that those extra ad views actually net them revenue.

Banning cars only makes sense at the municipal level. It's not something that will ever be completely practical at any larger scale than that, unless you just want to completely fuck over everyone who doesn't live in a big city.

It's more important to focus on building out better public transit infrastructure. More buses, more trains, more bike lanes, more options for people to avoid using cars, while still leaving that option available for where its needed.

Comparitively speaking, a lot less hype than their earlier models produced. Hardcore techies care about incremental improvements, but the average user does not. If you try to describe to the average user what is "new" about GPT-4, other than "It fucks up less", you've basically got nothing.

And it's going to carry on like this. New models are going to get exponentially more expensive to train, while producing less and less consumer interest each time, because "Holy crap look at this brand new technology" will always be more exciting than "In our comparitive testing version 7 is 9.6% more accurate than version 6."

And for all the hype, the actual revenue just isn't there. OpenAI are bleeding around $5-10bn (yes, with a b) per year. They're currently trying to raise around $11bn in new funding just to keep the lights on. It costs far more to operate these models (even at the steeply discounted compute costs Microsoft are giving them) than anyone is actually willing to pay to use them. Corporate clients don't find them reliable or adaptable enough to actually replace human employees, and regular consumers think they're cool, but in a "nice to have" kind of way. They're not essential enough a product to pay big money for, but they can only be run profitably by charging big money.

God that looks delicious.

NB as well. October 21st: https://www.electionsnb.ca/content/enb/en.html.html

Please show up and vote Higgs the fuck out. We deserve better than a transphobic asshole who wants to sell our healthcare to the highest bidder.

And please remember that in any Canadian election, you can register on the day at the booth if you have to. It takes five minutes as long as you bring a couple of pieces of ID (the list of what counts as acceptable ID is unbelievably long; I guarantee you'll be OK. You can even just get someone else to vouch for you are).

Don't get caught up in the horror stories from the US. Voting in Canada is incredibly fast and easy, even if you're not registered. You'll almost always be in and out in less than 20 minutes. Polls open early and stay open late, there are early voting days ahead of the actual election, and on election day your work are required to give you time off to vote if you need it. Know your rights and have your vote counted.

This is very well said.

I think what people imagine will happen, if they're thinking about the economic conundrum at all, is something rather like the Warframe economy. Players with real dollars to spare buy platinum (the premium currency), which they then either use to buy things directly from DE, or trade to other players in return for loot those players want to sell. Effectively, players flush with time grind on behalf of players flush with dollars. If there was a way to convert platinum back into dollars, it could be imagined that a player in a country with a weak currency might make a living from selling rare mods and prime parts.

In practice the reason this doesn't work is because DE would lose a huge amount of their income if players could cash out platinum. Any dollars put into the system for the purpose of buying things from other players would then leave the system when those players cash out. So there's no incentive for DE to do this. There's also the problem that you need to make a game that is actually worth putting real dollars into, and these crypto games are universally dogshit (ideal time to plug Jauwn's YouTube channel, his crypto game reviews are hilarious and really highlight what utter trash the entire field is). So no one has any incentive to buy the tokens that the play-to-earn players are trying to sell. That's a big part of why the price always instantly crashes.

The only way to make cashing out work is to have players directly sell their tokens to other players, instead of the money coming out of the developer, but that means now the players are competing with the developer on price. Whatever price the dev sells the token for becomes the ceiling. And if course, every token sold by a player basically steals income from the developer. If the dev instead gives the token out for playing the game, then there's no mechanism at all for the dev to make any money from the token, other than issuing large amounts to themselves and ultimately crashing the price by cashing out. None of these options work, and the model these games actually go with basically guarantees rug pulls as the only actual way for the developers to make any money.

Yup. Smart contracts aren't even contracts, and they certainly aren't smart.

An algorithm is, by its nature, dumb. It does the thing it's programmed to do, without any hesitation. It doesn't stop to consider the situation or ask relevant questions. This is a terrible idea for a system that facilitates trades, because all someone has to do, to use the example you cited, is wash trade a newly minted token back and forth a few times to set a price, and then find a smart contract that's happy to spew out some amount of a token you want, at the price you just set, like a busted slot machine.