Mailbox.org works for me.

Indeed. My Alienware doubles as a space heater in my north facing office.

Awesome! Send them to Canada, we can build data centres and sell the cloud services back to Americans powered by the electricity that we expect to be tarriffed, and cooled by the water we won’t sell.

Kiss of the Spider Woman. Back I the 80s our parents left us to fend for ourselves. I was around 10 years old and my parents were at a job site in northern Canada where the only channel was CBC. Definitely an intense movie, I’d say more than the Exorcism which aired another night. My brother missed the first, but had serious nightmares from the Exorcism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_of_the_Spider_Woman_(1985_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exorcist

Energy conservation has been part of that messaging. Running appliances and low peak times etc. All of that is out the window for AI.

Energy conservation is the dumbest thing we have ever talked about. For prosperity and well being, electricity should be cheap and plentiful. It’s pollution and greenhouse gases that need to be curtailed. Another mixed up policy mess of messaging, and it is being unravelled by AI.

Clean electricity should be so cheap that every other option isnt feasible. Instead, it’s talk conservation, reducing wealth and quality of life.

Duolingo is a game for points and badges. it’s not actually useful for learning anything.

Vegan leather. Not made out of vegans. Actually made out of polyurethane: oil: check, microplastics: check, disposable with a short usable life: check!

Powering off a pile of switches is turning it off. Powering off a sentient being is killing it. Not to mention a million other issues it raises.

Growing up years ago, I found a book on my parents bookshelf. I wish I’d kept track of it, but it had a cartoon of 2 Martians standing on Mars watching the Earth explode and one commented to the other along the lines that intelligent life forms must have lived there to accomplish such a feat. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time, but it’s stuck with me.

It only took a Facebook recommendation engine with some cell phones to excite people into murdering each other in the ongoing Rohingya genocide. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html

We don’t need AI, and at this point it uses so much electricity that it is probably the first thing that would get shut down in a shit hits the fan moment.

Roger Penrose wrote a whole book on the topic in 1989. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/179744.The_Emperor_s_New_Mind

His points are well thought out and argued, but my essential takeaway is that a series of switches is not ever going to create a sentient being. The idea is absurd to me, but for the people that disagree? They have no proof, just a religious furver, a fanaticism. Simply stated, they want to believe.

All this AI of today is the AI of the 1980s, just with more transistors than we could fathom back then, but the ideas are the same. After the massive surge from our technology finally catching up with 40-60 year old concepts and algorithms, most everything has been just adding much more data, generalizing models, and other tweaks.

What is a problem is the complete lack of scalability and massive energy consumption. Are we supposed to be drying our clothes at a specific our of the night, and join smart grids to reduce peak air conditioning, to scorn bitcoin because it uses too much electricity, but for an AI that generates images of people with 6 fingers and other mangled appendages, that bullshit anything it doesn’t know, for that we need to build nuclear power plants everywhere. It’s sickening really.

So no AGI anytime soon, but I am sure Altman has defined it as anything that can make his net worth 1 billion or more, no matter what he has to say or do.

I’m very impressed by the work by the Elementary OS team. Linux is a beast to figure out, and while I’ve used Linux for 30 years, I remember how frustrating getting started was. I use Pop!_OS on my desktop machines today and Debian or Ubuntu for other machines and I’ve used dozens of desktops, but Elementary really does just work (and also also happens to be Debian / Ubuntu based).

It has the easiest install process, trouble free device support, and it starts you with guardrails that keep from breaking things, but can be turned off as you figure it out. Very Mac inspired experience, so not completely intuitive from Windows, but the reality of Linux is that you are going to change distros over time, or even use multiple as each do a better job at dealing with niche requirements. Certaintly not the one size that fits no one that is the current Windows 11 debacle.

https://elementary.io/

Edit: Wine math last night, it was summer of 1994 so 30 years, not 35 😅. It was on my new AMD 486DX4/100 with VLB and getting X to work was no picnic. A friend gave me the CD ROMs so at least I wasn’t using dialup to download it.

YouTube ruined Christmas. I can’t stand my relatives anymore, they watch every conspiracy clip and now they are a thousand miles down the rabbit hole and I can’t handle them for more than a few days a year. I hate evil Google or alphabet, or whatever they call themselves.

“With regard to the algorithms used to hash data – particularly SHA-224 and SHA-256 – Buchanan expressed surprise that neither will be approved for use beyond 2030.”

Sounds like corruption to me. Hey gov’t pal, let’s make crazy requirements for security due to a quantum boogyman so I can sell you consultants and all new equipment with insane processing capabilities for a shit ton of money. Look for the greasy palms.

Decades of research and we are at 100 qbits and estimates are bouncing around that estimate it will take millions. Once we build them, job #1 will be reading government email?

Maybe, but it’s a lot easier just to use backdoors, software bugs, spies, and good ol’ bribes.

Yet companies are still pushing 2FA over the PSTN. IMO, it’s worse than no 2FA since some companies have processes that essentially trust the outcome as a full validation. I can’t think of a less secure channel.

If we just send all the offensive words into the memory hole then people will stop thinking bad thoughts about groups of people. We can erase it right out of history and everything will be better. Control the language, control the thoughts. Thanks Ministry of Truth! 🥸

Of course not. They were taking notes as they expect to be next in line to grind the peasants.

The other concern is censorship. Essentially a movie that you bought is on a server and then someone’s decided that words, content, or scenes are no longer appropriate. The video, song, etc, is different from the original and without any notification. The old scenes get sent to the memory hole. Oh dear Winston, I fear we will meet soon!

Backup was on Azure. I get the sentiment on the cloud, but there is no excuse for this incompetence at Google.

It’s great, I use it on 3 machines. Gigabyte Intel laptop with Nvidia GPU, Alien AMD desktop with Nvidia, and a Lenovo Intel desktop with AMD GPU. The separate installer for Nvidia GPUs is an awesome idea and took away my biggest headache (Nvidia driver issues). Installs were a breeze, performance is great. Laptop sleep /wake is very reliable. Intuitive UI and minimal fiddling meant I could get to work instead of troubleshooting issues. I only use Windows occasionally now for a couple games and Windows apps. I highly recommend.

For a developer, I’d try PopOS! It is built on Ubuntu, but doesn’t stray far from it. It has a lot of developer tools and packages either pre installed or easy to access. Simple install process and runs well.

https://pop.system76.com/