Fits law starts to break down when using a large 4k monitor, or even multiple monitors. It's much quicker to aim for a menubar that's local to the window I'm working in. Maybe old-school Next-style popup menu palettes may end up being the best way to go forward with large, multiple monitors.

Fortunately ublock origin is still managing to block slashdot ads. Every once in a while I'll get a message about html-load.com not working but not often. Whoever is behind html-load they are slimy and dishonest, and shame on slashdot for buying into them.

It's going into the oceans, just so the combination of pH fuckery and increased warming turns the world's oceans into an tepid acidic brine.

Yes, but you do realize that if the environment was so finely balanced that the extinction of a handful of the thousands of mosquito species were enough to cause an ecosystem collapse on such a massive scale that it eradicated humans then such an event would already have happened and we would not be here discussing it as a possibility?

Really? It is _much_ easier to repopulate them than to eradicate them - mosquitoes breed fast under ideal conditions which is something very easy to provide so that makes it a very viable back-up plan in the very unlikely event that we need it. I'm all for a cautious approach but surrendering to irrational fears of an insanely unlikely - and arguably basically impossible - consequence is, well irrational. If you are that concerned about miniscule probabilities, don't worry it is much more likely that we'll all be wiped out by an extinction-level meteoroid impact before anything like this happens.

I've mentioned this before, but I had Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude jointly design me an aircraft, along with its engines. The sheer intricacy and complexity of the problem is such that it can take engineers years to get to what all three AIs agree is a good design. Grok took a look at as much as it could, before running out of space, and agreed it was sound.

Basically, I gave an initial starting point (a historic aircraft) and had each in turn fix issues with the previous version, until all three agreed on correctness.

This makes it a perfectly reasonable sanity check. If an engineer who knows what they're doing looks at the design and spots a problem, then AI has and intrinsic problem with complex problems, even when the complexity was iteratively produced by the AI itself.

You seriously think the screenshots in the article look spectacular? You must have young eyes still. To me it looks like a blurry low-contrast grey-white mess. Wonder what their dark mode looks like.

Actually, the warning was first sounded the warning was Svante Arrhenius in 1896, when he determined the UV absorption properties of CO2 and came to the pretty fucking obvious conclusion, based on chemistry and thermodynamics, that if you increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, you will inevitably, as a basic function of physics, increase energy absorption.

So we can add chemistry to the list of things you're deliberately ignorant of.

Fuck, is stupidity and willful ignorance now viewed as a virtue? Or is it just sociopathy?

Although this is earlier than the current AI stuff, I do think we are missing something serious about how human brains work, because a child can learn to recognize a dog with only seeing perhaps a dozen dogs, they do not need to see ten million dogs and ten million "not dogs" pictures.

It is worth noting even the easiest puzzles here are puzzles which many, if not most humans, cannot solve. The fact that we're now evaluating AI reasoning based on puzzles above human baseline should itself be pretty alarming. But instead we've moved the goalposts and so are reassuring ourselves that the AIs cannot easily solve genuinely tricky puzzles.

Existing energy infrastructure already pays for "capacity" thats not being used, to older systems like natural gas and coal. This is necessary because energy production MUST match energy demand or someone's lights are going out. When an energy source (power plant) on a reasonably big grid suddenly goes offline ("trips out"), the grid can tolerate it but drops dangerously low. Other plants that are only putting out say 70% of their capacity quickly spin up to max production to cover this shortfall and bring the grid back up to a safe level. (usually in terms of grid frequency)

These plants don't want to just sit at 70% production most of the time, that costs money to have capacity and not be SELLING it. So the grid pays them a percentage of the going rate for their unused capacity, because the grid MUST have some reserve in case of the previously described situation. They're being paid to have (but not USE) capacity. ie be a "safety net". If we weren't willing to pay them something for this unused reserve, then they'd have no reason to invest in having it in the first place.

Renewable energy sources (like wind and solar) are in similar situations. When its windy and sunny, they produce plentiful, cheap energy. During those times, non-renewable plants can shut down or throttle back, saving consumers a lot of money with their cheap energy. But sometimes production exceeds demand. It depends on the time of day or day of week. (and even time of year) Solar and wind aren't just "on" or "off". Once you get enough of them online, there's going to be periods of time where more energy can be produced than can be used. (and storing energy is hard - we're just getting going with grid batteries) But if you want all that delicious cheap power during the peak use, you've got to give them something for the times they have more power than you need.

So there's nothing new about "paying for capacity", we've been doing that for decades. It IS slightly more annoying though, since this is "leaving money on the table" since that capacity is essentially "free" power not being used. (no coal or natural gas required) That's just the thing with most renewables, they produce power on their own schedule, not when it's convenient for us. We need to improve our energy storage infrastructure. I'm not sure why this is only "becoming obvious" now, it's been a known issue for decades. Maybe it's just been a matter of waiting for better energy storage technology, or maybe it's a "we'll bring up this added expense after we're done paying for the wind and solar plants"?

All this means that just like the hydrocarbon plants, renewable plants need to get paid something for the time they spend not being fully used, because other times we NEED them to run at full capacity.

This isn't a problem that's going to go away on its own. We've got A LOT more ways to make power than to store it. Batteries are probably the best solution in the short term, but they're relatively large for what they store and are expensive. Pumped storage (dams) are the grand-daddies of energy storage, but have very specific geographic requirements. Molten salt is often considered (especially for solar) but has technical challenges and limited capacity. We really haven't found anything so far that works better than batteries, and it's not for lack of trying. So for now you can expect we're just going to have to keep paying energy plants (of all types) for unused capacity.

I hope that you are incorrect, because they've been doing some pretty solid work in the area(albeit still at the stage where you are betting on them continuing to do driver support); but the moves like "don't be a total dick about RAM allocations like Nvidia" definitely seem like they could end up on the chopping block if a myopic spreadsheet cruncher gets a look at them.

"Some of our early testing with the components we've turned off in Windows, we get about 2GB of memory going back to the games while running in the full-screen experience." is one of those sentences where they guy specifically working on this project sounds like he has done his job; but it really makes you wonder what the hell MS is thinking with the standard setup. It's not like the win11 shell is especially compelling or feature rich; and games' expectations of the platform are weird and varied enough that this wouldn't work if it were some kind of 'disable legacy jank' mode.

Natural NNs appear to use recursive methods.

What you "see" is not what your eyes observe, but rather a reconstruction assembled entirely from memories that are triggered by what your eyes observe, which is why the reconstructions often have blind spots.

Time seeming to slow down (even though experiments show that it doesn't alter response times), daydreaming, remembering, predicting, etc, the brain's searching for continuity, the episodic rather than snapshot nature of these processes, and the lack of any gap during sleep, is suggestive of some sort of recursion, where the output is used as some sort of component of the next input and where continuity is key.

We know something of the manner of reconstruction - there are some excellent, if rather old, documentary series, one by James Burke and another by David Eagleman, that give elementary introductions to how these reconstructions operate and the physics that make such reconstructions necessary.

It's very safe to assume that neuroscientists would not regard these as anything better than introductions, but they are useful for looking for traits we know the brain exhibits (and why) that are wholly absent from AI.

They're not replicating our capabilities, nor could they. The architecture is completely wrong, as is the design philosophy. Brains are not classifiers, the way neural network software is, they are abstraction engines and dynamic compositors.