Also as an actual digital currency BTC is shite. A transfer of BTC will take 45 minutes on average, for 1 confirmation, and you need to pay TX fees for this to happen. At one point you had to pay $2 - $5 to guarantee you'd be in that 1st confirm window, otherwise you could be waiting literally days for your tx to confirm on the blockchain.
The BTC bros first said "use Lightning network braah" yet I've never actually seen the Lightning network used ever. Then the BTC bros said "braah you are trying to use BTC as a digital currency? lol it's a store of value braah".
That is when you know the thing is only an irrational hype machine, just like Tulip bulbs were.

For a real digital currency that people actually take you can use Litecoin, which TX in 2 - 10 minutes (still way too long to be useful for a shop merchant) with TX fees in the cents (LTC value hovers around $40 per LTC) or some of the privacy focused coins out there.

I started buying BTC at $500 a BTC unfortunately I spent it all immediately after buying instead of holding it, or I'd be very rich yes, but even back then I couldn't see how BTC could possibly go higher than $1000. But that was before I realised just how greedy and irrational people (especially those at the top) are. Now it is way too late.

Agreed, I run IT for a school district, at $800+ these are a non starter, unless they have somehow made them indestructible.

At $200 or below for a Chromebook, they are worth it as the damages can be replaced/repaired fairly cheaply. If you have school supplied ones, you can outfit trolleys of them at not so high a cost. If parents provide them, $200 isn't as big of an ask as $800. I would not want to be a school administrator arguing with parents who claim that their $800 Chromebook "just broke" when it has obviously been smashed up.

These things aren't very robust, even the more expensive models, the screens are fragile and can break just by being in a backpack when kids are being kids. The letters are easy to pry off by hand.

Paying $800+ for these things is way too much when for a school the AI isn't even what you want - it can even be a downgrade when pupils are supposed to be doing their own work and instead ask an AI to do it for them. How are kids going to learn when they have an AI doing everything for them? ChromeOS is already bad enough with abstracting away file paths, file origins etc.

Schools in various countries are now going "back to basics", less is more. If I were to design a Chromebook or computer for school use - it would be cheap, low powered, and robustly built. But I don't think the tech is really there yet e.g. a color 60fps E-ink display. Entire SoC with only i/o ports needed on a board. But of course the profit margins wouldn't be that high (that is if $800 Chromebooks will sell at all, I can't see many but the richest school districts picking these up)

Do we actually have any evidence for any of these AI models autonomously hacking into outside webservers, and doing all of this nefarious stuff? Recently I looked into an AI agent to take care of a high school's internal intranet (basically have admin access, and respond to queries such as "replace attendance poster X with this one" by normal human users. And I found such a thing was well beyond any AI agent I could find. At most they could seem to be a fancy kind of autocomplete.

So when I hear stories of these kinds of things, I can't help but feel like there were human researchers behind the scenes prompting the AI's to do such things. We then go from the AI being a really good hacking tool, to anthropomorphising these things into "omg they hide their thoughts from us and just can't wait to do us bad!"

A contract is a contract is a contract. But only among Ferengi

The Elites can and are "interpereting" those "checks and balances" to mean whatever they want them to mean. E.G. Corporate officials bribing officials etc. Turns out Money is Speech, it's not really a bribe after all. I thought Bribe meant to corruptly pay an official for a favor. Checks and Balances.
Expect them to do much more "interpereting" in the near future. Does Two really mean 1 and then another 1 ?

I don't know, Trump loves sycophants but he still knows how to do politics. He can pardon some Democrat politician nobody has really heard of, but there are some people who are just toxic. SBF is toxic, Trump knows this, he knows any pardon will look very bad and Trump loves looking good almost as much as money.

And don't forget SBF lost a lot of the 1%'s money, I can't see Trump pardoning any such person, the moment he floats an SPF pardon among his 1% friends they'll quietly tell him it's a no go.

Ironic you posting that you didn't bother to read everything he wrote on a post about low standards of reading...

I don't think I'd want to go toe to toe with an armed robot that can recognise and aim straight at a human forehead in 0.01 seconds... A different strategy will be needed.
Of course these current gen robots a slight breeze will blow them over so we have some time yet

Yes; as far as I'm aware the definition of AGI is - an AI that can handle general intelligence like a human can. That would mean visually too; not just recognising a dog or a cat; but understanding and navigating a 3D environment; following multiple complicated steps to solve a complicated problem etc.

OpenAI has not demonstrated this in any way; therefor I can say I "know" OpenAI has no AGI. Of course they could have some hidden model stashed away, but then you could say that Tesla has a car that can run on water hidden away, or that Microsoft has a decent OS stashed away.

Unless I see proof I'm not going to believe it and so far there is no proof.

Show me the model that can run on my desktop and field all my desktop support calls. A ticket comes in "help the Internet is down I can't get on" - where does it go from there.

What these guys will do is just redefine AGI "We never said human intelligence, it says General, and our model can do poems and analyse images, see it's general".
But all the hype about AGI radically changing our world - a model that can't really do anything by itself - isn't going to change the world much now is it

As long as I'm not one of the 5 or so people left alive for the Master Computer to torment...

Yes exactly. If we can force teenagers/children to do these things "for their own good" - we can do this for adults as well.
Every overweight adult should be forced to exercise one hour a day, and should have their vehicle taken from them 1 day a week as well, to promote cycling.
After all obesity has much more harm than social media and it is for their own good, right ?

Yeah this is nonsense, at least for opioid addiction. I've heard many "miracle cures" for it before; all of the treatments we have (apart from Ibogaine which I've not tried) involve substitution and taper, or meds to ease symptoms while your neurons "heal" (readjust to baseline).

There's no way a treatment can make your neurons go back to the pre-dependent state in 20 minutes at least not without this potentially having the capability to be really dangerous to the brain. They make it sound like this guy was full blown dependent, put on this helmet for 20 minutes, then walked out of there fine and dandy no withdrawals fully cured. Ultrasound especially what is it going to wiggle the neurons back the way they were?

And unless the guy was already full blown dopesick he will still have opioids in his system. Was this guy the only patient? None of it makes sense

Yes but one thing that has changed since then - Apple products are now more fashion accessories than anything else; that wasn't true for the general public back then.

People will pay $2000 for a handbag when a $50 handbag is available made of the exact same materials in the exact same factory - why? Because of that logo. Conspicuous consumption - the average human is dumb. Sometimes increasing the price of a luxury/sumptuous good can actually make it more attractive, again "you can show off what you got".

Most people I know who use Apple products do it for the logo alone (despite saying "muh usability", please, modern Apple interfaces are not intuitive and also I've noticed most Apple users barely know how to operate their own products, including teenagers) - and they'll pay an extra $1000 to have that logo.

So any other brand pricing themselves this high would be a disaster, but not for LV, Gucci, or Apple

In school I was issued $5 of printer credits for free each month, if I needed more I had to buy them; this meant you couldn't abuse the privileges by printing out 1000 copies of "CowboyNeal Sucks" over and over.
So you would think they could issue so many searches to the officers and any that go over could be flagged.
This would be an admin headache and cost money so I doubt it will go anywhere. Plus I've always been a proponent of "trust your employees" but it seems in this case that might be a little bit naive.

Because it shows intent - this is what the powers that be want for all of us. It was fun to joke about the UK, believing this was some kooky thing the UK government came up with all by itself. But the truth is the UK was a trial run for this increased surveillance; now they are happy with how it has gone they will roll this out in more Western countries. Utah and I hear Texas will be next; France has done something similar, Red states will start it off in the US but it will spread country wide before long.
Part of it being increased surveillance, the radical anti-porn lunatics can push their agenda, but ultimately I can see you needing a China style Digital ID - you must authenticate to your named account before being allowed Internet Access.

But the big joke is, even in China, people routinely bypass the Great Firewall to such an extent that the bigger barrier for Chinese browsing Western sites is actually the language barrier not the technical barrier. So our "betters" will want even more draconian Internet laws than even China has yet daring to bleat to us about "freedom" because I can buy 9mm ammunition in Walmart. (they fear us having uncensored Internet access more than they fear us having sidearms)

I remember posts on here, in the 90's and early 2000's, about why the Electric Car was impossible, because of the same energy density of gasoline vs batteries reasons as now. Plus a host of other issues, battery degradation, toxic NiCad materials, etc. None of those posters seemed to have conceived that the technology would improve over time and a few of these posters even argued that this energy density problem showed the laws of physics themselves proved a practical electric car is impossible to exist in our universe.

It's sad to see a site of so called tech geeks can be so utterly short sighted