I submit as an alternative hypothesis the rise of computers and interactive entertainment as a cause.

The rise of computers since 1970 coincides with the timing.

The interactive nature of computers in general engage the brain more than just watching tv (3 channels old timey tv), listening to radio, or even reading the newspaper. Games in particular engage the brain much more than being a couch potato. Social media allows faster, easier, and more frequent interactions. The quality of these brain engagements can be argued but I think the net effect for the average person is significantly higher. Just think about how many hours are spent reading news, playing games or even watching cat videos vs staring out the window on a train... staring at the display on the elevator... or looking at your watch on the train platform.

>> Children born since the 1970s were the first of subsequent generations whos life expectancy is lower than that of their parents, this is why.

Unclear.. life expectancy as a whole has been rising steadily. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F.... Any graph on the right hand side.

The idea that children will have lower life expectancy is at an educated expectation based primarily on the increase in childhood obesity and the expected subsequent diabetes and heart disease issues.

The problem with this assertion is that it doesn't take into account the effects of continuing medical intervention. Dying from obesity related issues has dropped by a factor of 4 in Britain as a result of medical advances in recent years for instance. There was a meta analysis that even suggested that being overweight actually increased life expectancy. But I think the biggest confounding factor are the new class of GLP1 medications which have the potential to completely crush the obesity epidemic.

The actual money per employee isn't actually mentioned so saying it's more "Than Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix Combined" is clickbaity in my opinion. The actual number could be $90 per hour or just slightly more than Facebook (#2) for all we know. I doubt it's more than $210 per hour which would be what the others "combined" implies.

As an aside, I worked at a startup where the per income was over $1m. It's fairly common for a highly functioning small tech company.

If normal enzymes/etc can't deal with the chirality of the new organism then likely the new organism can't deal with the chirality of the natural species.

I'm not even sure how you would keep something like this alive let alone have it dominate the world. I mean it likely can't handle natural D-chiral sugars (right handed) so what's it going to eat except some left handed sugars made by chemists in the lab? If it gets out... it'll just starve to death.

Likewise l-chiral amino acids (normal amino acids) would probably choke one of these anti-chiral organisms..

The objective is to replace people with automation... especially in vehicles. That's the most economically and societally impactful use of AI.

This clearly isn't going to work any time soon. No matter what Musk claims nor who's ear he has.. automated driving isn't even close and he's been lying for over a decade.

This is one of those things that bean counters do without thinking about the whole picture.

When I worked at nVidia, they would offer free food at 6pm. It was basically rice with some chicken slop on top of it... couldn't have cost more than $3 to make but the line of engineers waiting for it was staggering. So they basically got an hour of an engineer's time with $3... plus they were happy. Amazing returns on investment.

Coffee? Caffeine is the life blood of engineers. Cutting that off is pure stupidity.

It's like the hot dogs at Costco. Yeah they're losing money per hot dog but if you look at the big picture... it's the best investment they have.

GLP-1s like Rybelsus, Ozempic and soon Retratrutide will crush obesity in the near future as supplies increase, patents expire and prices drop. Also, chronic application of GLP-1s has been shown to lower blood pressure. Obesity and BP are 2 major factors of CVD (cardiovascular disease) so I suspect that this issue will become moot long before 2050.

I asked chatGPT to create a data structure in python that can hold the data described in Table XX.X in the document at the link www.XXX.XXX/XXX.pdf. About the only useful thing I got out of the thing was the name of the pdf document. At least I know it can read a pdf. The rest I might as well have typed "sample python data structure" in google. It completely ignored the data in the table and just spit out some random data struct that has no connection with the described data.

This is the kind of simple task that you'd expect basic programming capable AI to handle. Its the kind of stuff you'd toss to a junior fresh out of programming 101 high school student. I expected some errors.. minor optimization issues.. etc etc but it just spit out essentially nothing. I suppose I could have refined the question a little more... "field 1 should be a 2 bytes and named 'manufacture_id', field 2 should be a string...etc etc" but it would be easier to just type all that in.

another hysterical wave of hype...

We used to call it Mousewitz.

If there was proof of aliens.... Trump would have just told everyone already and the documents would be framed on a wall in Mar Largo.
Deep down you know it's true.

I think the ask was something like... "make a python struct that holds the data described in table 3-5 of the pdf in this link...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic6.arrow.com%2Farop..."

Its the Cypress Fx2 Technical Reference Manual. Table 3-5 is a 7 byte eeprom configuration. Its probably the simplest structure in that manual and contains the vid (vendor id), pid (product id) and the did (device id). I didn't spell out the members in the ask. I figured that the formal description should be sufficient, complete and more digestible then any verbal description on my part. ChatGPT could read the pdf in the link as the response recognized the title of the pdf but it basically ignored any information in the table and just spit out a generic struct. For example, I think one of the 2 members in the result was a manufacturing id... which isn't in the table.

I mean.. I could have asked... "create a python struct with 7 members, the first is 2 bytes in little endian named vid, the 2nd is....." etc etc etc. but then I should just type that out. It'd be much faster. Consider something with 500 members.. it would be horrible to describe verbally. But pointing to the formal description in a pdf and getting a flushed out struct...that'd be a useful programming tool... and pretty simple to do for a supposed AI.

I tried asking chatgpt to create a python structure that can store the fields described in table X-Y in the pdf in the link www.blahblah.com/whatever.pdf. Figured it was an easy task that programmers do all the time. It recognized the pdf so that was nice... then proceeded to generate a generic struct that had 2 fields in it which didn't match anything in the table/pdf. Basically I could have typed "example python struct" in google and got the same thing. very disappointing. I expected that at least it would have fields that matched the names of fields in the table. 1/2 expected the fields to be the wrong type... maybe it would mess up the subfields, not do the bits correctly, etc etc. but no... it just spit out a generic struct and ignored most of my instructions. I suppose I could have asked it to put in a member for each of the items in the table but eh... might as well just type the damned thing in myself then.

The chance that Trump wouldn't leak the existence of alien ships for his own gain is essentially zero and thus no alien ships... or even top secret documents with alien ships. That'd be UGE... and all over his campaign.

At this point he's got to be an embarrassment to the university. Given that the samples aren't destroyed in the process the university should ask for independent verification of his original samples for continued support.

for the malware architects to track everything you care about.... https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmobile.slashdot.org%2Fst...