Anything Sam Altman does is to help Sam Altman.

Not really. While some people can learn from books alone, most cannot. Then there is the topic selection, which is more important than the actual teaching because students lack the experience to know what they will need and what will give them efficiency. And finally, the quality gates (exams) are a critical part of it all.

Suggesting that an author goes through all that work for free is unrealistic. Same with suggesting the publisher prints and lists the book for free.

That's where you're wrong, kiddo. On here, everything is free. Movies, software, music, you name it, all of it is free. It doesn't cost the song writer anything to write the song. Nor does it cost anything to produce it. The group certainly isn't charging anything for the song, for their time spent in the free studio, all the equipment used, the personnel who mix the music, the distributors. All of that is free so why should someone pay for music?

When it comes to software, everyone knows it's free. Computers can be found falling from the sky. Pick one up because it's free. We know electricity is free. It's part of nature. All those servers storing the software? Pffft, if they cost anything they're a few pennies, hardly worth calling a cost. Make them free as well.

Same with these books. It doesn't cost the writer anything. Their time is surely free to write these books, spending time to research to get things right. The reviewers are simply reviewing out of the goodness of their hearts. They don't expect to get paid. As for producing the books themselves, it's just trees which are free all around us. No cost there. Since everything is free, the books should be free as well.

I agree with you in general. Personally, I don't think you can believe any politicians. Republican and Democrat are just two flavors of a corrupt system run by money in US politics.

I'm not going to defend the Democrats, but from the distance I'm at, the Republicans seem considerably worse. Good/bad is not a binary choice. One being pretty bad doesn't make them equivalent to the other which is truly awful.

so fielding her may not have been the best strategy by the Democrats

It's not. The voting public is too sexist, the Dems have found this out twice now. Though I can in some senses appreciate the unwillingness to give up on their principles completely and make sexist choices (i.e. excluding female candidates) merely because that's necessary to win.

When "the office" is a shop producing furniture then having a diesel truck or cargo van is something of a necessity.

Given I collected a pair of chairs and brought them home using nothing but a cargo bike, I dispute your assertion.

But the thing that proves you're really off your rocker are things like this:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ford.co.uk%2Fvans-an...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbusiness.renault.co.uk...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mercedes-benz.co.u...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.volkswagen-vans.co...

You know, vans.

Yeah, their lyrics are pretty good; but I still think that you'll miss the music and vocals sooner rather than later.

Sounds like a fantastic argument for WFH - or at least for a return offices as opposed to cubes.

They taste like what AI thinks sushi tastes like!

Well, maybe. But keeping any of the usual assholes out is a good idea.

Shit yeah. Good point.

Indeed. The whole "embodiment" thing is nonsense speculation that for some reason idiots think is some sort of immutable law.

Next we'll be hearing about an exciting new experiment whereby AI controlled robots are able to extract iron from copious amounts of human blood they've been programmed to have an unquenchable thirst for.

You only need just over 2,300 people to get enough iron from their blood to make a sword.

If you want to go for steel you'd need just over 16,000 people.

The Guardian is a reputable source of journalism. The OP is just whining. You'll note they didn't criticize the content, only the source. That is standard tactic nowadays.

That said, they probably consider NewsMax or Breitbart as the epitome of "reputable" sources.

He's just one of many conmen that plague us right now.

While the term 'neural network' is misleading, you should know better by now. Neural networks are absolutely nothing like brains. They do not learn, grow, or change as they're used and nothing they do is even remotely like thinking, let alone "human thinking". How much energy they need relative to one another is completely meaningless because the two things are not equivalent.

As for training, they are also not trained in any way that could be described as "at a human level". The way we train these things is so far removed from how you'd train a person that even using the word 'training' to describe the process feels fraudulent.

A typical feed-forward neural network is really just a simple function. They can't actually do much in way of computation. In terms of computational power, they're equivalent to lookup tables. (Consider the difference between a mechanical adder and an addition table.) What makes neural networks useful is that they can be 'trained' to approximate functions that we otherwise don't know how to make. "Training" a neural network is an iterative process by which internal constants are adjusted to make the output closer match what is desired for a particular input. The result isn't likely to be perfect, or even particularly efficient. The hope is that it will be 'good enough'. This is why we sometimes call them 'black boxes'. Not because we don't know what is happening internally, we know every detail, but because it often can't be described like a traditional algorithm.

Given how long this nonsense about what neural networks are and what they can do has gone on, I doubt reality is going to 'set in' during my lifetime. The current bubble will pop, sure, but only because people, or foolish investors, finally realize that they're not getting the magical science-fiction robot they wanted.