There's no doubt that AI is developing into a useful tool -- for people who understand its limitations and how long it is going to take to work the bugs out. But people have a long track record of getting burned by not understanding the gap between promise and delivery and, in retrospect, missing the point.

I think we should take a lesson from the history of the dot com boom and following bust. A lot of people got burned by their foolish enthusiasm, but in the end the promise was delivered, and then some. People just got the timescale for delivering profits wrong, and in any case their plans for getting there were remarkably unimaginative, e.g., take a bricks and mortar business like pet supplies and do exactly that on the Internet. They by in large completely missed all the *new* ways of making money ubiquitous global network access created.

I think in the case of AI, everybody knows a crash is coming. In fact they're planning on it. Nobody expects there to be hundreds or even dozens of major competitors in twenty years. They expect there to be one winner, an Amazon-level giant, with maybe a handful of also-rans subsisting off the big winner's scraps; tolerated because they at least in theory provide a legal shield to anti-trust actions.

And in this winner-take-all scenario, they're hoping to be Jeff Bezos -- only far, far more so. Bezos owns about 40% of online retail transactions. If AI delivers on its commercial promise, being the Jeff Bezos of *that* will be like owning 40% of the labor market. Assuming, as seems likely, that the winning enterprise is largely unencumbered by regulation and anti-trust restrictions, the person behind it will become the richest, and therefore the most powerful person in history. That's what these tech bros are playing for -- the rest of us are just along for the ride.

I spend quite a bit on Discord server services, but I'm out.

GFY, Discord and governments, for mandating this bullshit nonsense.

But you are leaving out the difference in fertility. The fertility rate of the UK, which as you noted is a population dominated by native britons who trace their ancestry on the island back a millennium or more, is 1.4 live births per woman. The replacement rate is 2.1. In a hundred years the UK will have a smaller population than Haiti.

Because under a true system of sovereignty, people wouldn't be allowed to vote for a Muslim mayor.

Not just once the crash comes, but this sort of thing will help cause the crash.

Cory Doctorow talked about some of it in a recent post that really helped me grok what I've been feeling about the inevitable AI bubble collapse.

AMD giving 10% of itself to OpenAI is almost entirely symbolic as OpenAI will turn around and "spend" that money on something like GPU hardware, probably AMD products. AMD is just paying itself via OpenAI and both companies will book it as revenue to try and obscure the colossal losses on AI spending.

It's all monopoly money laundering, and it's going to crash hard.

It's been mangled by culture.

Once upon a time, it was unambiguously a pretty debilitating mental state. If you had that diagnosis, everyone could see issues and it wasn't at all something that anyone would aspire to.

Then Asperger's came along and thus began the 'diagnosis as an excuse for selfish behavior'. The general impression was "a smart person who has a tendency to be a jerk", which sounded totally awesome to a lot of people. They didn't need to try not to be a jerk, they had a pass in the diagnosis. People *wanted* this diagnosis.

Then, at least in part, some felt that Asperger's had become a very coveted 'diagnosis', and self-diagnosis was popular. They said 'oh, you know what, maybe if we group it with general autism, maybe people would be more reluctant to want that association, and it can go to being an aid for those that needed it.

But no, bereft of their diagnosis, they would instead do the same with autism, really diluting it and making a lot of people end up not taking autism seriously.

Nowadays, Gen Z highly values 'neurodivergent' as a badge of honor, that anyone cool *must* be neurodivergent.

So we end up with everyone saying they have a diagnosis, that they are neurodivergent, and they absolutely are not anything so pedestrian as 'normal'. Meanwhile those that really need it are generally taken less seriously because it's been diluted so much.

Is if they confirmed your age by a behavioral maturity test. AI could monitor posts, and if it figures out that someone with an emotional age of 15 or older wouldn't have posted such a thing, you're cut off.

Art and cultural activity is a major sector of the US economy. It adds a staggering 1.17 *trillion* dollars to the US GDP. However that's hard to see because for the most part it's not artists who receive this money.

The actual creative talent this massive edifice is built upon earns about 1.4% of the revenue generated. The rest goes to companies whose role in the system is managing capital and distributing. Of that 1.4% that goes to actual creators, the lion's share goes to a handful of superstars -- movie stars and music stars and the like. This is not as unfair as it sounds, as it reflects the superstar's ability to earn money for the companies they distribute through, but the long tail of struggling individual artists play a crucial role in artistic innovation and creativity. Behind every Elvis there's a Big Mama Thornton, and armies of gospel singers who may have made a record or two but never made a living.

We can't run this giant economic juggernaut off a handful of superstars with AI slop filling in the gaps in demand. But maybe we'll give that a try.

Looks like the displays have something like a 128x78 'pixel' active LED display as a backlight, and then put an LCD on top of it.

So if a tiny region of the display is just dim reds, then it can get a backlight that is doing just that and the LCD doesn't have to block as much other stuff.

No, this is still backlit LCDs.

The LEDs are still 'just' a backlight, but now a colored backlight. You basically have an OLED-like characteristic of emissive lighting at some resolution. The problem is the resolution of these LEDs would be something like a 128x78 display. Impossibly low even by old fashioned 'SD' standards.

So you have a 128x78 active LED display, and then an LCD panel on top to give it resolution. So you get to pick a good tiny local backlight color and minimize how much extraneous unwanted color that tiny dimming zone needs to filter out.

But less convenient than version numbers, particularly since Ubuntu uses very predictable versioning.

So I know that even numbered years are LTS and the version number is YY.MM, and the month is always April for LTS and October is the other possibility.

So with that all in mind, one says "ok, I know I need to add stuff for Ubuntu 24.04 to this configuration". Except some configurations don't do version number and take the codename. So now I've got to remember 'noble'. Canonical themselves in their web site sort of de-emphasizes the codename. The 'tag' results for the blog all fixate on the version number. The download page doesn't mention the codename. The release cycle page does, and the *original* blog announcement mentions it, but not the subsequent ISO refresh release announcements.

I'd say the likely scenario is that the person actually buys stuff but doesn't consider the stuff an 'investment'. I bought a house to live in, not to turn it around for a profit.

To the extent people are 'investors' in things like 401k, they may not be 'active' investors and would just as much prefer something like a massive expansion of social security instead of letting investment companies play with their money. Or to the extent they do want to 'invest', they actually want to contribute to the potential success of things they intrinsically want to succeed, rather than chasing the best percentage return without regard for anything intrinsic to the people using the money invested.

The sentiment I think is plain enough, that they don't like the thought of handing their money over to a group of folks that will mostly enrich themselves above all else while their money is used for who knows what without regard for his deeper consideration of what is going on.

Presuming it can ultimately 'work as advertised' the key word might be 'more', but lower paying programming jobs.

If it makes it more accessible with less experience and interest required, the labor pool expands and suddenly developers are cheap enough to afford for that software someone wants but isn't worth it today.

All that said, I'm a bit more skeptical that it 'works as advertised', or that it will anytime soon, but instead it can expand productivity of already strong programmers and do next to nothing for those without the skills. It screws up constantly and even as I try to lean into it and try asking it to fix its own mistakes, it's really terrible at it. It generally creates code that is really hard to maintain and further is the worst at trying to modify code that is hard to maintain.

Now I do know of some dysfunctional development teams that employ dozens of interns and give them just shit tasks that are ripe for LLM fodder. Those teams may find it hard to justify the same volume of junior devs when the LLM can just take care of those shit tasks with no more supervision than the junior devs but with a much quicker responsiveness.

Of sinister sounding dystopian stuff and naive optimisim.

I suppose he will be giving '110%' all the while? Will be interesting to see someone give up sleep, food, bathroom, and everything else for 20 years.

And this is supposed to ingratiate the concept with the audience?

Again, "surveillance architecture" is a pitch for some education we are supposed to want?

Seems like the fallacy that if everyone just had a billion dollars, everyone would live like billionaires do today...

Talking to people in public isnâ(TM)t harassment.

Talking to people on taxpayer funded grounds also isnâ(TM)t trespass.