Where, prey tell, do you think humans get the vast majority of their "knowledge" in 2025?

I had a person yelling at me online this morning because I had the gall to point out that the only way vaccines could cause autism would be using time travel (your born with autism, clearly something that happens to you after you are born can't cause something that happened to you before you without a time machine of some sort), and it struck me that actually the internet IS how a lot of people are "learning" and its making people incredibly stupid.

I had a realisation a while back that it wasn''t AI research/dev per se thats driving this, its Nvidia thats driving it.

DeepSeek proved that you don't *need* the the "hyperscale" datacenters to develop good-enough AI. (Theres a lot of conspiracy theories about how DeepSeek must have had secret spooky mega sized datacenters doing all this, but they published their methods and training sets, and people have reproduced it, and it all checks out, you really can do this shit on the cheap).

And thats bad news for NVIDIA which needs for AI to expensive to justify their capital outlay, sales projections, and irrational market valuation. Hence all the circular investment. Pump money into companies with the provisio they buy a whole bunch of compute that honestly probably isn't needed if AI companies actually started thinking about efficiency instead of scale.

So we're gonna burn down the amazon for NVDA share prices. Yay 2025.

Who's going to do the booting? Certainly not "the will of the people". If the constitution can be freely ignored, and the Army proves to be loyal, then that can be freely ignored too.

Well, it aint over till the fat lady sings. You'll know either way late next year I suspect. Then you get to find out if that second ammendment is worth shit.

The thing is though,historically its not senior brass that coups govts, its junior officers. If the senior brass wants to engage in a bunch of democracy suppression and the junior officers go "Wait up, I didnt sign up to shoot my neighbors I signed up to uphold the constiution" then the govt will discover the military intervention they expected isnt the one they get.

And I really hope that isn't why the white house is shitting anger-bricks over the senators reminding the troops that they are forbidden under the UMCJ to follow illegal orders.

And basically all artists except a handful of irrelevant hipster ones

Yeah thats not 100% not true. Your confusing things like Ozone mastering and a few things like stem splitting with generative. These aren't generative algorithms, they use machine learning to balance eq and compression. And honestly, it kinda sounds like shit, but its not necessarily detracting from the creativity.

Almost no artists use however generative, partly because generative AI can't generate art so it offers no creative assistance, partly because it forfeits royalties since generative outputs are all public domain, and partly because most people are at their core good people who dislike stealing from other people.

Its WEIRD that you think artists are using Suno. Suno cant generate Art, so what do you think an artist would get out of it?

Very few I suspect. Grimes maybe. A few like that.

Every musician I know, and as someone who paid my way through university as a stage roadie, I know a few who have been reasonably successful, are horrified by this and see Warners deal as utter betrayal. God knows musicians had already gotten fucked by the record companies deals with spotify that effectively diverted independent artists royalties to the big labels (It resulted on lower royalties than before, except for the artists on a few big labels who got higher royalties. Or rather their labels did)

Well... maybe with any luck in 1-3 years when this mindbogglingly ridiculous govt gets booted, that giant computer brain can be put to some sort of useful use, like climate change, or figuring out how to unfuck democracy or something

Thats a more high tech version of the thing they did with my dad when he was having his punchup with prostate cancer, some sort of tiny pelet of radiactive shit they implanted in the middle of the tumor. Thankfully ,before it hit stage 4, that and the hormone therapy managed to get it under control and they managed to nuke it.

And instead of losing my dad, I got to make fun of him for a year for being on feminizing hormones and having a fried asshole (radiotherapy is amazing, but it has...... side effects.)

I guess the one your refering to is a much more directed version of it. Less chance of inducing secondary cancers from cell and genome damage.

I think one of the big things I've learned from this stupid war is watching ukranians on social media , and Ukranians are *very funny people*. I guess when your dirt poor, and live in a part of the world that turns to bitter ice for half the year you gotta have a sense of humor to go with the vodka.

You can, although i dont recomend it. That said, repurposing old macs into home servers is something I've seen a fair bit of.

I *suppose* the mac minis could be quite useful for an office mac if you have a primarily mac infrastructure, but Apple have discontinued MacOS Server since 2022, so YMMV

Its shocking how ingrained this has become for some people. I still occasionally use twitter, although not much anymore because its become a shockingly hostile place for most people, but I saw the other day some poor woman getting the shit kicked out of her because she made the fatal mistake of posting about finally getting her PhD on a *very* interesting looking paper about the evolution of cooperative behavior in ants. And the comments where just stacked with people telling her its a stupid topic and how she should be having babies and getting married instead of being a scientist.

Now, yes some of that was *definately* sexist nonsense. But theres also an underlying massive hostility towards intelligence and intellectuals, and its so disheartening to see, because it feels like we're slipping back into a new dark ages. I saw one person refered to it as the "Endarkenment".

Just teeth grinding imbiciles raging against knowledge because it might contradict their idiotic views on vaccines or whatever.

Reminds me of that famous Frank Zappa quote;- "Comparing Guitarists is a stupid sport".

Now Zappa was no slouch on the guitar, considered by many as possibly the most inventive guitarists of the 1970s, but he was far less enamoured with virtuosity than his reputation suggested, eventually even giving up on playing it live, and handing over axe duties to his young apprentice, Steve Vai. For him it wasnt how well you could play the instrument, its what the music you played on it sounded like that interested him.

I feel the same about programming languages. Python might not be the flashiest, its missing some key features, its slow (although in modern days a lot faster than it used to be), and so on. But I can get the job done faster and cleaner than I can in almost any language except maybe Ruby (which nobody seems to use anymore). Is it the best language? Hell no. Does it matter? NOPE. What matters is everyone on my team knows python, and it gets shit done. Flash and virtuosity is for teenagers and shredders. I wanna play the blues.

The last great holdout for windows was games. For office stuff, the transition from monolithic AD/Exchange stacks to cloud based stuff made Macs a viable platform for many organizations, particularly with software devs finding the Unix system under the hood productive for developments meaning that while Sysadmins have traditionally been mac hostile, devs are often mac friendly (well, other than the dotnet guys), and with the corporate drones enjoying the user friendlyness and fashionable appearances of the machines, windows centrality to the office has been under serious challenge.

But games where unchallenged. While modern macs are respectable for games that have been ported, its undeniable that windows was clearly the winner in this field, with access to Nvidia (and increasingly AMD) GPUs and APIs well suited to gaming.

But Valve has different ideas, and despite the attractiveness of the XBOX subscriptions, Valve have a near monopoly on the ecosystem, and Valve do NOT like Microsoft breathing down their necks. So proton (A wine fork that works shockingly well) has been under constant development and is now at the stage where many windows-only games run as well, if not better, under Linux, even on small machines like the Steamdeck (I have one at home, and it runs..... every game I've tried. Oh and with the emulation stuff makes a pretty great nintendo switch emulator too)

So yeah, the final fortress in windows dominance has toppled. Linux is just a straight up better server. Macs are viable and friendly. And now Linux even plays games better, or at least competitively.

And with Microsoft hell bent on turning windows into a hellscape of chatbots , corporate surveilance, subscription slop and advertising, people have had enough.

If Microsoft doesnt change its ways, its going to lose everything its worked for.

Yeah it seems to me the choice is either
1) a stable orbit with a 50% duty cycle, which means more collectors AND heavy batteries. Expensive.
2) Parking it in something like a lagrange point. Extremely stable forever-orbit, but extremely expensive per kg to get it to that place. And space junk from abandoned shit will never go away
3) geostationary orbits that require a tonne of fuel for constant adjustment burns.

None of this of course factors iin cosmic ray shielding and the enormous amount of infrastructure to deal with the fact that the only way to remove heat is radiating it. Massive amounts of GPUs running at full throttle with no obvious way to cool it.

Or, they could just drop these things in the ocean and use ocean currents to power the GPUs. Hell, you could even just use nuclear down there and never have to worry about a meltdown or radiation leaks, because salt water is the ultimate radiation shield and diluter of radioactive particles.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The thing that makes rust a "hard" language is its punishing borrow checker step that simply refuses to compile if you've got code smells that hint at page violations or other memory goonery. Rust punishes you, but in doing so it makes you a better programmer.

Its something I fell in love with Crystal over (which, btw does NOT do a borrow checker), its static analysis step that refuses to compile if your doing things with variables that introduces un-handled nulls. I could feel myself becoming a better coder (which is a hard thing to achieve for someone with 20y experience) simply because it was pointing out anti-patterns in my coding and requiring me to fix them. Its a shame crystal never really took off, its a genuinely good and speedy little language. Who knows, maybe some day. Python sat in obscurity for two decades (Python, for the youngsters in the audience, is OLDER than JS, Java and so on. Y'all only hearing of it recently doesnt make it a recent language) before finally exploding in popularity

Steve Jobs back? Like him or not, the best Apple days, products and innovations were done during his iron fists days. And he drove countless companies down this same path, to the point some are now better than current day Apple is.
Since he will not return, hope whoever is confirmed do more than just damage control and play catch up.

Although Tim Cook has been a perfectly fine leader commercially (The man is a supply chain god, by all accounts), he's never had Job's innate sense for the market, consumer, and for design.

I've long maintained they should have given the top job to Jony Ive. Jony is the reason Apple stuff went from grey boxes to attractive and elegant looking designs that actually made the damn things into fashion accessories. Sure the iphones are technological marvels, but if they still looked like plastic chunks with fold out keyboards, there really would be no reeason to buy one over the equally technical marvels like the Nokias , Androids or bloody windows phones. That was Ives design eye that gave us the modern phone.

Apple would do well to repeat the old move it pulled off with Jobs, and hire back Ives to take over the company.