A new shiny thing after cryptocurrency wound up as a commodity traded like so many others, and not the civilization-changing invention envisioned.

AI looks like it'll be hampered by power generation and delivery (or rather the lack thereof).

On the upside, there'll be ungodly amounts of money spent upgrading and expanding the power grid.

I think a better question is whether we are seeing capitalism's end game: concentration of wealth in the hands of so few they decide that it's in their interest to remove the governments power to regulate them. (As has been stated by more than a few national figures about deregulating to the point the US Federal government "can be drowned in a bathtub")

At which point the wealthy can simply assert the role they already hold: as our feudal lords. They hold all the means of production, all the means of information distribution.

They'll likely even have swarms of slaughter bots to enforce their will. What can the rest of us gonna do to stop them?

The problem is the same people are also entirely unable to see when they're being lied to / bullshitted in a different area. As a species, we just aren't skeptical enough in general, and we love when bullshit fits our desired narrative.

Context is important: The US had many of dead-ends that have been abandoned - Fusor (electrostatic confinement)) designs (still very useful, but not as a power source) lead the way for quite a while. Fusors are easily built by hobbyists, even. There was some hope that the Polywell would bring electrostatic to net energy production, but it seems that hope is gone.

The Soviet tokamak (magnetic confinement) seemed (and continues to be) more promising in the late 60's, and with that, most of the world started moving towards various forms of magnetic confinement - tokamak, stellarator and other more exotic forms of magnetic confinement. ITER being the biggest of the projects, and its construction expected to complete around 2033 currently.

The US's NIF seems to have reached the closest thing to breakeven, if only briefly, using inertial confinement.

As far as "winning" the race... well... it seems everybody is making claims about being about to do something. Lockheed made promises they couldn't keep a few years ago, there's this story, and no doubt China has their own overly optimistic predictions for their own prestige reasons.

At this point, I think ITER's delays are probably the most honest with the world about a reasonable timeline.

Yes. One wonders if it has an event horizon.

In fairness, Gates can afford to invest widely. And why not. It's not like he's gonna live forever.

That prize already exists: You'll be swiftly extracted, and be transported immediately to a private island. It's excellent security a consequence of your unmarked grave.

For AGI, nobody knows whether it is even possible.

Kind of like the open question of useful quantum computing. We have toys that work, but we are at best hopeful whether we will be able to handle noise and errors as we scale larger. That doesn't stop its own hype machine from spinning. That said (and this statement is unrelated to anything with AI), quantum computing, at the very least, is providing some interesting and useful science/engineering in the quantum realm.

The difference being we have a far better idea whether fusion is possible with our current understanding of technology. It's developed in the open, and a ton is understood - most of what isn't understood is then published openly as we learn more.

Much of the AI... pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Or the curtain. Or the man shoveling cash into the boiler to keep the thing powered.

By the way, we need more cash.

Visa & Mastercard aren't just for credit - why would they limit themselves, after all? Plenty of debit cards use the Visa & Mastercard networks as well - though they're often the fallback compared to other debit networks.

I'm not sure I'd call it pirated, given the MIPS64 architecture owner open-sourced it (and released MIPS r6) in 2019. At least, probably not anymore (chronology probably matters, but...)

Even the IP owner of MIPS has moved on to RISC-V.

I'm going to bet it's that: zstd has the capability to create/use lz4 (and gzip, xz, and lzma) archives. (zstd --format=lz4 foo.lz4 file1.txt file2.txt ...)

No love to bz2 or brotli, though.

Part of it is the same thing as what happened to h.265/HEVC and .heic: patent headaches. HEVC adoption suffered because a couple of patent holders broke off of the main patent pool and decided they weren't going to give FRAND license terms. If you couldn't be sure your license terms would be the same as the next guy, would you want to license HEVC? That did HEVC no favors. Time will tell if lessons were learned and applied for h.266/VVC.

JPEG 2000 had 17 organizations that you had to license the patents from - who should license it freely, but there was no formal guarantee. So 17 rolls of the dice.

Additionally, JPEG 2000 had performance that really wasn't all that great - it was computationally expensive and continual improvements to JPEG coding ate up JPEG 2000's advantages.

JPEG 2000 is a wavelet-based format - much like the Dirac video codec. Wavelet transform codecs had a lot of interest at the time, but they don't appear to have panned out as well as hoped - whether its because of computational complexity was too high for the performance or what, I'm not sure - the math is way beyond my understanding, but between Wavelet and Cosine Transforms, it seems that Cosine Transforms have definitively won out for now.

I agree. They yanked JPEG XL out of Chrome a year ago, which will prevent adoption of the format even though Safari and Firefox support it.

It's pretty clear Google wants to push their own VPx-derived .webp (and further derived .avif) image formats. A fair amount has been written about the quality issues when repurposing a video codec to encode still image data - while they can produce decent results, it does not produce results as good as a dedicated still image format.

Here, they're making a 'backwards-compatible' JPEG library, that uses JPEG XL's advanced compression, but doesn't provide one of the key things that JPEG XL gives us: transparency. If you want lossy graphics with transparency on Chrome, you have to use .webp or .avif. If you want to have a website that does dark mode well, you either need to have two sets of images, or you need transparency.

Sending in SWAT was specious at best, as the "evidence" was not particularly compelling. I get they were searching for a number of violent carjackers, but (as we see): The carjackers were not there, and more importantly, they were at least smart enough to know that when they saw AirPods, they should ditch them.

The qualified immunity angle is simple: Qualified immunity means there's vanishingly small chance of legal recourse for the people whose property has been damaged and lives have been turned upside down because any of a number of dumbassses in the chain of errors couldn't imagine somebody born in the last two decades would know to ditch a homing beacon.

The only reason Chauvin is in prison is because is simple: massive amounts of public unrest. It's easy for some outlets to dismiss unrest in some areas - for example, conservative outlets like to dismiss unrest in more liberal cities like Portland, for example. That leads to the problem you can't ignore: when you've got a riot in deeply conservative, police-supporting, sleepy, and almost entirely white Salt Lake City over a cop killing a black man over a thousand miles away -- that's a different matter entirely.

In nearly every case nationwide, the police can destroy your property and literally end your life with near impunity due to qualified immunity, as long as they have "probable cause." In this case, the "probable cause" was a set of AirPods (wisely?) dumped out the window by the carjackers.