TechTakes

damned shame they couldn't both lose

Some online dating device is demonic in the same sense as the chatbot which encouraged someone to commit suicide then initiated erotic roleplay with him.

A lot of lonely guys will do well from hiring a professional for some social dates and makeout sessions to get practice reading body language and finding some face-to-face activity with women which is not just about dating.

Fuck me for having read this... Surely there are only like 2 dozen people in the world who think like this, right?

Ope, im getting an update that it is more than 2 dozen...

"Im a fuckin sicko and no one wants to immediately fuck me"

The ISS already has issues with structural fatigue which seem to be worsened by thermal expansion. Having one side of your station red hot and another at room temperature is a big temperature differential and what faces the sun and heats up on one side of the orbit will be in shadow and cooling on the other side. And the bigger you make a physical system, the worse problems get.

I miss when I could cheer SpaceX launches on an iMac.

For some reason once you start talking about space people stop thinking about it as one of many alternatives. If you want to think about industrializing space, simply being possible isn't enough. The unique challenges of operating in orbit (of which cooling is only the most obvious among a great many problems) need to be addressable efficiently enough that sending it up still makes more sense than building it on the ground.

Microsoft's experiments with underwater data centers serve as a powerful parallel since it has many of the same challenges but is still significantly cheaper. If it were economical to put a data center in orbit it would be even more economical to put it in an underwater container, so if we aren't doing the latter we would need a hell of a good reason to do the former. See also the economic challenges of living on Mars, the moon, or even LEO compared to Antarctica or ocean platforms.

@sailor_sega_saturn

His eyes are giving me Corinthian vibes.

I find it really funny how after he gets booed he says, "If you don't care about science, that's okay, because AI is going to touch everything else as well. Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done." Yeah, if you're worried that AI is only going to fuck up science, don't worry, it's going to fuck up everything else as well. Was he trying to stick to a (terrible) script, or is he genuinely this incapable of reading a room?

"When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on." No, my mom taught me about stranger danger. I know what to do when a sketchy old man named Eric Schmidt pulls up with a rocket ship that says FREE ICE CREAM.

"The rocket ship is here. Let me give you some advice. First, find a way to say yes. Listen." Thanks for revealing how AI adoption is really about coercion. It doesn't matter what you think, AI is inevitable and you ignorant Luddites are gonna have to find a way to like it.

Truly a masterclass in public speaking by Eric Schmidt. When the audience reacts negatively to what you said, just double down and shove it down their throats. You're a billionaire, so you know better than them.

When some offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.

I don't know mate, I think I do neither of those things because the kid-diddling natalist doesn't seem to be good at making ones that don't go boom.

Christ what a fucking shitweasel.

I mean, the classical pitch for an IPO is the same as any other large investment, right? You get a great big chunk of capital that you can throw at scaling or improving processes or building our your manufacturing capabilities or whatever, and then that investment of capital in your business in turn generates a financial return for investors. But in an industry and world where venture capital is plentiful, it shouldn't be surprising that when an IPO rolls around all the low-hanging fruit for improving, scaling, and stabilizing the business have already been done. Instead you're looking for a way to let your earlier investors liquidate their returns and get actual cash that they can invest in new ventures. In the best case that means that the IPO price doesn't move very much and it becomes a stable part of the market, but the incentives are all there to make sure the IPO overvalues the company as much as possible. I would need to do more research but I would suspect you can find an inverse relationship between venture funding and public market success in recent years, at least strong enough to expect the wheels to come off when the initial hype is pushed this high.

Mild nit: "frontrunning" was a term (and practice) in use before crapto trading.

That is still very high for pulp science fiction.

I think the more telling aspect here isn't the possible employment impacts, it's the fact that it's making all the things it's supposed to touch worse. Like, the new textile mills may have been massively disruptive to people who had previously been skilled labor, but at least the efficiency gains meant that you could make a lot more cloth a lot faster. The affected workers bore the cost, but anyone could reap (some of) the benefits. But with AI, not only are we seeing the automation impact people's livelihoods, it's also making the experience of interacting with all these systems worse. I don't know how many people outside the tech industry would care about underemployment and retraining for software engineers, but everyone can feel that the systems they rely on are less reliable, more glitchy, and uglier. Combined with the way data centers and AI companies serve as focusing points for people's concerns, I think there's decent odds that we see blood regardless of whether the prophecied great replacement (not that one) happens as advertised.

It isnt just causing unemployment, it is also causing drinkable water and energy problems. And apparently there might already be a wace of workers setting fire to warehouses going on in the usa (which is not being reported on if it is, not sure of it is an actual thing btw, but saw somebody on social media say the warehouse fires which they were tracking went from 100 to 150 in a short period. I do not know enough to say if this is real or somebody mistaking normal accidents with a revolution, i assume it is the former. The one fire I saw reported was due to a cost of living thing btw).

The dreaded midnight hour of oblivion!