Yup, it's strange that's so unpopular when it's mostly what current science points to:
Massive universe => It's pretty much certain that there's life, even intelligent life, out there.
Light speed limit => It's highly unlikely that we will meet each other.
Hard disagree, so take my upvote.
The line between science fiction and fantasy is blurry, but the difference is not about how well the systems are explained or about the quality of the story.
There are very good scifi stories with "laws of the world" that are not terribly well designed or explained (a lot of stories from the sixties, like the ones from the "Dangerous Visions' anthologies or from more poetic authors like J. G. Ballard). And OTOH, there are many really good fantasy stories with well defined systems, like the Mistborn series, as you mentioned.
I don't remember where I read it exactly (it was more than 30 years ago), but there was a story/explanation of the difference that stayed with me. It was something like guy A (a fantasy writer) is talking with guy B (a scifi writer) in some room and guy A suddenly exclaims "Look over there, there's an alien walking upside down on the ceiling! It's green and has a spacesuit with a flowing cape that reaches to his boots!". Then guy B asks "If the alien is upside down, shouldn't the cape be flowing down to the floor, instead of his boots?" and guy A replies "That's why you're a scifi writer and I'm a fantasy writer". I think guy A was Ted Sturgeon and guy B Asimov, but I'm probably wrong.
Yeah, the aeronautic industry is on China's current 5-year plan, but they're way way too early in this race. Pretty much the entire plane is made of parts from outside China.
They never learned the lesson about the Torment Nexus.
8 years ago, compatibility and ease of use weren't quite there. This has changed a lot in the last 3 or 4 years, I would say (having followed linux gaming for around 30 years).
That is true, but there's a difference now; for the first time in history Moore's Law has reversed: instead of doubling compute power at the same cost every X months (depending on the part), we're now having less compute power at the same cost than the previous Y months (we as in we consumers, not the hyperscalers, of course).
Windows has always been resource intensive, but it's the first time that new computers, at the same price, have less resources to run than new computers the year before. Of course Linux is affected too, but as it runs well on pretty much everything with some tweaking, it's a much better choice now for every 12 year old kid that likes to play games and does the technical support in the family.
It's far from useless. Overblown, for sure.
They made an awesome hammer that can solve many hammer-related tasks, but they're selling it like it can also cook, drive and keep the house clean.
Blame the companies, not the math.
They're really speedrunning the story. We'll see how that goes.
It depends on what criteria you use for high quality. In the case of art, I would consider that creativity and novelty are important factors for high quality, and GenAI, by its nature, can't be novel or creative. The fact that it has won awards tells more about the contests than about the art itself.
GenAI computationally generates stuff based on its training data and it cannot go beyond that training data in significant ways. For tasks that require this kind of "mediocrity" and predictability, like for example language translation, it's competent. For tasks that require creativity or intuition, it sucks.
The sad thing is that is being pushed as a replacement for everything, which it's clearly not.
It's not like that. Tokens are an inherent computational property of how a model calculates the probabilities and such to generate text.
Having said that, what a token means in terms of computation varies wildly between models and is not directly comparable. So attributing a money value to tokens in general, independently of the model, is weird by nature.
And even within a model, the number of tokens needed to generate a response is very variable too, depending of the model itself and the parameters with which it has been configured (thinking mode, temperature, etc.).
So yeah, companies can pretty much set any price they want and there's not much anyone can do about it.
They frequently broke, but they were very cheap to make compared to "cooler" weapons and didn't require as much maintenance.
And most importantly, spears are one of the easiest weapons to learn to use at a basic level (for war), and as most armies in the past were composed of a majority of regular people, not professional soldiers, spears were very popular.
Just in the observable universe there are around 2 trillion galaxies. Our galaxy (pretty average as galaxies go) has more than 100 billion star systems, each of them with their corresponding planets.
Even if the average density of life is just 1 planet per galaxy (which frankly speaking, would be ridiculously low), you'd have a couple of trillion of planets with life. Intelligence of course would be scarcer, but I don't think it's that anomalous in the large scheme of things.