> As long as Anthropic is a U.S. company, there is no escaping this.
Reminds me of the RISC-V Foundation → RISC-V International move to Switzerland. Around the time some dumbass Republicans tried to impose export restrictions on a set of open, world-wide used specifications.
Pandora's box has been opened, and there's no closing it. Capable AI models will be everywhere.
"This service is free and works with both Kindle devices such as with the Kindle appIt also automatically converts many files to Amazon's internal format (such as AZW3 or KFX), as long as you respect its supported file types and size limits."
Read: requires internet connectivity to put documents on your Kindle. Depends on Amazons 'blessing'. Ends when Amazon ends support for your device. Is limited to whatever document formats (and sizes) Amazon decides to support. Internal formats on your Kindle may be DRM locked. Amazon could snoop any document transferred through that service. Could be turned into a paid service @ some point. Amazon could effectively brick your device if so desired.
(please correct if I misunderstand any of the above)
Sure, this may work for many users & they may be happy with that arrangement. But it's quite a few drawbacks. And the "planned obsolesence" smell is strong here. Me... I'll pass.
All of that is technically correct, however my non-Amazon readers (Sony, Nook, ...) reached the end of their useful life when their batteries died or their screens broke. All of them were "unsupported" at that stage (3-4 years after announcement), so not much to do about it. With that, I have a very old Kindle (7 years or so) that is still working -- with "Amazon's blessing" of course.
Any reader will turn into a brick one day. What matters is what you're getting before that point. For me, I'd rather use Send-to-Kindle and never bother with SD cards again. Naturally, YMMV.
> The fact that 2 °C is probably enough to render the space of potentially billions of people uninhabitable is completely outside of the experienced reality in Western countries, we cannot relate from our lived reality to theirs.
Surely they'll reconsider once potentially billions of climate refugees flood countries up north.
Also I think the impact of weather extremes is underestimated. You can reinforce buildings against stronger winds. You can move people into climate-controlled buildings. Desalinate seawater when the rains stop.
But that's impossible for the bulk of agriculture. Now imagine extreme winds, droughts and/or wildfires decimate 1 or more staple crops - worldwide, in a single season. Economic chaos, wars & famine will ensue.
Compound effects are a thing. And there's an ever-growing list of candidates.
"Casket Loader: Ford 2.5 powered by propane fuel, 435 heavy-duty Ford 5-speed, high-speed transmission that ties down an NP 205 transfer case and feeds onto a 1-ton GMC differential. Isuzu single front axle."
Faster Than Light (FTL) isn't needed for interstellar travel. A cosy 0.01c would cross the distance between Sun and its closest neighbour (Proxima Centauri) in ~425 years. Less if we wait for it (or another star) to make its closest approach.
Further-away stars would take longer but on the flipside you have many more candidates as destination.
TLDR; any spaceship that can be kept operational for a few centuries or millenia, while travelling at a modest fraction of c, would allow space-faring intelligent life to meet alien life in person, as long as it is 'nearby' (compared to crossing the Milky Way for example).
Not saying that's easy! Or that alien life is nearby. But possible.
When born, you're handed a set of cards that you 'play' life with. Among others:
Genes (affecting gender, skin color, attractiveness & more). Birthplace (affecting citizenship, or 1st-learned language). Wealth of parents and/or that country. Upbringing (including religion). Sisters/brothers or single child. Parents who stayed together or single parent. Etc etc.
For your family: great they worked to get you where you are. And yes that was work not a lottery. No need to minimize their effort.
But for you as recipient of that, it was a lottery ticket. You did not work, or decide what your family did for you. You did not decide what genes you wanted to inherit from them. You did not pick your birthplace.
So the "lottery" part does apply: for each recipient of a set of cards.
I think you two commenters have both expressed the opposing ideas at the core of so much of the political/worldview divide of the world today.
Position 1: a human is an entity distinct from their family.
Position 2: a family is an entity that exists across generations, and no individual in the family can be abstracted from it.
I don’t think you two, or anyone else, is ever really going to suddenly change their mind on this point. It’s at the foundation of the irreconcilable divide between leftism and conservatism.
Ultimately, since we have plenty of evidence to show that people will just shout past each other when they hit this ideological sticking point, I think a better approach would be to individually answer the question: “Which is a better model for predicting the world?”
> It would also be more interesting if you can explain how you imagine we’d even get to a place where there is only a single earthly jurisdiction with free movement etc. now THAT would be an interesting thought experiment.
Article could do with some explanation of latency (delay) vs. bandwidth (units of data transmitted per time unit).
Effectively the whole article is talking about latency (mentioned exactly 1x). But sometimes high latency might be okay if subsequent events occur at a high rate (your "truckload full of SSDs" arriving after being stuck in traffic). Which is how many internal busses, IC-IC protocols, or longer-distance serial connections work.
Yeah it does mention parallelism - 2 trucks can carry more SSDs than 1 truck. Duh..
What's commonly called "speed" or "performance" is a combined (mixed) effect of the above.
Reminds me of the RISC-V Foundation → RISC-V International move to Switzerland. Around the time some dumbass Republicans tried to impose export restrictions on a set of open, world-wide used specifications.
Pandora's box has been opened, and there's no closing it. Capable AI models will be everywhere.
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