Am all for it if law enforcement were held to the same standards. Plenty of cases where LE murder is simply not enforced. Thus LE becomes a haven for those seeking impunity and ability to nefariously track anyone.
The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products for over 100 years and yet product quality, material stability, aesthetic trends, and function design still dominate the purchasing decisions of the general public.
Being tapped into fickle human preference and changing utility landscape will be necessary for a long time still. It may get faster and easier to build, but tastemakers and craftsmen still have heavy sway over markets than can mass-produce vanilla products.
I would generally put “stability” and “quality” as attributes of mass production far more than that of handmade things. Yes, an expert can make a quality product by hand, but MOST handmade things are far more likely to be shoddy.
The whole point of mass production was that suddenly you could make a million identical perfect products.
computation — like speech and property — is a fundamental human right
Computation however requires a vast supply chain where certain middlemen have a near monopoly on distribution of said "fundamental right". The incentives for lobbyists seems clear.
I don't necessarily disagree with the idea, but until profit is shared with taxpayers, this is a one-way transaction of taxpayers bankrolling AI companies.
I find your claim that there is a monopoly on computing laughable. No other technology has improved in quality or dropped in price as much as computers over the last 40 years. If this what you get from a monopoly, then we need more monopolies.
Modern semiconductor fabrication is a very narrow field.
As far as monopolies go I don't think it's our biggest concern, like you say.
If we want to continue to wage wars and seek conquest, it's not great to have it located in one/few countries. But instead if we want to work towards peace, we should continue breaking down barriers to trade (while maintaining protections for labor).
Sadly, "using the bathroom" will cause a more immediate visceral reaction for most people than "maliciously manipulating your entire life via ad networks and media".
Do we really care what it is that will cause the visceral reaction? If I said it might reveal ways/means or private IP or any of a million other examples, few would really care as not everyone is involved in that. However, everyone goes to the bathroom.
I care a little bit - I think it's genuinely disappointing that your privacy can be so thoroughly compromised by interesting uses of metadata... but I also won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It'd be great is people truly understood the dangerous of invasive monitoring outside their physical forms (a, imo, relatively minor privacy to have compromised compared to your behavior) - but if it gets folks riled up I'm all for it.
If we could all spread the knowledge of what is actually going on to the wider public, it would make my meetings easier, and prevent very smart folks from outside the field from saying dumb-sounding stuff.
This is an example of why LLMs won't displace engineers as severely as many think. There are very old solved processes and hyper-efficient ways of building things in the real world that still require a level of understanding many simply don't care or want to achieve.
I'm not so fond of it because it has a fan. But if you could use it at home, and then had a "phone conversion housing" you could attach it to a belt and have a smartphone. Run wired earbuds out it. Have a trackpoint nub.
The power draw looks like it's at least 4W with a max of maybe 45W. That's maybe 7 hr with a 10000 mAh battery assuming it's sleeping the entire time and not really doing anything. Not very practical for people used to a small phone lasting all day without a charge.
Surely there's a way to power down parts of it to reduce the draw? Is that a thing? Like having a V8 and only bringing in cylinders when they're needed. Couldn't cores be disabled or memory modules? On-demand telco and wi-fi. Even having minimal threads activated and perhaps on-demand DRAM over a typically DRAM-less SSD.
You could power down portions and that's what a lot of modern systems do but you need to incorporate that into the design at a fundamental level. The entire PC would have to be redesigned and you even need a whole new cpu and motherboard design in order to be able to power down enough things while still being able to do useful work.
So yeah, it's possible but you'd basically be redoing the entire system from scratch.
I still think it's a good idea. Apple could do it.
I think you'd want a tiny switchboard where you could manually-override powering up/down parts of the system. Also, just because you're at a desk doesn't mean you want all cores going and when traveling only a couple - it could be on-demand. The other key thing is damage resistance. Just because you've got it in your pocket doesn't mean you want to risk it being damaged. Maybe a free-floating housing for traveling like with the old Sony Action cams.
"The X3000’s entire lens and sensor unit moves physically inside the body to compensate for shake. It is widely considered some of the best stabilization ever put into an action camera."
Also for the ND pipeline, I think it does relatively little to change the economics of fossil fuels.
This is ignoring the issue of tribal sovereignty and water rights which is where most of the issue lies imo. No one is trying to ruin the economy, they simply want untainted natural resources on their own property.
If this pipeline was going through disneyland, i don't think you'd hear popular arguments about disney trying to ruin the oil economy.
I think that’s half right. We are absolutely horrendous to natives around here. But that’s not why Greenpeace got involved, nor why most of the left cares about this issue.
If the pipeline was going through Disneyland I think you’d still see the same people up in arms protesting. They’d just be searching for a different justification.
This is a complete load of shit. Oil is trucked back and forth over those roads all day and night, and that has a much higher leakage rate than a pipeline. NIMBYs never come out and say they just don't want something built. They always have some bullshit excuse like this.
I mean what you just said is the huge load of shit. There are interesting differences in risk and pollution between trucking and piping, but they’re not nearly as black and white as you claim and they don’t require acrimony. Calm the hell down?
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