It’s nothing of the sort. If nobody had the capital to scale it through more power, then the research would be more focused on making it efficient.

Large power consumption only happens because someone is willing to dump lots of capital into it so they can own it.

If gigantic amounts of capital weren’t available, then the focus would be on improving the models so they don’t need GPU farms running off nuclear reactors plus the sum total of all posts on the Internet ever.

Both AI and social media are a shit show because it’s owned by a few people.

Unironically, the best social media is Fetlife. Not that it’s perfect by any means–not by far–but it is designed to facilitate bringing people together.

The delusional maniacs are going to be surprised when they ask the Super AI “how do we solve global warming?” and the answer is “build lots of solar, wind, and storage, and change infrastructure in cities to support walking, biking, and public transportation”.

It’s not necessarily about changing anything. It’s a matter of safety for those visiting.

It’s also quality of the tape and how we used it. You could buy a tape and use it for 2, 4, or 6 hours with a tradeoff in quality. Blank tapes were rather expensive, so we all used 6 hours and then copied from there.

Commercially produced VHS tapes also tended to be higher quality than blank tapes, unless you went out of your way to buy the quality ones.

Somewhat different issue there. JPEG compression is lossy. It doesn’t happen on a BMP. Though you can probably link the two up with underlying information theory.

People used to enjoy anime and MST3k episodes on fifth generation VHS copies. Crypto is worse than that.

Steph Sterlings’ recent video hits it directly. The big publishers see Balatro doing well, so they go copy Balatro. They spend a lot of effort looking for the next Balatro in all the wrong places. Their attempts to copy it will fail, because people who like Balatro will just play Balatro. This will continue until there’s a new indie darling dominating the sales charts, and then they’ll try to copy that.

The industry is deeply misguided.

The article puts the cutoff for “old” as being 6 years or more. Officially, Factorio was released in 2020, but we all know that any other studio would have considered it done years before that.

It’s AI at this point. Nvidia considers the gamer division to be vestigial. They were a $700B market cap company that was primarily known for gaming GPUs. They are now quadruple that with AI, and that’s even with some recent hits to their stock price.

IIRC, the steam release is based on a mobile port, and it’s bad. Maybe they fixed it since release, but I dunno.

PSX version added some anime cutscenes, which are nice. Problem is that loading times are horrible and happen as part of every battle.

I seem to remember the DS version being recommended. Otherwise, the SNES version is always good to find on the high seas.

It’s more approachable than most RPGs from the era. It has no random battles, and tends to avoid situations where you advance a character wrong and soft lock yourself. More hardcore RPG fans find it too easy, but it’s a classic for a reason.

I’ve heard that phrase a handful of times now and it’s already making my eye twitch. Though I don’t think it’s meant to be complimentary.

He probably paid some fishing tourist shop to get him to just the right place so he could hook it and pull it in. That pic cost him money, and it’s really important to him.

There are silver linings like this. The good news is that if we fight now, Trump will have destroyed a lot of the institutions (both domestic and foreign) that were holding back real progress. Clears the way to build better ones.

Some time ago, I heard a story of CS and Econ professors having lunch together. The Econ professor was excited that Excel was going to release a version that blew out the 64k row limit. The CS professor nearly choked on his lunch.

Dependence on Excel has definitely caused bad papers to be published in the Econ space, and has had real world consequences. There was a paper years ago that stated that once a country’s debt gets above 120% of GDP, its economy goes into a death spiral. It was passed around as established fact by the sorts of politicians who justify austerity. Problem was, nobody could reproduce the results. Then an Econ undergrad asked the original author for their Excel spreadsheet, and they found a coding error in the formulas. Once corrected, the conclusion disappeared.

The trick is to take the hard drive out of the EVA foam.

Did they ever finish their own bible translation? The one they started because King James was too woke.

At least some Teslas use the Supercharger network for free, so they’re a drain on the company at this point. But I think they canned that program a while back for new sales.

Personally, if I picked one up (and I probably wouldn’t unless it was even cheaper than they are now), I’d spray paint it in gaudy pansexual pride flag colors.