I am relatively pessimistic about the profitability of those panning for gold in the downstream AI market.
The core bottlenecks are power and computing capacity, and they actually trace back to the exact same issue. It all comes down to the physical energy it takes to flip or move a single bit inside the ram or disk storage. This concept is subject to fundamental physical barriers.
There are a few ways to tackle this, like improving power efficiency, reducing model size, or pushing hardware further. However, achieving orders-of-magnitude improvement in any of these areas will cost a massive amount of time and money. I wonder if governments, corporations, and investors have the patience to wait for these tech breakthroughs.
For people who think often, ad is only useful in very few situations.
The ability to think often is ultimately a capability that only a minority of humans possess. Therefore, for the vast majority of people, ad is very useful.
For example, my retired parents enjoy buying little gadgets from ads.
I remember a joke where a guy sent a joke to another via private message, and Xi Jinping laughed. It seems the government's mindset is the same everywhere.
If they want to protect children, shouldn't they sterilize everyone?
Every child born, regardless of wealth will inevitably suffer injury, illness, and psychological setbacks.
Therefore, the best way to protect them would be not allowing people to have children.
By the way, not having children is also more eco-friendly, because an infinite series simply converges.
I wonder if I’ll see this ridiculous scene in my lifetime.
> By the way, not having children is also more eco-friendly, because an infinite series simply converges.
This one isn't actually accurate. Younger people have longer time horizons (i.e. aren't expecting to be dead as soon) and are therefore more likely to support policies like electrifying transportation and generating power from lower CO2 sources, and policies get enacted when they have majority support, so causing the population to skew older by reducing the number of children is ecologically very bad.
In theory. In reality the number of young people concerned about climate change is high, but the number of those willing to then not take a airplane for a few days of vacation is pretty low in my experience.
So supporting policies, "that somebody should do something" sure, also my generation thinks like this and the older one. But supporting policies that also actually affect themself, different story.
Because there is also the effect of doomerism. If the world is doomed anyway, then I can at least enjoy my vacation while I am still alive.
> In reality the number of young people concerned about climate change is high, but the number of those willing to then not take a airplane for a few days of vacation is pretty low in my experience.
Probably because air travel is something like 2% of CO2 emissions, driving long distances also emits CO2 so the actual reduction is more like 1%, and people understand what a cost/benefit ratio is.
Meanwhile they're significantly more likely to do things like buy an electric car or hybrid or install rooftop solar, which makes a much larger actual difference.
> But supporting policies that also actually affect themself, different story.
Who is more likely to support voting to fund car chargers, working people who are tired of buying gas or retirees who want to use that money to increase government retirement benefits?
> Because there is also the effect of doomerism.
Doomerism itself comes from being in the minority.
I would support air travel taxes even though I’ve used a plane 5 times this year already.
Just because I don’t believe in voluntary action doesn’t mean I wouldn’t accept society-wide policy. I want impactful societal action, not self-harm disguised as feelgood ecohobbies.
This problem can only be solved by coordinated government intervention.
They should just mandate 1 spouse should stay at home (working remotely or not working) or you must hire a full-time nanny. I'm only half joking. If your kid has enough unsupervised time to be watching porn on a regular basis, wtf is going on?
The solution is obviously to force CCTV inside homes, with data analyzed and hosted in a government cloud. If you are against this proposal, you support child abuse.
And no, this money couldn't be used to improve the life of families.
Worth remembering that eugenics was the smart idea among many intellectuals in the earlier 20th century. The fascinating list of eminent adherents include J. Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill, T. Roosevelt, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, Herbert Hoover, J.H. Kellogg (of corn flake fame), Oliver Wendell Holmes, GB Shaw, Sidney Webb (early socialist, co-founder of the LSE & the Labour Party) and William Beveridge who created the British National Health System (NHS). Apparently Hitler wrote "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.". (Mein Kempf).
According to the current shortage of computing power and electricity, I suspect that what they really want is not your data, but the computing power and electricity from your device.
If users' behaviors can be pre-labeled on their own devices, processed with AI, and then sent back, it might save a significant amount of internal computing costs.
Chrome does/did this already. They've never been of any forensic interest to me but the history file stores clusters of domains visited and keywords searched for. It was pitched as user "Journeys." I think they've deprecated it.
I agree to install it, but I don’t agree to automatic updates. The bigger problem is, I can hardly find where to disable Google’s automatic updates. In the end, I just locked the file permissions to stop that virus-like auto-update program from running.
Auto-updating browsers is one of the best advances in the web dev space in the past decade. I find it hard to believe that anyone who did web development before evergreen browsers became a thing would ever disagree.
I think automatic updates that offer no easy way to refuse are completely unreasonable.
Can you imagine going to see a doctor, and in the middle of your appointment, the doctor drags you into the operating room to automatically update your body?
That's roughly how I feel about automatic updates. If you apply the concept of automatic updates to any industry outside of software, it would very easily be illegal. But strangely, this concept is considered legal when it comes to software.
Considering that most websites are optimized to just barely run on what the developers are targeting, letting them target the "state of the art" instead of what came installed on grandmas machine is been a huge negative for website efficiency and thus average user experience, not to mention global resource waste.
> and anyone who wants consistent rendering of sites
Yeah, that's where you lose me. The people who want to guarantee pixel-perfect rendering of web sites tend to be the same people who feel entitled to run their code on my machine as part of delivering their site, who prioritize their brand identity over my accessibility settings, who want to build their complex web app UI with no respect for the conventions of my chosen operating system. My browser should not be an ally to them; it should be taking my side in those conflicts.
The core bottlenecks are power and computing capacity, and they actually trace back to the exact same issue. It all comes down to the physical energy it takes to flip or move a single bit inside the ram or disk storage. This concept is subject to fundamental physical barriers.
There are a few ways to tackle this, like improving power efficiency, reducing model size, or pushing hardware further. However, achieving orders-of-magnitude improvement in any of these areas will cost a massive amount of time and money. I wonder if governments, corporations, and investors have the patience to wait for these tech breakthroughs.
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