Who even knows? For whatever reason the board decided to keep quiet, didn’t elaborate on its reasoning, let Altman and his allies control the narrative, and rolled over when the employees inevitably revolted. All we have is speculation and unnamed “sources close to the matter,” which you may or may not find credible.

Even if the actual reasoning was absolutely justified–and knowing how much of a techbro Altman is (especially with his insanely creepy project to combine cryptocurrency with retina scans), I absolutely believe the speculation that the board felt Altman wasn’t trustworthy–they didn’t bother to actually tell anyone that reasoning, and clearly felt they could just weather the firestorm up until they realized it was too late and they’d already shot themselves in the foot.

…So your metric of “too much AI safety” is that it won’t let you fuck the fish…?

The speculation I heard in the Ars Technica article is that the board was unhappy with how quickly he was pushing to commercialize OpenAI, and they were wary about all the AI side hustles he was starting, including an AI chip company to compete with nvidia.

I’ve had an AI bot trained on our company’s knowledge base literally make up links to nonexistent articles out of whole cloth. It’s so useless I just stopped bothering to ask it anything, I save more time looking it up myself.

Yeah, even with a heatsink and blasting my case fans at max my m.2 SSD hovers around 50 degrees idle. It’s getting to the point I’m seriously considering taking off the side panel and pointing a fan straight at the motherboard to keep it cool.

For better or worse, the “FUCK YOUUUUU! FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUU!” cutscene doomed it, it was impossible to treat the game as a legitimate entity after that point

I keep NoScript around because there’s been a few times where I clicked a bad link and NoScript blocking JS by default has saved my bacon. Plus, a lot of services like twitch serve ads through separate domains that I can block from running entirely with NoScript–the entire time people were complaining about Twitch trying to bypass adblockers, I never once saw a single ad.

The only game my 1060 truly struggled with was my pirated copy of Hogwarts Legacy, though there has been a few other games that would chug in parts like RDR2. I wound up replacing it with a 6950XTX I found on sale for less than some lower end cards like the 3070, so I think I made out okay.

(I really wish I’d picked a better game to upgrade over than fucking Hogwarts Legacy, though. Biggest disappointment in years.)

This is what I did when I visited the UK a few years ago. I paid about $30 and I was covered for the entire trip.

I think the horrible truth of the matter is that the cycle won't stop until one side is dead, no matter how much we wish otherwise. There's just too much bad blood for either side to trust the other, too many old grudges spawning new grudges that in turn result in more bloodshed. I legitimately, honestly, seriously don't see a peaceful solution–the Israelis won't give anything up because they (rightly) fear any concessions will simply be used to fuel further attacks by militants until they're driven out or eradicated, and the Palestinians won't give anything up because they don't have anything left to give up, nor do they have anyone who will take them in, so they can't even leave (which they don't want to do anyway since they'd been living there for centuries).

The worst part is that deep down, pretty much everyone knows this, and they know that supporting one side means tacitly supporting the genocide and eradication of the other. But nobody in power wants to come out and say it, because admitting you're supporting genocide is a surefire way to piss off literally everyone. So we get platitudes and high-minded speeches about preventing civilian casualties, and everyone hems and haws while we create our own little Hell on earth.

Advertising is largely a cargo cult, with the "advertising/marketing is the most important thing" mindset being pushed by people with a vested interest in getting you to spend money on advertising. Actual, real businesses buying actual, real advertisements have said they saw basically no difference in revenue before and after buying the ad.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like there's no point in advertising–small businesses need it to jumpstart their client base, and medium/large businesses use it to make sure their products maintain mindshare so that a customer is more likely to think "I want a Coke" instead of "I want a soda." But in terms of directly influencing customer purchasing decisions, the biggest influence is old-fashioned word of mouth and direct customer experience, not advertising.

I daily drive it at work and it's perfectly solid, but I also don't do anything cuhRAAAAZY because it's a workstation. 99% of the time I'm just running Flameshot to take screenshots, a few Firefox windows with one or two dozen tabs total, a company chat program, and on rare occasions I'll use LibreOffice to open a file or do some very light image editing.

Linux is pretty much universally free, with the exception of a few select distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and even then, there's variants of RHEL that are free like CentOS and Fedora, the main attraction for RHEL is paid support).

Most distributions are fairly similar, these days, with the main differences being the desktop environment (i.e. how the UI looks and feels), the update cadence (some distros are much more aggressive about deploying updates to the software and utilities underlying the distro, which gives new features faster at the cost of breaking things more often, while other distros prefer to stay on older, known-stable versions longer, at the cost of being slower to deploy new features that sometimes a program needs to run), and the methods used to configure settings (some distros go out of their way to make as much configureable in the GUI as possible, while others are primarily configured through console commands, and others like Gentoo expect you to manually compile pretty much all the software yourself–this makes it extremely customizable, but extremely difficult), and the default file format for package installation (rpm, deb, flatpaks, snaps, etc).

My personal recommendation is to check out a few of these:

• Ubuntu

• Linux Mint (or Cinnamon)

• EndeavorOS

• Pop!OS

I also recommend that when you first format the disk, you make two partitions: one smaller 50-100 GB partition for the root partition (where Linux stores its system files and software), and a larger partition for /home, which is where all your personal files are stored. This way, you can easily swap between different distros without needing to really worry about losing your files.

I've had the car in the shop for repairs precisely zero times, and the one actual problem I've had was mostly my own damn fault and once I figured out what was going wrong it was a literal 5 minute fix. I'd call that zero issues.

And the air cooled battery is literally not an issue unless you fast charge it multiple times in a day. The number of times I fell under that scenario in 4 years of ownership was precisely once, when I going on a weekend road trip for my birthday, and I opted to rent a hybrid for that instead. I consider something that covers literally 99.999% of my driving needs, has needed zero shop time beyond routine maintenance, and has saved me literally thousands of dollars in gas money to be a pretty good deal.

Now, to be 100% fair, I wouldn't recommend someone buy a Leaf today because its CHAdeMO fast charger is obsolete. But the car itself is perfectly fine.

Huh? I've had a 2018 base model Leaf for over 4 years, and here's the sum total of my issues:

• Car didn't recognize the door was closed at one point, preventing me from shifting out of park (issue was due to dents in frame caused by occasionally closing the door on the seat belt buckle, which was positioned at the same height as the sensor switch built into the door that gets depressed when door is closed. Fixed in 5 minutes by wadding up a small ball of packing tape and taping it to the frame where it comes in contact with the sensor switch)

• It occasionally doesn't load the Bluetooth module properly, fixed by restarting the car

That's literally it. It's been rock solid otherwise, and it gets driven literally every day.

Literally the only reason I’m not still using the 5G variant of the 4a is because I dropped it in a grocery store and rolled an IRL nat 1 (it landed on its corner, went windmilling on the rebound, and struck the edge of a metal shelf in the exact top center of the phone, severing a cable and killing the display AND touch screen). I swapped back to my OG pixel, and the only reason I’m even considering am upgrade now is because its battery is literally starting to die.

Yeah, as someone in a tech job whose primary function is “parsing and interpreting logs” sometimes even the repeated flood of seemingly useless logs can be helpful. If nothing else, they explain why there aren’t any useful logs and that can guide how I respond to the problem.

If you believe Google isn’t planning on eventually training Bard on Gmail, then I have a half dozen bridges to sell you.

And if the odds of that happening are literally zero, what then? If the only feasible outcome of immediate, widespread AI adoption is an empty suit using the heel of their $750 Allen Edmonds shoe to grind the face of humanity even further into the mud, should we still plow on full steam ahead?

The single biggest lesson humanity has failed to learn despite getting repeatedly smacked in the face since the industrial revolution is that sometimes new technologies and ideas aren’t worth the cost despite the benefits. Factories came and covered vast swaths of land in soot and ash, turned pristine rivers and lakes into flaming rivers of toxic sludge, and poisoned the earth. Cars choked the skies with smog, poisoned an entire generation with lead, and bulldozed entire neighborhoods and parks so that they could be paved over for parking lots and clogged freeways. Single use plastics choke the life out of our oceans, clog our waterways with garbage, and microplastics have infused themselves into our very biology, with health implications that will endure for generations. Social media killed the last remaining vestiges of polite discourse, opened the floodgates on misinformation, and gave a safe space for conspiracy theories and neonazis to fester. And through it all, we continue to march relentlessly towards a climate catastrophe that can no longer be prevented, with the only remaining variable being where the impact will lie on the spectrum from “life will suck for literally everyone, some worse then others” to “humanity will fall victim to its own self-created mass extinction event.”

With multiple generations coming to the realization that all the vaunted progress of mankind will directly make their lives worse, an obvious trend line of humanity plowing ahead with the hot new thing and ignoring the consequences even after they become obvious and detrimental to society as a whole, and the many, instantly-obvious negative impacts AI can have, is it any wonder that so many are standing up and saying “No?”

It’s literally not the same as digital art and I find the comparison offensive. One is a human directly putting pixels on the screen, the other is output from a program that processed millions of pieces of actual artwork into the creative equivalent of pink slime.