Germany has Spaghetti ice cream, but that’s at least real ice cream just made to look like spaghetti.

The best argument against Rand is just listening to her for 5min.

Very rarely do you see such a mixture of arrogance, self-righteousness and utter lack of logic in a single person.

And who does that?

I think you don’t really get my point. I’m not arguing that there are no ways to archive data. I’m arguing that there are no technologies available for average Joe.

It is hardly a good strategy to basically set up half a datacenter at home.

Thin concrete slabs are extremely brittle.

Is it? It’s rather expensive and would you really know, if the data is gone or corrupted?

You’d have to download every single file in certain intervals and check it. That’s not really low complexity.

But what actually is “archival”?

Like, what technology normal person has access to counts at least as enthusiast level archival?

Magnetic tape, optical media, flash, HDD all rot away, potentially within frighteningly short timeframes and often with subtle bitrot.

and I could make a death ray out of my home wifi box and a wok.

I mean, you could. Do you happen to have a small nuclear reactor and about 400l of liquid helium?

It’s absolutely not inherently wrong or implausible to assume that the constant and rather direct exposure over decades causes cancer.

Old timey radio operators definitely died earlier. They had much higher cancer rates. Granted, completely different levels of radiation, but radiation damage is stochastic. If there is an effect at all, it will cause thousands of new cases even low doses simply because we have like 7 billion phone users.

Doing proper studies on that is hard, but absolutely necessary.

Well, obviously, you just have to put a sticker with a geometric pattern on it to turn the bad radiation into good radiation!

(I wish that was a joke, but you can actually buy those)

Not much less. The cheaper ones all have significant drawbacks.

Used phones might be cheaper, but they still rely on someone else shelling out money.

My problem is not my personal financial situation, it’s societal. We throw out tons of resources (natural, but also human) out of the window for products that have zero benefit. It’s extremely wasteful.

Life.

I need a smartphone for my job (authenticator), bank, social life, etc.

Buying a new phone in the range of 500€ and having to replace that every 4-5 years, comes down to about 10€ per month.

Of course I could buy a cheaper phone, but those usually get barely any software updates, which I find rather frightening, and often enough break for other reasons (battery dead, ports worn out, cracked display). So it’s not really cheaper.

I just got a new phone (reluctantly) and it feels like 90% of the “features” are useless marketing gimmicks.

Most people still use their phones for very similar purposes to 2016 or even 2012. Instead of providing properly optimized software and batteries that last weeks, we get these huge heavy expensive unoptimized pieces of techno garbage. And of course they need fast charging, otherwise you’d be wired to a charter half the time.

I’m practically forced to spend 10€ per month, even if I’m hesitant to buy new stuff, just to have a reasonable phone. That’s crazy.

He’s still on YouTube, in case you didn’t know.

What really bothers me is that rpi seems to have “lost its way”.

I’d argue, there are essentially two camps here. The close-to-x86 camp, who want powerful, but efficient small machines, and the tinker-board camp, who want cheap machines with barely any power needs, basically a microcontroller on steroids, that you can buy an entire school class worth of for a few bucks.

Rpis started in the latter camp. 35€ for reasonable performance, great software for kids to tinker with, hardly any requirements, everyone has a usb mouse/keyboard.

But nowadays pis are in the no man’s land between. They’re priced above cheap N100 PCs, but are not as powerful, and simultaneously way too expensive and involved for throwing them at children - like it was initially intended.

I’m not sure, how that’s supposed to be sustainable.

I work at a company that does ai research.

You are so emotionally charged.

Let me rephrase that: “My salary depends on believing that AI is great, so I will not stop believing”

But sure, I’m emotionally charged. Not the guy who’s (poorly) defending his excuse for work.

So all your points are “nu-uh”.

Show me a single product that is even close to being worth the investment.

How can openAI ever recoup all the money?

This tech has already irreversibly changed coding, graphic design, marketing, writing, education,…

Where? Writing boilerplate articles without content for dying news outlets? “Coding” hardly changed. You know why? Because typing code is by far the least time consuming part of the work.

And where are all those great graphic design products? You mean those cool images of Trump riding a laser velociraptor?

You think companies would be investing hundreds of billions if there is nothing there?

Yes. Also, Metaverse, blockchain, etc. Ever heard of the dotcom bubble? Same pattern.

You would be wrong, as I work in AI research.

Hard doubt. Because the number one virtue of a scientist is to know the limitations of their subject. So either you’re not actually a researcher, or a really bad one.

Then where is it?

There’s hardly any application that’s more than a gimmick. ChatGPT is an incompetent liar, Sora and all the image/video generators produce mediocre crap the can’t reasonably controlled, chat bots keep making up stuff, etc. etc.

This tech is done. Why do you think there’s no progress from openai? The tech hit a ceiling. LLMs scaled to their current state very quickly, but each increment used exponentially more compute. There’s not enough compute, not enough training data to get better.

I’m pretty sure, you don’t understand how models work. It’s just magic for you. Just like blockchains, NFTs and VR. None of them changed the world in any meaningful way - just scams.

AI companies very fundamentally don’t make money, and have no way to become profitable in the near future. None of their tech has any business model. OpenAI relies 100% on Microsoft essentially donating azure instances.

Sure, AI has its applications, but not hundreds of billions worth of applications.

Why the hate? Because 99% of what’s AI now is actively harming society.

Training and running them consumes enormous amounts of energy, all the IP is within some gigantic monopolistic corporations, these corporations in turn push huge amounts of money into products that are not only bad, but dangerous (MS Recall or X’s porn generator AI), other corporations use AI as excuses to fire thousands of people and letting their core products rot away.

Currently, AI has hardly any positive sides, and those positives are very very narrow. Overall it’s a net negative.

I have to say, I’m always skeptical of proposals that seem too active.

Agriculture is mostly passive. Of course plants need care, but most of the time, they’re doing their thing alone. If you need constant monitoring, maintenance, resource cycling, etc, etc, it’ll drive costs up very quickly and will need to be detached from nature quite a bit.

This is, at best, a niche solution for rich countries. It won’t feed the masses.

Look at crowdstrike. A tiny error disabled millions of computers for hours. Think about what would have happened, if this wouldn’t have been an error, but an actual attack.

Look at the supply chains of medical supplies. One major outbreak of some bacterial disease in India or China will lead to them stopping exports and since so many pills are produced there, a huge drop in global supply.

Look at the undersea cables. There are not that many and capable malicious actor could easily destroy a lot of them.

Look at the power grid. I don’t know about other parts of the world, but the European grid, spanning pretty much all countries in Europe plus turkey, has no plan for a cold start. If it breaks down, there’s gonna be blackouts for weeks.

Of course, none of that will end society, but that’s not how collapses work anyway. One event triggers another, and the combination leads to the collapse itself.