Unless it’s baked into non-rewriteable ROMs, I imagine that someone might come up with a way to stick whatever scream you want into the thing.

And…let me make it even more concrete. I’d say that there are basically two scenarios:

1. We establish that AI — for some definition of AI — is simply too dangerous for humanity to have. In that case, the right path is to ban AI globally. That means that nobody gets it. Some coalition of countries is going to have to be willing to attack anyone who tries developing it. In that case, what we have is effectively an arms control restriction baked into customary international law. It is not optional to participate. And, for all the future of humanity, we need to be willing to enforce that. It means that we need a viable verification protocol to ensure that nobody is developing it, as is normally the case for arms treaties. And everyone has to submit to that verification protocol.

2. We don’t. In that case, we want to develop AI sooner rather than later.

I am certainly not willing to say that #2 is the “right” scenario and #1 is the “wrong” one. But if we decide on #1, that comes with a lot of things that we need to be doing as a species. It’s not just going to be the pre-computer-era status quo persisting, where our limited state of technology was what maintained the situation.

EDIT: I’d also add that, just as that I’m not sure that Friendly AI is a solvable problem, I’m also not sure that it’s really viable to have a verification protocol where we can prevent development of AI. Past arms control treaties where I think that verification was likely much easier — it’s hard to hide development of major warships under the Washington Naval Treaty, for example, yet there were still parties evading restrictions — were not always successful. #1 comes with its own set of hard problems too. Are parallel compute processors legal? What about their development and production? Under what restrictions are they used? Is it possible to achieve advanced AI using CPUs (my guess is that it likely is)? If so, what new restrictions will need to be placed on use and access to CPUs? How will we identify entities building production facilities to build CPUs and GPUs? Will we need to track all existing CPUs and GPUs, to try to identify entities who might be stockpiling them? How will we monitor what the great stores of those out there now are being used for?

If we go with #1, that also entails a different world from the one that we live in today.

I’ve got some pessimistic views as to long-term AI concerns — I’m not sure that aligning advanced AI goals with human goals in the long run is a viable problem to solve. We may not be able to achieve Friendly AI. I could believe that.

But I certainly don’t think that AI development is “moving too fast”. Not really anything to gain in slowing down development. I remember Elon Musk proposing a six-month moratorium on development — that doesn’t make any sense, only would be something that you’d want to do if you had an immediate milestone that you believed that there was major risk attached to. In general, either AI is something that you should ban globally because it’s too much of an existential risk for humanity, and halt all development and enforce that halt, or you’d like to achieve it as soon as possible. We are not at a point where there is a consensus that that level of unacceptable risk exists and there is a global commitment to enforcing such a global prohibition.

I can believe that there might be an excess of infrastructure development in particular, that we might not have the research side moving as quickly as need be to support that. Like, we might be doing misallocation in buying a lot of specific chips without establishing that those chips are going to provide a worthwhile return. But in terms of the technology advancing…no, can’t agree there.

24 years ago

Oh God how is the Internet this old

So, I’m being a nit-picky, but while I’d say that personal Internet access really became a major thing in the US in the late 1990s or so, and that led to a huge explosion in the creation of the stuff like commercial websites, and so from consumer “the Internet is directly part of my life” standpoint, a lot of people might say “that’s when the Internet became a thing,” the Internet as an entity has been around since it was created from the ARPANET.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

The ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United States to enable resource sharing. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET).[39]

In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which facilitated worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks. TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States for researchers, first at speeds of 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s.[40]

The NSFNet expanded into academic and research organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in 1988–89.[41][42][43][44] Although other network protocols such as UUCP and PTT public data networks had global reach well before this time, this marked the beginning of the Internet as an intercontinental network. Commercial Internet service providers emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia.[45] The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.[46]

It’s just that the places using it were more universities and companies doing engineering stuff and stuff like that for a while.

So if you say that the Internet was really born from the ARPANET when networks shifted to TCP/IP, you’re talking something like early 1980s; by that metric, the Internet would be something like 55-ish years old.

EDIT: Some users here are on lemmy.sdf.org. SDF was around well before 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System

Super Dimension Fortress (abbreviated as SDF, also known as freeshell.org) is a non-profit public access UNIX shell provider on the Internet. It has been in continual operation since 1987 as a non-profit social club. The name is derived from the Japanese anime series Super Dimension Fortress Macross; the original SDF server was a Bulletin board system created by Ted Uhlemann for fellow Japanese anime fans.[1] From its BBS roots, which have been well documented as part of the BBS: The Documentary project, SDF has grown into a feature-rich provider serving members around the world.

Does Kickstarter have liability in general for Kickstarted projects? I’d kind of assume that that’s on the specific project. I can’t imagine that Kickstarter is in any kind of position to really do a domain-specific evaluation of whether a given project is in line with local regulations.

SATA drives ain’t dead

Who was saying that they were?

Rotational drive demand is way up due to AI, which is why prices are way up, and for rotational drives, the SATA interface is just fine.

EDIT:

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/

Hard Drive - 3.5" SATA 16 TB (Average price in USD over last 18 months)

“Observe my anus. I will place it directly in front of your eyes to facilitate inspection.”

“I was feeling under the weather and wanted to find a safe place to hide, so I threw up in various nooks and crannies around the house.”

“I want to go out. Actually, I want in. Actually, no, I want out. On second thought, I want in.”

“I just thought I’d drop by and check to see whether I could get food a few hours early. No? Okay, how about now? No? How about now?”

“As a sign of my undying loyalty, I have placed a dead mouse on the foot of your bed.”

“A new pleather couch? Oh, you shouldn’t have! Permit me to extend my claws and take a jaunt to enhance its breathability.”

It’s possible to get keyboards with an integrated pointing stick, which is how I think most people use them. It’s just that most laptops don’t provide it as an option, so your options are very limited if you want that.

https://www.amazon.com/HHKB-Hacking-Keyboard-Wireless-Bluetooth/dp/B0DGR1JD36

or:

https://www.pckeyboard.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=UB40PGA

(I own one of the latter, and can’t recommend it; while the buckling spring keyswitches are pretty much immortal, the mouse button switches wore out long before they did.

Honestly, what I’d really like is for a non-all-in-one form factor to be available. Like…laptops are intrinsically limiting, because I have to take what the laptop vendor chooses. That selection is limited. And today, laptops aren’t very modular. With a laptop, I can’t pick whatever touchpad or keyboard or whatever I want in the way that I can a desktop unless I haul both the built-in one and an external USB one.

I’d like to see something where there’s just a standard frame that opens that a display, keyboard, and touchpad/trackball/nipple mouse can be mounted on and then have the body of the PC separate, on a cable, so that the weight and heat isn’t there. That provides a lot more flexibility as to options. Mini-PCs can kind-of sort-of do the separate PC, though there’s no standard for attaching the input and display stuff, but there isn’t a convention for them having a battery whose charge they can monitor and act on.

I don’t personally care for the Thinkpad-style pointing stick, which is what this is aimed at addressing. But I damned well do want a touchpad with three physical buttons, which Thinkpads also have had. I can get external USB devices like that, but for integrated stuff, I’m pretty much at the laptop vendor’s mercy.

First, Peltier elements are pretty inefficient. Second, I’m dubious about the design — a Peltier element moves heat from Point A to Point B, and the whole device appears to still sit beneath the shirt. I suppose that the hot side is the outer side, but what you’d ideally want is to have hot air blowing as far away from you as possible.

I’m skeptical that it’s better to carry a battery-powered Peltier element than to carry something like an evaporative cooler. That’s more-energy-efficient, and you don’t have the problem of part of the device getting hot.

EDIT: Or, if you can’t leverage phase-change from liquid water to water vapor because of high humidity, cooling vests that leverage solid to liquid phase-change.

How a Cooling Vest Invented by a Furry Made Its Way Into the U.S. Military

China’s special for controlling a very high proportion of the processing infrastructure that converts the lithium ore to batteries, rather than the extraction. There are a bunch of places that have substantial known lithium reserves.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lithium-reserves-by-country

Australia does the most extraction:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lithium-production-by-country

I think that 2026 is doing okay.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/d7886499-5a38-4fc6-bf28-d350d836e6d5.png

Given that the Metaverse stuff hasn’t been commercially successful thus far, burning a lot of money.

The Oregon Chapter of the Sierra Club indicates they support cleaner energy but believe drilling must not come at the expense of fragile habitats.

Foreign lithium isn’t magic, zero-footprint lithium. We are a major consumer of lithium, and will probably increase if we’re going to move to BEVs. If we’re going to consume it, it only seems fair to the rest of the world to have some of the footprint in our own territory.

I’d kind of expect more than that.

Meta’s said that they’re going to to be shifting focus from VR to AI.

It looks like Meta’s VR wing employs 15,000 people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs

Number of employees: 15,000 (2026)

Though…hmm. It says that there are some AI things under that as well, so maybe that’s not all VR:

Reality Labs, formerly Oculus VR, is a business and research unit of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook Inc.) that produces virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) hardware and software, including virtual reality headsets such as the Quest, and online platforms such as Horizon Worlds. In June 2022, several artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives that were previously a part of Meta AI were transitioned to Reality Labs.

I use AMD GPUs.

And then the wave exploded into a fireball.

Frankly, being taken for $100 on a phone is probably a lot better than putting your life savings into one of Trump’s memecoins or Truth Social, which some people did.

My impression is that Trump mostly just licenses his name to these ventures for a payment and isn’t affiliated with them otherwise. I don’t think that he likely cares much what happens to the phone buyers or sellers. He’s made his money either way.

EDIT: Yeah:

https://www.trump.com/lifestyle/trump-mobile

Trump Mobile, its products and services are not designed, developed, manufactured, distributed or sold by The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals. T1 Mobile LLC uses the Trump name and trademark pursuant to the terms of a limited license agreement which may be terminated or revoked according to its terms.

It’s some third-party fly-by-night organization doing the actual deal.

Truth Social?

Patrick Lynett, a USC civil engineering professor, said when it comes to natural disasters, training people how to react is important, and one way to do that is through digital work like the simulation and video game he created that depicts what happened.

I think that if you’re in a boat right next to the initiation of a 328-foot-high megatsunami, going 1,578 feet up a rock cliff, as the video portrays in the game, you’re probably just pretty much boned.

EDIT: Not nearly as big, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

The Vajont Dam as seen from the village of Longarone in 2005, showing roughly the top 60–70 m (200–230 ft) of concrete. The wall of water that overtopped the dam by 250 m (820 ft)[1] and destroyed this village and all nearby villages on 9 October 1963 would have obscured virtually all of the blue sky in this photo.[4]

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/1eb406f1-849d-4e96-b89a-78f9ace2911f.jpeg

Like, someone standing there and looking up at that wave is just pretty much boned.