These are some wild numbers, looking at them together.

So, basically, it’s heavily disproportionately loaded towards high-education users. 25% users have post-graduate degrees.

https://www.ccdaily.com/2025/09/datapoints-educational-attainment-in-the-u-s/

This has 14.9% of the US age 25 and older falling into that group.

But it’s also disproportionately loaded towards black and Latino users. This has 30% of the userbase being non-Latino black.

https://blackdemographics.com/black-population-in-the-u-s-reaches-51-6-million/

That’s 12.7% of the US.

I wouldn’t blink at either one of those statistics in isolation.

But…both black and Latino groups, particularly black, typically have lower levels of educational attainment in the US.

I would expect that to mean that there is either some really high concentration in one area—like, a exceptionally high level of black users with graduate degrees are using AI, enough to throw the numbers that far from overall proportions in society, or you have different strong “clusters” of different groups using AI—like, there is a really high level of black AI users and a really strong cluster of high-education users.

considers

It does say that users are disproportionately below 50, and that would explain some of it. Younger generations are both more educated and less white than older ones.

searches

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/07/30/most-common-age-among-us-racial-ethnic-groups/

Would need to go dig up demographics for each cohort to figure out what proportional numbers would be, but just glancing at that, that’s definitely not going to explain nearly all of that. The groups are roughly equally-sized for younger age cohorts, so that’s be a fair bit of that on age, but there’s still gonna be a substantial education split.

searches

https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72

For the 2021-2022 school year, this has whites being granted about six times as many masters or doctorates as either black or Latino students, so that’ll be a pretty big educational gap even for younger age cohorts. Yeah. Huh.

drums fingers

Well, I dunno. It’s an interesting pair of figures, though.

39% said they occasionally tell AI things that they would not tell other people.

I would be a lot less concerned about this were it not for the sneaking suspicion that most users (a) probably are using cloud-based LLMs rather than local and (b) have no idea what the rules on data privacy regarding their conversations on said service are.

I’d guess that there are probably utilities to export the world file to POV-Ray or Blender or something. They might be able to scale better.

What the actual fuck does a package manager do?

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

man, apropos, info…

WE CANNOT DO A THING! PROBABLY!

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

Asteroid impact avoidance encompasses the methods by which near-Earth objects (NEO) on a potential collision course with Earth could be diverted, preventing destructive impact events. An impact by a sufficiently large asteroid or other NEOs would cause, depending on its impact location, massive tsunamis or multiple firestorms, and an impact winter caused by the sunlight-blocking effect of large quantities of pulverized rock dust and other debris placed into the stratosphere. A collision 66 million years ago between the Earth and an object approximately 10 kilometers (6 miles) wide is thought to have produced the Chicxulub crater and triggered the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event that the scientific community understands to have caused the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs.

In 2022, NASA spacecraft DART impacted Dimorphos, reducing the minor-planet moon’s orbital period by 32 minutes. This mission constitutes the first successful attempt at asteroid deflection.[15] In 2027, China plans to launch a deflection mission to the near-Earth object 2015 XF261, with the impact estimated to occur in April 2029.[16]

EDIT: Based on a Tineye search, this comic was made no later than 2008, so it did predate that.

I don’t recall that, but IIRC it does need to be a minimum of installed RAM if you want to be able to hibernate, since then you write out the contents of your memory to swap. That makes having at least as much swap as RAM a good rule of thumb for many systems.

IIRC kernel crash dumps also make use of swap in a similar way, though I assume that in most sane scenarios, it’s not going to actually require as much swap as physical memory, because you won’t have all of your physical memory allocated to the kernel.

On non-exotic Linux systems, I always make sure to have more swap than physical RAM.

“Hello I would like to torture my SSD’s FTL because I left three Electron apps open”

If you don’t actually need the swap, Linux isn’t going to make use of swap. If you need the swap, then you’d probably rather use it than have the OOM killer take out a process.

My desktop has plenty of swap available, but is using none of it, because the system isn’t under memory pressure.

Yudkowsky tends to like engineering bioweapons in If Anyone Builds It, Eveeyone Dies.

I’m not sure that that’d be my first concern, but I also don’t really think that ability to affect the non-electronic world is really the big hurdle. I think that the bug hurdle is getting some kind of AGI running somewhere, and once that happens, it’s going to be really difficult to keep it from acting in the real world in a way that gives itself more capability to act.

Like, I don’t think that the idea that computers are a sort of effective containment system and that the AI is inside a computer, and humans will act as a sensible check on the computer influencing the real world, so it can’t do much, holds up very well. If you do wind up with something more-capable than humans running around, I think that it’s going to be very hard to anticipate all the possible risks.

Say that someone manages to get an AI producing something particularly valuable and useful, doing something profitable for them. My guess is that they are probably going to link it up to whatever they think will be useful.

My understanding from past reading is that one of China’s principal near-term interests is in trying to leverage AI to do industrial automation. Even if it were not, you’re going to have more-and-more heavily-automated production facilities, and probably more general-purpose systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)

Lights-out manufacturing or dark factory is the manufacturing methodology of fully automating the production of goods at factories and other industrial facilities, without requiring any human labour presence on-site.[1] Many of these factories are considered to be able to run “with the lights off,” but few run exclusively lights-out production. For example, in computer numerical control machining, the presence of human workers is typically required for removing completed parts and setting up tombstones that hold unfinished parts. As the technology necessary for total automation becomes increasingly available, many factories are beginning to use lights-out production between shifts (or as a separate shift) to meet increasing production demand or to save money on labor.

An automatic factory is a place where raw materials enter, and finished products leave with little or no human intervention.[2

You have the ability to influence humans, which can also affect the real world. One of the most-seriously disrupted industries by LLMs right now is in copywriting, targeted advertising. Why? Because they’re pretty good at influencing humans, even in very primitive form. And we have an interest in building models that can influence people even more effectively.

You don’t have to have a human be off trying to intentionally trying to destroy humanity to be doing sonething that gives an AI increasing ability to act in the real world.

I remember reading an article a while back about some guy who had spent a while talking to ChatGPT or some similar chatbot and who became convinced that he needed to violently liberate the god being held captive in the computer. Like, if, as some have put it, “glorified auto-complete” can get a human to do that, what could a much-more-capable system with goals and intentions do? I think that just the ability to communicate with humans, which we certainly already permit (and is one of our main uses), would make containment pretty hard.

People already run all sorts of LLMs connected to uncontained, agentic things. Like, sure, if you have some kind of isolation system adequate to contain it, then there’s no risk. But…people are running stuff without such an isolation system, all over, now.

Hell, South Africa infamously used an LLM to write the legal rules that they were proposing to control AI, then didn’t validate the text by human. If there’s one place you would not want to use unvalidated AI output, that’s it.

I tend to be somewhat skeptical of the practical risk, but in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, Yudkowsky makes the case that existing systems are already too dangerous, not because of what they thenselves can directly do, but because they are being applied in ways that could lead more-sophisticated systems to emerge.

If you’re an AI researcher, one of the most obvious and imnediately-relevant applications of AI is using it to improve existing AI.

Think of our current CPUs. No human could ever have designed them. They are far too complex, contain billions of transistors. But…we built computers and then promptly used them as tools to build more capable computers.

Yudkowsky’s point is that you have people doing that sort of thing with AI now, and doing so in a way that produces very unpredictable results.

Now, my guess is that that doesn’t constitute much of a probability of going very badly by complete surprise. I think that it’s very likely that instead of a paperclip maximizer that obliterates humanity, you get something that fails spectacularly in a way that causes itself to stop functioning. Like, I’d bet that we’d see something more like a series of similar, spectacular failures before we get something that can function long enough and well enough to represent an existential threat.

But…I will concede that that’s more of a gut feeling. I don’t have real numbers. I can’t make a really convincing argument to myself that I am definitely right. And if I’m wrong, the cost is very high.

I would guess that most of that is textures.

They could probably reasonably just ship half-resolution textures on disc and make higher-res textures be a downloadable option. Bethesda did that with their games, later on added free, downloadable higher-res textures. Shouldn’t require a lot of technical work. Maybe reducing texture resolution could trip some existing bug, a race condition somewhere, but it should be pretty mechanical, as changes go.

I don’t really have a dog in this race—I wouldn’t get the game either way. So I’m not pushing for that as an option. Just saying that I think that it’s an option from a technical standpoint, if one wanted to provide a compact, on-disc version of the game.

It might let you download less than would be the case if it were purely digital.

There are people out there who don’t have the most amazing Internet connections.

I have a bench variable-voltage power supply. Mine is a very low-end one, doesn’t even have an integrated voltmeter, so you need a multimeter or oscilloscope or something to set the voltage.

But…if you need some kind of exotic power at a given voltage and don’t have time to wait for an order to come in, one of those will fill the hole for all kinds of fixed-voltage power supplies.

I have only very rarely needed it. I’ve used it to provide 5V power to a PIC project that I was breadboarding, and another time tried checking whether it was low voltage causing a problem with a given battery-powered device. Maybe one or two other occasions.

If you specifically want barrel plugs, you can get “universal” adapters that will adapt one cable to various diameters and polarities.

I think that USB is also kind of increasingly filling the hole here as a universal standard for DC power on newer products.

Yeah, I had that problem.

I then had a coworker who was a sysadmin, and randomly dropped into his cable box at work and realized what I was doing wrong. Get a bunch of cable ties. Coil up each cable and cable-tie it.

And honestly, one has to keep perspective. Yeah, I’ve occasionally used a really old cable, but let’s say that the worst happens and I need to occasionally get a new cable. It’s…probably not that much of a disaster. It can be hard to get some old computing hardware, but even very elderly cables are generally commercially available.

I tend to think that keeping around things like IECs and analog audio cables are more-worthwhile since they’re slow-moving standards. Most old PC cables just haven’t found much use, in my experience.

Cables used to be something that brick-and-mortar stores had a large markup on. I remember a guy I once knew who had worked at a PC store telling me that the store made more (like, in absolute terms) selling the parallel cable that came with the printer than with the printer. Back then, having some cables around could avoid that, and having a few on-hand was a good idea. But online retailers have made the competition a lot more intense.

I typically have gotten cables at Monoprice if I’m getting a bunch at once, which in the US has historically has had pretty good cable prices, though I haven’t tried comparing online retailer prices recently.

Most have 400V 16A available in the kitchen, allowing for instance our stove to use up to 6400 W!

Yeah, there are also 240V three-phase heavy appliance circuits in the US for things like stoves, air conditioners, washing machines, and such. But that usually isn’t what one is going to be running a PC on.

At some point, the limiting factor is going to start being cooling in the room.

That’s 900W for the GPU alone. The CPU can probably be north of another 200W, and then you will have other hardware you need to power.

I have a space heater that can do 400W on low, 800W on high.

Plus, power. A standard US household circuit is 15 (or 20, in some cases) amps, so even if you’re dedicating an entire 15A household circuit to the PC, that’s 1800W you can drive.

For many US motorists, updating their license at the DMV can be a herculean feat with lengthy wait times.

If you’re an AAA member, you can already just go there for a lot of DMV services and have them done there. They’re considerably faster.

Last time I checked in California, they couldn’t do driver’s license renewals, though AAA can in some other states.

A more-practical “provide a faster alternative” change than abolishing the DMV might be just letting California AAA do driver’s license renewals.

I’m okay with the comic, though I’m not a fan of The New Yorker’s articles.

But the spacing on the typeface in the caption around those right-hand quote marks, both the single and double, is killing me.

looks more

I guess maybe when they made the italic font, they had to move the quote marks to avoid colliding with slanted letters, like the capital T—the left-hand quote marks next to it look fine to me. But then, maybe they didn’t add kerning information so that if an adjacent character didn’t require shifting, the right-hand quotes didn’t shift all the way over, so they’re always left hanging out there to make space for potentially-problematic characters.

You’d think that an entity like The New Yorker, with a long history of printed output, would have selected solid typefaces.

Yeah, honestly, you could go way further back.

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

A Venus figurine is any Upper Palaeolithic statue portraying a woman, usually carved in the round.[1] Most have been unearthed in Europe, but others have been found as far away as Siberia and distributed across much of Eurasia.

Most date from the Gravettian period (26,000–21,000 years ago).[1] However, findings are not limited to this period; for example, the Venus of Hohle Fels dates back at least 35,000 years…

For context, we figured out agriculture and started to move away from hunter-gatherer life about 12,000 years ago.

These figurines are recognised as some of the earliest works of prehistoric art.

Most have wide hips and legs that taper to a point. Arms and feet are often absent, and the head is usually small and faceless. Various figurines exaggerate the abdomen, hips, breasts, thighs, or vulva, although many found examples do not reflect these typical characteristics. Depictions of hairstyles can be detailed, and clothing or tattoos may be indicated.[5]

The original cultural meaning and purpose of these artefacts is not known. It has frequently been suggested that they may have served a ritual or symbolic function.

I have a guess.