Even if they’re trained on the same data, and I suspect they are, why maintain 2 unfathomably large and probably very similar sets of data

It still might be doing it on its own based on its own internal logic

Like maybe it’s worked out that users who use miles expect the conversation to proceed in a different way than users who use kilometers and is tailoring its responses to fit those expectations.

Not that I’m ruling out that it’s something deliberately coded into it by a longshot, just kind of pointing out another possibility

But both options are terrifying when you think about them.

I don’t think it needs to be an actual AI to cause a “Chernobyl Moment” maybe almost literally.

We have tech bros and random clueless idiots trying to shoehorn these glorified chat bots into basically everything, and an administration that doesn’t seem interested in putting meaningful guardrails on the technology. What happens when it gets put in charge of something it really shouldn’t and starts to hallucinate?

If it somehow ends up in charge of critical safety systems in a nuclear plant? (Remember that some of these tech bros want to have their own plants to power their data centers)

Or air traffic control and causes multiple crashes? (Pretty sure I’ve already seen that idea being floated)

Maybe every cybertruck goes haywire stuck on self-driving mode and they cause tons of damages and deaths for a few hours until their batteries run out.

Maybe it gets used to route navigation in Google maps and it ends up causing massive gridlock in every major city around the world for a day or two

Perhaps it gets used for identifying vehicles on traffic cameras and automatically issuing citations, but ends up citing everyone on the highway for a week whether or not they actually did anything plus a bunch of cars that it hallucinated before someone catches on. Millions of tickets are issued and need to be sorted out, if anyone actually pays the fines refunds need to be issued, some people maybe get their license revoked and maybe even get arrested because of it and all of that needs to be set straight

If any of these kinds of things happen on a big enough scale, I think that could be a Chernobyl Moment for AI

I used to drive an Isuzu Trooper. I got rear-ended which totaled my car. Theoretically it was repairable, but when your car is old enough to vote it doesn’t take much damage for it to get totaled.

There was other damage, but one thing that still pisses me off is that a few hundred bucks of that calculation was my spare tire cover, which had some cracks after the accident, and the insurance company would not let that drop.

It was a plastic shell that is mostly just decorative that covered the spare bolted to the back of my vehicle. I didn’t care that it was cracked, it in no way affected the safety of my vehicle, I would have happily driven that car for another decade with it being cracked, if they slapped 5¢ worth of epoxy on it I would have been more than satisfied, or hurry they could have just thrown the damn thing away and I guess my spare would get a little dirtier that it would if it was covered.

But they had to include that in the repair cost estimate, and since it was kind of an uncommon older car, replacement spare tire covers were scarce and pricey and added a few hundred bucks onto the estimate.

I don’t know if that was the thing that pushed me over the edge to a total loss but it certainly didn’t help

I had a perfectly mechanically sound vehicle that was paid off, and could possibly still be on the road today, and instead I got stuck with a couple years of car payments on a car I liked less than that one.

I’m admittedly in a bit of a bubble, but right now my PC gamer friends are a pretty even split between windows and Linux. Know anyone with a steam deck? They’re gaming on Linux.

No, it’s not quite as user-friendly as windows, and it takes a couple extra steps to get things running, especially if you’re playing non-steam games, but that’s one-time setup stuff then you’re golden. Most games are able to run fine on Linux these days, by some measures more PC games may actually work on Linux than in Windows because sometimes new versions of Windows have broken compatibility issues with older games.

There’s edge-cases to be sure, like some stuff with kernel-level anticheat have issues, but the state of that constantly improving, even the game devs are improving Linux support from their end in a lot of cases.

Anecdotally, I’ve had some cases where games are even running better for me on Linux than they did on Windows. Part of that is that most of the main components of my computer are pushing 15 years old, but I think that alone is a pretty big endorsement for Linux gaming that in some cases it can keep your rig relevant for longer.

When I was about 17 I started training for my first backpacking trip. First shakedown hike I loaded my pack up with about 40 or 50lbs, and I think I lasted about 5 minutes before I went back to my car to lighten my load because I was dying carrying it.

Worked my way up to doing it no problem over the next few months, and for the next few years I hiked and backpacked pretty regularly. I never exactly got in good shape, I had a gut the whole time but I could carry a heavy backpack 10 or occasionally 20 miles a day up and down mountains no problem.

I’ve been a lot more sedentary the last few years just due to being a busy adult with a wonky schedule. I still squeeze in some hikes here or there, but nothing with a heavy pack, and rarely doing more than 10 miles, and usually not going up and down any significant mountains, and I’m definitely not hitting the gym or anything, and I’ve probably packed on about 50lbs of mostly fat since I was 17.

But still, a couple months ago I went backpacking with a friend. Didn’t really do anything in particular to prepare for it, and I still carried about 40-50lbs in my pack

And I did just fine. Definitely huffed and puffed a bit more than when I was in my prime backpacking shape, and I was definitely a bit sore and had some blisters after it, but I was able to hit the trail with a heavy pack and almost no prep and I definitely couldn’t have done that when I was just starting out at 17 years old despite being generally younger, healthier, and more active back then.

So to a pretty great extent, my body definitely “remembers” how to backpack.

promptly drove to the chick fil a right next door

That’s… not better, you know that right? The owners of chick fil a have funded some pretty horrendous anti-LGBQT organizations

Please lead the way and get off of it thene be the change you want to see.

Sorry, but I think the point about local AI not necessarily being evil is the tangent here.

The OP is about motherboard shortages, which is being driven by the big AI companies and is making hardware unaffordable for normal users

The top level reply to that is about how that’s bad because it removes the ability for people to be in control of their own computing

Then someone comes in, saying “yeah, but you can host your own AI so that it’s not evil so not all AI is bad”

Then someone points out that you can only host your AI if you can afford the hardware to do so which, as the OP and the comment you replied to pointed out, is getting really hard to do.

It’s very possible that I’m misremembering, we are talking about a memory from almost 30 years ago from when I was a little kid

There’s also a very real chance that I was simply taught wrong, I wouldn’t exactly say that most of my elementary school teachers were particularly techy and probably not actually keeping up to date on search engines.

From what I could find though (after a quick Google search funnily enough, not really interested in doing any in-depth research) the Google domain was registered September 1997, and the company was officially founded September 1998. I don’t know if google.com actually went live on either of those dates, somewhere in-between or maybe shortly after (it does seem that they were up and running by August 1998 because that’s when the first Google doodle appeared) but in either case my school district usually started school in late August or early September so that timing seems like it would work out to me.

And even if it did launch at the end of the previous school year or over the summer break, summer break is only around 10-12 weeks so we would have been coming back just as Google was taking that top spot (if indeed it did do so that quickly, another search shows a lot of results saying that it didn’t get that big until around 2000, again, not going to fact-check that too closely because I just don’t care that much)

I remember back in like 4th grade when my school was just introducing us to the internet, they told us about the big (I think 6) search engines, which, if I recall, were

Yahoo, AltaVista, hotbot, lycos, ask Jeeves, and northern light

And then they also mentioned Google, which was still pretty new and hadn’t yet cemented its place in the internet yet. But they did say that Google had more results than the others, and that was all we needed to hear as kids and I think we all immediately started using Google almost exclusively.

I once bought a couple copies of a book as an inside joke for a couple friends.

It was not at all a popular book, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ve never heard of it or it’s writer, and odds are you’d probably hate it if you did ever read it.

I think when I bought them they were going for about $5 a pop.

And immediately after I ordered them the price shot up to like $15

I can only assume that the algorithm assumed that something happened that made that book popular all of a sudden, instead of just one asshole buying a couple copies to give to his asshole friends as a joke.

Took a few months before the price dropped down again.

Once in a while I get a notification that, for one reason or another, doesn’t actually bring me to the content it was supposed to link to and instead brings me to the main page of an app, and sometimes it’s difficult or impossible to find where the link was supposed to go

But going in through the notification history, the second try usually takes me where it was supposed to go

I really only need 1 HDMI port on my TV- to connect my AV receiver to, everything else gets plugged into that receiver, it’s got about 8 HDMI ports.

Right now there’s 3 consoles, a pc, and a Chromecast hooked up to it, so I have ports to spare, and I haven’t had to use anything on my tv since I initially set it up and set the input to HDMI 1

It’s not necessarily feasible for everyone, it does take up a little more space in your entertainment center that not everyone has, but I also think it’s 100% worth it to at least have a decent set of speakers hooked up to your TV if you can find the space and budget to do so.

If I were the type of person who was willing to give AI the benefit of the doubt and not assume that it was just picking basically random numbers

There’s a lot of cases where it can be a shorter (by distance) walk than drive, where cars generally have to stick to streets while someone on foot may be able to take some footpaths and cut across lawns and such, or where the road may be one-way for vehicles, or where certain turns may not be allowed, etc.

I have a few intersections near my father in laws house in NJ in mind, where you can just cross the street on foot, but making the same trip in a car might mean driving half a mile down the road, turning around at a jug handle and driving back to where you started on the other side of the street.

And I wouldn’t be totally surprised if that’s the case for enough situations in the training data where someone debated walking or driving that the AI assumed that it’s a rule that it will always be further by car than on foot.

That’s still a dumbass assumption, but I’d at least get it.

And I’m pretty sure it’s much more likely that it’s just making up numbers out of nothing.

I’m sure it’s more complex than I’m making it out to be, but each gas in the air has its own freezing/melting boiling/condensation/sublimation points, so I’d imagine you could just kind of take advantage of that

Basically just cool it down to x temperature at y pressure, and all of the carbon dioxide should be solid, the oxygen a liquid and the nitrogen still a gas, and they’ve all sort of separated themselves out. Fish out the dry ice, siphon off the oxygen, and you’re left with nitrogen.

Might need to do a couple more rounds of that on each of those to account for other gases in the mix depending on how pure you need it to be, but in theory I imagine it could be that simple (again in practice I’m sure there’s probably a lot of details I’m missing)

It’s actually not terribly uncommon for people to take roadkill if it’s fresh and in decent shape.

In my state (PA) you’re supposed to report it to the game commission within 24 hours, and you’re supposed to surrender the hide and antlers to them unless you pay for a separate permit.

Same boat, my computer is basically the computer my wife built probably about 12 years ago before we got together, it was pretty beefy for its time. I basically stuck her old components in a new box (and also stuck a newer graphics card in it because I got a really good deal on a used 2060)

Still manages to run most games out there on acceptable (to me) settings.

Made the switch to Linux about a week ago, no major issues, some things are arguably running better now. It’s not without its hiccups but so far things have gone pretty smoothly.

EDIT: went with Mint over Zorin though.

I’m pretty much in the same boat, 720p looks fine to me in the vast majority of cases, and while I’m not great at going to my eye doctor regularly, the last time I had my vision checked it was fine, and it was right around the time I was shopping for a new TV and upgraded from 1080 to 4k, and still had a 720p in my bedroom.

If I looked really hard at them, I could tell the difference from the 720 to the 4k, but truth be told, I’m just not scrutinizing the picture quality of my TV that much.

Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)

There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues

And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.

Not that I really support cops confiscating orbeez guns as a general rule

But I work in 911 dispatch in a different area where orbeez guns aren’t illegal, and they’ve been kind of a problem this year.

I think some of our local delinquents have taken to freezing the balls or modifying their guns to shoot faster or something, because we have had a few injuries and broken windows and such linked to orbeez guns this year.

Even without that, they’re a pretty significant nuisance that have started a lot of fights because no one likes being pelted with orbeez.

And of course there’s the problem that exists with all toy guns where if you paint them black or are running around with them in the dark it can be hard to tell them apart from a real gun which is asking for trouble.

And the countless calls I’ve gotten from neighborhood karens who “don’t think it’s safe” or “that they shouldn’t be doing that here” is getting kind of old.

And not for nothing, orbeez can be really slow to break down in the environment and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re contributing to our microplastics problem.

If there is a way to twist the interpretation of a law to say that orbeez guns are illegal, I’m not at all surprised to hear about cops doing just that. Not that I generally support that, but if you caught me on a bad day after I took a bunch of calls about kids with them, I might be tempted to sign a petition to get them banned.