I certainly can't memorize Homer's work, and why would I? In exchange I can do so much more. I can find an answer to just about any question on any subject better than the most knowledgeable ancient Greek specialist, because I can search the internet. I can travel faster and further than their best explorers, because I can drive and buy tickets. I have no fighting experience, but give me a gun and a few hours of training and I could defeat their best champions. I traded the ability to memorize the equivalent of entire books to a set of skills that combined with modern technological infrastructure gives me what would be godlike powers at the time of the ancient Greeks.
In addition to these base skills, I also have specialized skills adapted to the modern world, that is my job. Combined with the internet and modern technology I can get to a level of proficiency that no one could get to in the ancient times. And the best part: I am not some kind of genius, just a regular guy with a job.
And I still have time to swipe on social media. I don't know what kind of brainless activities the ancient Greeks did, but they certainly had the equivalent of swiping on social media.
The general idea is that the more we offload to machines, the more we can allocate our time to other tasks, to me, that's progress, that some of these tasks are not the most enlightening doesn't mean we did better before.
And I don't know what economist mean by "productivity", but we can certainly can buy more stuff than before, it means that productivity must have increased somewhere (with some ups and downs). It may not appear in GDP calculations, but to me, it is the result that counts.
I don't count home ownership, because you don't produce land. In fact, that land is so expensive is a sign of high global productivity. Since land is one of the few things that we need and can't produce, the more we can produce the other things we need, the higher the value of land is, proportionally.
If there is no in-house storage to match, how does it help the grid? It is still needed for cold winter nights, where demand is high and solar panels produce nothing. Hydro can provide the power, but the grid will be running at full load.
Most houses in Canada are heated with natural gas. I'm not negating your overall comment, but in general, cold nights don't strain the grid because of heating needs.
(still good news, as most of Canada's electric generation is low carbon hydro, and the rest of fossil generation can be pushed out with storage and renewables, although I do not have a link handy by province how much fossil generation needs to be pushed out)
> One thing I like about JPEG-XL is that it supports all kinds of weird image formats.
And it is probably the reason why browser vendors disliked it. Lots of complexity, it means a big library, which is high maintenance with a big attack surface. By comparison, webp is "free" if you have webm, as webp is essentially a single frame video.
What kind of pictures can starlink would take? When I look at pictures of starlink satellites, I don't see a camera. Maybe they have one, but if we can't see it, it is most likely useless for observation, except for taking pretty pictures of the Earth, or maybe other passing satellites.
Spy satellites are more like space telescopes, but pointed at the Earth. As an example, Hubble is designed after a spy satellite, the "camera" is pretty massive and obvious.
Starlink can probably be weaponized for a variety of thing, like for communication, obviously, but I don't think earth optical observation is one of them.
Maybe it has changed but Google doesn't look like it uses litigation as its primary weapon. It defends itself but rarely attacks.
The are however more than happy to use technical measures, like blocking accounts. And because of their position, blocking your Google account may be more damaging than a successful lawsuit.
People like being told they are right, and when a response contains that formulation, on average, given the choice, people will pick it more often than a response that doesn't, and the LLM will adapt.
Software tools are not really tools like a knife. They are more like cooking recipes.
Traditionally, people don't pay for cooking recipes, they may pay for cookbooks, that is a nice packaging around the recipes, or they may keep their recipes secret. Cooking recipes are like the software tools of chefs.
The actual tools of developers are computers, which they pay for, like chefs pay for their knives.
Software tools, like recipes cost nothing to copy and distribute, while actual tools, like knives and computers cost money per unit to produce.
> If they really care about security at this level then they should ban all non in person voting methods.
Many countries do exactly that, sometimes with a few exceptions (ex: expats, disabilities, ...).
One problem with internet voting that does not apply to money is the "receipt-free" aspect. That is, a voter should not be able to prove that he voted for a particular candidate, as it would allow for vote buying, threats, etc... And it is a hard problem. With money transactions, you generally want the opposite, which is an easier problem.
I remember at the time that donating CPU time was considered trivial. Not so much today.
At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full load, fans usually ran at constant speed, and power management was much more primitive. So you barely noticed the difference between idle and full load, both on your electricity bill and on the noise the PC made.
Now hundreds of watts is not uncommon if you also use the GPU, and people are much more conscious about how much power computers use. And at full power, fans spin up loudly, laptops get uncomfortably hot, etc... It means you are not going to do it as easily. It probably didn't help the "@home" projects.
My homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat anyways.
I remember some startups trying to install cryptominers in people homes, the idea was to use the electricity that would be spent heating the space anyways. The company would pay for the mining hardware while the customer would provide the electricity, and the profits would be shared.
I don't know how it worked out, but the idea was there.
I know of this one [1], a 1000W space heater with integrated cryptominer. Looks kike you can actually buy it now. Not sure how much the mined crypto offsets the heating costs though.
My understanding is that for most residential heat pumps, the temperature needed to make the heat pump less efficient than resistive heating is so low that it enters a range that the pump doesn't even work anymore.
However, that's only a measure of efficiency. It could still be that the throughput isn't enough. A 30 kW resistive heater can ALWAYS output 30 kW of heat. But my 7 kW heat pump could produce anywhere from 14 to 30 kW depending on outside temperature.
Does that mean the heat pump gets less efficient as the outside warms? Because that would be fine. 7kW to make you home a constant temperature seems wonderful.
I think you are giving executives too much credit. All the people you cited are just business managers. Multi-billion dollar public companies are not startups, decisions are the result of comities, shareholder meetings, and consequences of choices made a decade later. Who is at the head now matters, but to a limited extent. Steve Jobs may be an exception, but mostly because he was a founder, so he led the company when it was small enough to support a true dictator.
As for Ballmer vs Nadella, what did Microsoft do under Nadella that wasn't started under Ballmer? The big things: 365 and Azure were both started under Ballmer. Bing, the only real competitor to Google search, which is also profitable, was made under Ballmer too. Essentially, Nadella continued Ballmer's job, as expected from a MBA CEO to another MBA CEO. The shift from Windows-first to cloud-first was already in the making when Nadella took over.
In addition to these base skills, I also have specialized skills adapted to the modern world, that is my job. Combined with the internet and modern technology I can get to a level of proficiency that no one could get to in the ancient times. And the best part: I am not some kind of genius, just a regular guy with a job.
And I still have time to swipe on social media. I don't know what kind of brainless activities the ancient Greeks did, but they certainly had the equivalent of swiping on social media.
The general idea is that the more we offload to machines, the more we can allocate our time to other tasks, to me, that's progress, that some of these tasks are not the most enlightening doesn't mean we did better before.
And I don't know what economist mean by "productivity", but we can certainly can buy more stuff than before, it means that productivity must have increased somewhere (with some ups and downs). It may not appear in GDP calculations, but to me, it is the result that counts.
I don't count home ownership, because you don't produce land. In fact, that land is so expensive is a sign of high global productivity. Since land is one of the few things that we need and can't produce, the more we can produce the other things we need, the higher the value of land is, proportionally.
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