The past is so much closer than you think. We are only three human lifetimes away from the American Revolution. The last living children of American slaves were around into the 2010s. Back to Teddy, the last living person who could have met him was still around in the 2000s as well, meaning in your lifetime you could have talked to someone who knew someone who saw Abe Lincoln alive.
Indeed this is one of the things I most enjoyed when I first visited DC, the realization of just how recent these historical events really were. Standing on a battlefield in Gettysburg and thinking "This all happened in the 1860s, barely more than 100 years before I was born. I have relatives who lived in this area at that time, and only a few generations back."
When I talk to young people today, and realize how little they know about people and events that were major news when I was young, I understand how it happens. Even for me WW2 is just something from the history books, and yet it concluded just ~30 years before I was born. 30 years before today was 1996.
Our descendants are going to enjoy an enormous wealth of imagery and videos for events that will to them otherwise be just something from a history book. Just imagine what it would be like today if we could see videos of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, etc. Might knock the mythology down a peg or two, though.
"Our descendants are going to enjoy an enormous wealth of imagery and videos for events that will to them otherwise be just something from a history book. "
The question will be at some point, will they be able to tell it apart from AI generated fake ones? (and will they care?)
Already now youtube recommends me some obvious AI generated garbage as WW2 documentations.
And that was just garbage generated for attention (ad money).
Once big actors with money want to rewrite history and flood the web with fake images to spread certain narratives, then new challenges will arise.
I hope enough people still care about facts and guard them.
That's a good point. When I wrote my comment only my optimistic side was engaged ;-). The pessimistic side shares your concerns. I hope that we develop some technologically diffult-to-overcome solutions for preserving the integrity of media. Like methods for cryptographically signing raw content from a digital camera that guarantees it was produced by that hardware. Not a panacea, but a step in the right direction I think.
It's the "if you think the news is all lies, bullshit and agendas you should see the history books" meme.
Lord knows what falsehoods of today will become the official record of tomorrow never mind what lies of the past we just repeat because they're what got written down.
There is an anecdote a regarding Napoleon and Bertrand Russell. One lifespan can be relatively close to two events that an are seemingly far apart.
Bertrand Russell was raised by his grandparents. His grandfather met Napoleon when Napoleon was imprisoned in Elba, and talked about this with Bertrand.
Bertrand was alive to watch the moon landing on TV.
Weird thought: someone born in the 1800s was (most likely) alive when the first transformer model ran.
Emma Morano died April 15, 2017, the NIPS submission deadline for "Attention Is All You Need" was May 19, and a Wired article indicates they were testing models for quite a few weeks before then.
Dave the Diver is the best game I've played in years, and its a new kind of game that I think really solves this. You focus on atmosphere, characters, and discrete game mechanics that work together as a system, rather than relying on any single gameplay loop. Mechanics are contextual, and introduced in a way that makes sense to the story and setting, leaving the player with that feeling of "I wonder what's next".
>"This article is nonsense. It lost me at "understood it was about itself". It is not self-aware and therefore has no understanding. It is a word guessing machine."
I think everyone goes through the "omg this thing is sentient" phase with AI for a bit at first until you understand how it works. But eventually you see stuff like this for what it is; meaningless slop.
This is becoming a pretty clear wedge between red and blue. Why do you think Musk opened his diesel turbine driven data center in rural Mississippi? Big Tech is systematically targeting small municipalities across the US with promises of insane money to anyone willing to sell out their residents. Missouri being traditionally purple, it makes a lot of sense the flashpoint would be here.
It's not possible to identify operators who do not wish to be identified. The land is purchased by an LLC, developed by another LLC, and then sold to a third LLC for buildout. Once it's up and running it could be rented to a fourth LLC who has contracted with the actual client, or the client could just buy the involved LLCs (usually via another LLC).
The people are, their politicians are not. Overwhelmingly this is a problem of backroom deals with state and local Republicans subverting the electorate's will.
Those are mostly more traditional data centers. 20 or 30 kilovolt racks with separate cages for different tenants, some meet-me rooms, and a bunch of telecom gear are the order of the day.
Internet traffic requires routing and switching. That’s all traditional DC equipment in terms of power and cooling. They don’t require 80 or 100 kilovolt racks like something stuffed full of AI accelerators.
Is it still 'NIMBYism' if what they are building is something that none of the residents want at all? Like yeah no-one wants the new sewage plant in their backyard but they will still see the value in it.
Even as someone in tech I don't see the value in this scale of buildout. This technology is very new and no doubt in my mind that in 5 years we will be able to do everything these models do on a fraction of the resources.
It will still be $30k+ out the door, guaranteed. There's zero interest in making an actual affordable car when their margins are so high at that level.
There are a lot of new $30K EVs on the market right now, as manufacturers have added a lot of incentives since the EV rebate expired. And a lot of slightly used EVs are coming off lease this year.
Tesla is going to struggle since their brand no longer has any cachet and people aren't interested in subscribing to a kinda-self driving feature.
It's not that it doesn't have cachet, it has anti-cachet.
People of Musk's exact political stripe absolutely are not impressed if you drive a Tesla, and everyone else, at minimum, is silently counting it as a character flaw and judgment problem.
To top it off, they're not the latest or the greatest EVs available and it's common knowledge at this point. The two metrics that they maximize, range and 0-60, are not really a big factor in day-to-day ownership in the way that a smooth ride and build quality are.
The Swiss nervously check the time when a train is 2-3 minutes late. When a train is late, the situation is basically on the brink of a national emergency.
I mean I've regularly seen trains in germany arriving AFTER the next train. Statistically they are worse than pretty much any european country.
And outside of trains, my german friends run the gamut of being always on time to systematically being 30 minutes late. Don't really see much of a correlation between being German and punctual.
Japan on the other hand I do associate with punctuality, when I worked there I was made to sit in the seiza postion for the m9rniny meeting if I was late by even 3 minutes. My friends there were overwhelmingly ontime except (and proving my point) for a German coworker I had there :)
Also got neither. I’m Irish but have lived a long time in Austria now. The punctuality thing is common with Germans. They have a different approach to rules here I think.
There needs to be a word for that feeling of dread you get when reminded of just how feeble and weak the average human mind is, and how tenuous of a grasp on reality most people have.
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