The other side of the coin is that AI currently uses more power than is produced by all renewables across the globe annually. So at least they’ll be offsetting that, which would be a net positive.

And it seems like Google’s funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs, which is another win that could lead to replacing coal plants in many countries with small scale reactors that don’t run on uranium.

It already is as far as I know. I’ve heard before that ChatGPT is strictly trained on data from before, like 2018 or so for this reason.

As plenty of people have gone into the production pipeline, I’m gonna comment on the history of anime and manga and how that affects the way they’re produced, since I did a paper on it many years ago.

Manga dates back at least to the era of woodblock printing, as a famous artist by the name of Hokusai released a collection of prints titled The Manga, but the manga we know today was actually originally inspired by serialized Sunday comic strips from American newspapers imported via South Korea. The comparison to modern Western comics is clear, but I think this connection to the Sunday comics is why production houses like Shonen Jump have their weekly releases which allows them to try out new artists and comics without as much risk as Western comic publishers would have starting a new series with a full comic debut. Manga books can be better thought of as anthologies of weekly comic strips like Calvin and Hobbes rather than superhero comics.

Anime is very much inspired by Disney films, but both anime and manga target demographics of all kinds and every genre you can think of. I think this goes back to the woodblock prints of yore, which were an artform that had no particular demographic or subject matter, ranging from raunchy porn to advertising for theatre shows and anything in between. Add in the economic boom that Japan went through in the 80s just as anime was taking off - a time where money was so easy to come by in the industry that they were just greenlighting pretty much any project regardless of subject matter - and anime had no qualms about portraying adult themes like sex or body horror, as well as deeper musings like the common references to the atomic bombs and the deep cultural trauma that did to Japan.

Also of note: America was actually one of the last places to be introduced to anime and manga, and it took a long time to take off here. The rest of the world was getting into anime during the 80s while Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying that a cartoon movie for adults would never take off in the US in reference to the theatrical release of Akira, the profits of which funded many of the most famous studios of the 2000s.

In short, the cultural gulf between America and Japan divested the newspaper comic strip of its stereotype as a media for kids, which resulted in an artform that catered to all audiences and interests. And upon circling back to America decades later, this lack of the stereotype and willingness to show deeper stories found a niche that had been completely unattended to amongst the teens of the 2000s, who gobbled up media in a form that they had grown up with but treated with more respect than most kids’ cartoons. Also, it probably helped that many kids’ shows were created with the sole intent of selling more action figures.

By “abrupt,” I mean that Windows 7 ended service updates just last year, and Windows 10 will end next year. And by “current,” I mean that Windows 11 overtook 7 as the second most used version of Windows in 2022.

We’ve known that they’re ending support for 10 next year for a few years, but that end of life timeline is very short compared to previous versions of Windows. If 10 had the same end of life timeline as 7, we’d be seeing service updates for 10 ending in 2030. And 11 may be the newest version of Windows, but it is by all means not the most used version and is most likely not the version currently being used by most people that this article is relevant to.

Fixed it for you:

Company renders 60%+ of computers running current software incapable of running new software due to niche hardware requirement, abruptly ends support for current version next year, and tells users to throw away their computers and buy new ones.

Oh, and they’re promoting their cloud storage option. Which may or may not have anything to do with their data harvesting? I don’t really know on that one.

They’ll be useful for gamers, at least. With the increasing trend of companies caring less about properly optimizing the size of game installs and expecting gamers to have SSDs for texture loading on the fly, these drives will definitely see use. I currently have a 4TB HDD that has over 2.3TB of Steam games installed on it right now (roughly 100 games from tiny indie games to big AAA releases that are 40-80 gigs in size), and several newer games have an SSD listed as one of their minimum requirements.

See the rest of my post: the people who are making it and why they’re making it.

I have no complaints about the people making LLMs that can spot tumors better than humans can, but I 100% agree with every single one of your points. The grifters and the AI fad of venture capitalism are ruining a useful technology and ruining the world and society along with it for a quick buck.

The underlying point misses why people have problems with the current AI bubble. I’ll cheer when they replace CEOs with AI - it seems like the best job to be replaced with LLMs and would save companies billions of dollars that could be used to improve the lives of workers. There’s tons of AI being used for all kinds of cool things already like spotting cancer in MRIs.

The issue people have with AI isn’t the tech. It’s who’s making it and why. It’s not being used to make life easier and better, it’s being used to cut decent paying jobs and commodify part of the human experience, all while making big profits without paying the people whose work was stolen to make those profits.

It’s just a different flavor of the fast fashion industry stealing high fashion designs and churning out their cheap knockoffs from factories in China where they don’t have to worry about things like safety standards or paying their workers a living wage.

Fun fact: After the adoption of electric lighting in homes became common, there was a massive increase in the demand for maids and cleaning services because people simply couldn’t see just how dirty their houses were when everybody was using candles.

Another fun fact: With the introduction of the computer and similar technology into many jobs, productivity skyrocketed, but wages didn’t rise to match the increase in company profits. However, it was still viable for the average American household to live off of the wages of one 40 hour per week job. Today, the average American household requires at least 2 full-time salaries in order to survive, despite technology continuing to push productivity even higher and companies continuously reporting their most profitable year ever, year over year. Despite technology, the amount of work per household has effectively doubled or more over the past 60 years.

I’m well aware of switchboard operators. Computers were originally a profession as well.

Secretaries are still all that, both using digital tools as well as physical. They weren’t replaced by any of those programs. They just changed how they do their job. They schedule your meetings for you now in their cell phone instead of on a desk-sized paper calendar mat.

“When I was young, they told me that one day, AI would do the menial labor so that we would have more time to do what we love - like art, music, and poetry. Today, the AI does art, music, and poetry so that I can work longer hours at my menial labor job for lower wages.”

Also, on point one, I still see a lot of job hirings for personal secretaries and people for data entry and to take minutes at meetings, and plenty of people complaining about not being able to actually talk to somebody on the phone to get their problem solved.

A lot of this started in the US because the big telecom companies were paid a lot of money by the government to roll out broadband in the middle of the country, where customers are spread out enough that they didn’t want to bother building the infrastructure, but they took the money and did none of the work. So, these communities did it themselves. Some of them literally burying fiber optics cables by hand through their farm fields.

I remember reading somewhere a few years ago about how this is feasible on the neighborhood level now at potentially better speeds and cheaper than the telecom companies with a satellite connection that people can use via a wi-fi network across the neighborhood.

Companies have done this on purpose. They all want you to stay in their walled garden, their “ecosystem” of various products. So they make it easy to get into and get connected to people and things, and then make it hard to leave because you’re “invested.”

I really don’t understand how people use Instagram. I’ve tried, but it’s about 45% ads, 10-15% posts by people I don’t follow, it’s not in chronological order (or any sense of order for that matter), and regardless of whether I was on there yesterday or 2 months ago, it’ll show me about 40 posts before saying “You’re all caught up from the past 3 days!” and then refuse to show me any more.

I guess this is why I’m here on Lemmy and went crawling back to Tumblr, one of the last vestiges of the old internet. At this point, I’d rather watch a platform die than become marketable to advertisers and shareholders.

This is why I said “you might as well do something worth the punishment.” In the US, protesting can get you more harsh sentences than crimes like assault or robbery. And not to “That’s, like, just your opinion, man” but…it’s just my opinion that their time would’ve been better spent blocking the street and holding up rush hour traffic or something for the punishment that they got. Like you said, it clearly worked because people are talking about it - and talking about it enough that the arguing in another post on this article got the post locked.

I’m not here to rag on them. Again, there’s no “right way to protest,” and this is a noble cause to protest for.

This is what the American public thought of MLK in the 60s:

I mean stupid as in “you might as well do something worth the punishment” or that they might have been better off blocking traffic through a major thoroughfare or something rather than possibly damaging a cultural artifact.

I agree with the concept, just not this particular executation.

While I think this was a stupid way to go about risking jail time for a noble cause, I would like to remind everybody here of what everybody in the 60s thought about MLK and his peaceful protests:

There never has nor will there ever be such a thing as “the right way to protest.” The right way to protest means out of sight where it can be conveniently ignored.

Actually, it’s almost exactly like the Civil Rights protesters. MLK even outright said that they didn’t do anything more than marches and sit-ins because those were already illegal and doing anything more could get them killed or prison sentences.

That said, I think this was a stupid way to risk jail time.

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