I LOVED that book! It was one of the books that helped me learn English as a kid. The movie was an utter mockery of it and I don’t even know what the fuck they were thinking with the sequel.

It had an ending. This is unacceptable!

I’ve heard people proposing a “computational electric heater” in the past where it’s just a really powerful computer that can do citizen science processing (or presumably whatever you want on it). I suppose the only issue is cost of sufficiently powerful processors that generate enough heat to actually work as a heater, as well as the thermal regulation system since semiconductors are way more temperature sensitive than a coil of resistive wire, shorter lifespan too I imagine. Though if we can overcome these issues that would be a massive technological milestone.

It would be a really good use of old computers instead of throwing them out though, could use them as space heaters in a place where you don’t mind the noise and/or find a way to dampen the noise while allowing the heat to come through.

Homelab (running home servers). Especially since I’m in Canada so I pay out the ass for shipping. Got into it purely out of interest for server administration, programming (computer science in general really) and the desire to experiment on my own hardware, but I’ll have you know I have a total of 48 processing cores and 30 TB of storage running my personal fileserver and “private cloud!” Though not relying on the likes of Google for data storage and “cloud” services is a massive genuine benefit!

I also run BOINC and Folding@Home on the excess computing power in the winter, essentially “donating” it to science, which is perfect because my house only has electric baseboard heating anyway so I’m consuming the same amount of electricity for heating either way, and the electricity sources are mostly renewables where I live! The home office is toasty all winter, if kind of loud.

The company cares about you in the same way a beef farmer cares about his cattle.

Also, the Turing Test isn’t some holy grail of AI. It’s just a thought experiment, and not even the highest test for an AI that we can think of. Passing it is impressive don’t get me wrong, but unlike what clickbait articles would tell you, it does not automatically mean an AI is sentient or is smarter than humans or anything like that. It means it passed the thought experiment, nothing more.

Also also, ChatGPT was not the first AI to pass the Turing Test. Actually, plenty have, even over a decade before.

I am actually curious as to how you would make a locked down managed linux OS akin to ChromeOS.

Because Linus Torvalds stupidly refused to change the Linux license to GPL3.

Yes. The biggest problem with them is you will hate pooping outside your own house even more once you get used to it.

I’ve never seen a post they’ve featured and had to go look for it because I was so curious. It’s all the lowest common denominator memes meant to appeal to I assume mostly children and pre-teens.

I feel like it would be better to have a dedicated Reddit-mirror instance that instances can choose to federate with.

The issue is mirror posts are not organic which is not conducive to high quality discussion. If a community only gets 10 original posts a day but a mirror bot is dumping well over 1000 posts a day, that’s a problem because the organic content will get drowned out and further disincentivize people from posting and actually growing the community.