"I had heard that tunnels were a good first step for rolling out super conducting cables, but that doesn’t seem to be a thing."

Yeah tunnels underground would be better for superconducting cables, but it is indeed not really a thing as the cooling and installing and maintainance would be waaaay more expensive, than just using higher voltage. Or if one really cares about the loss, use direct current - but we are talking aber very small distances here.

If superconducting would be easy, we likely just would have fusion plants everywhere with no need for transporting electricity long distances.

> Or if one really cares about the loss, use direct current

I thought direct current had higher transmission losses vs AC

AC has higher losses over a transmission wire because of the changing magnetic field that it induces which creates losses.

Tesla vs. Edison is back! :)

Not if it's really high direct current, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

Problem is they need these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_converter , for these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_converter_station which are expensive. So it depends on circumstances, how and when its economically feasible to use HVDC, or not.

And if learned how to articulate assignments for humans right in a clear way, you likely also can do a prompt right.

None of that knowlege will get useless, only working around current limitations of agents will.

Rowhammer, cosmic bitflip or hardware or just compiler bugs come to mind.

The first three are hardware failures, not software failures. The latter would be a design error, not a failure.

The software may need to handle hardware failures, but software that doesn't do that also doesn't fail -- it's inadequately designed.

Counterpoint, I have definitely taken them into consideration when designing my backup script. It's the reason why I hash my files before transferring, after transferring, and at periodic intervals.

And if you're designing a Hardware Security Module, as another example, I hope that you've taken at least rowhammer into consideration.

I consider these all the time as a programmer. Particularly compiler/toolchain bugs, which are relatively common once you start looking for them.

Isn't the side effect also giving incentive to those companies to just not be honest in internal communication? But do the real conversation via call or different channel?

"The easiest way I can see would be to frame a helpful, curious question to which your service just happens to be the answer. So then you most an Ask HN like "can anyone help me to understand why people do X" followed by a few sentences of your thoughts, then at the end say "I've been working on a service to help with this but we don't seem to be getting much to traction, here's a link"."

Nah, that would be obvious marketing to most. More sneaky would be answering the question with the recommendation from a different account in a way to promote your service and have that upvoted, but that requires more effort and skill I assume.

But in general yes, this community definitely can also be manipulated, but I would say it is one of the hardest to fool. The standard mentality here I actually would rather describe as critical instead of curious, but there is just lots of garbage being pushed and also my curiosity is limited.

"These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things."

I would argue Gemini is popular and commercially interesting, but yes, mainly it is a curious topic, whether one is invested in the current hype, or not.

What? You have to do a lot of curation and fighting the service itself (hiding shorts) to get to a bearable level. And I did not spend hours clicking things I don't like. I mostly just watch movies/clips I want, but my recommendations are full of clickbait manipulative garbage. So yes, one can find jewels in it - but only if digging through the garbage first.

I watch a ton of great content by people that I subscribe to. It's not difficult or complicated to get there.

Not sure what else to say.

But you don't agree it took a lot of effort to hide the garbage?

Not really, if anything, there is too much stuff I want to watch that is suggested to me.

I suppose if you created an account today you'd be fed a lot of garbage, but I've been watching YouTube often for at least a couple years.

"or for extreme privacy"

Or for any privacy/IP protection at all? There is zero privacy, when using cloud based LLM models.

Really only if you are paranoid. It's incredibly unlikely that the labs are lying about not training on your data for the API plans that offer it. Breaking trust with outright lies would be catastrophic to any lab right now. Enterprise demands privacy, and the labs will be happy to accommodate (for the extra cost, of course).

No, it's incredibly unlikely that they aren't training on user data. It's billions of dollars worth of high quality tokens and preference that the frontier labs have access to, you think they would give that up for their reputation in the eyes of the enterprise market? LMAO. Every single frontier model is trained on torrented books, music, and movies.

Considering that they will make a lot of money with enterprise, yes, that's exactly what I think.

What I don't think is that I can take seriously someone's opinion on enterprise service's privacy after they write "LMAO" in capslock in their post.

I just know many people here complained about the very unclear way, google for example communicates what they use for training data and what plan to choose to opt out of everything, or if you (as a normal buisness) even can opt out. Given the whole volatile nature of this thing, I can imagine an easy "oops, we messed up" from google if it turns out they were in fact using allmost everything for training.

Second thing to consider is the whole geopolitical situation. I know companies in europe are really reluctant to give US companies access to their internal data.

To be fair, we all know googles terms are ambiguous as hell. It would not be a big surprise nor an outright lie if they did use it.

Its different if they proclaimed outright they won't use it and then do.

Not that any of this is right, it wouldn't be a true betrayal.

On a related note, these terms to me are a great example of success for EU GDPR regulations, and regulations on corporates in general. It's clear as day, additional protections are afforded to EU residents in these terms purely due to the law.

Depends what you count as AI (just googling makes you use the LLM summary), but also my mother who is really not tech affine loved what google lense can do, after I showed her.

Apart from my very old grandmothers, I don't know anyone not using AI.

How many people do you know? Do you talk to your local shop keeper? Or the clerk at the gas station? How are they using AI? I'm a pretty techy person with a lot of tech friends, and I know more people not using AI (on purpose, or lack of knowledge) then do.

I live in India and a surprising number of people here are using AI.

A lot of public religious imagery is very clearly AI generated, and you can find a lot of it on social media too. "I asked ChatGPT" is a common refrain at family gatherings. A lot of regular non-techie folks (local shopkeepers, the clerk at the gas station, the guy at the vegetable stand) have been editing their WhatsApp profile pictures using generative AI tools.

Some of my lawyer and journalist friends are using ChatGPT heavily, which is concerning. College students too. Bangalore is plastered with ChatGPT ads.

There's even a low-cost ChatGPT plan called ChatGPT Go you can get if you're in India (not sure if this is available in the rest of the world). It costs ₹399/mo or $4.41/mo, but it's completely free for the first year of use.

So yes, I'd say many people outside of tech circles are using AI tools. Even outside of wealthy first-world countries.

Hm, quite some. Like I said, it depends what you count as AI.

Just googling means you use AI nowdays.

Whether Googling something counts as AI has more to do with the shifting definition of AI over time, then with Googling itself.

Remember, really back in the day the A* search algorithm was part of AI.

If you had asked anyone in the 1970s whether a box that given a query pinpoints the right document that answers that question (aka Google search in the early 2000s), they'd definitely would have called it AI.

Google gives you an AI summary, reading that means interacting with LLMs.

Google also gives you ads. Some learn to scroll past before reading.

I'm sort of old but not a grandmother. Not using AI.

In short, they could become a non profit again, with a single mission - build a open source browser with the interests of its users as first priority.

Others are trying that approach, so I guess we'll see if that's enough