Being a fool has become a year-long occupation for many …

For starters resistance changes with temperature.

Also even in a multi-turn potentiometer, getting a precision of 1 in 10^9 would require an equal level of precision in the angle you rotate that potentiometer to (for example, a 0.1 degree error in a 10 turn potentiometer - which I believe is more turns than anything that actually can be bought - translates into a 1 in 36,000 error in resistance, so about 3000 larger than 10^9) even if you had a perfect material whose resistance doesn’t change with temperature.

(PS: Just out of curiosity I went and dove down further and to translate a 1/3000 deg movement in a rotating potentiometer into a 1mm movement at the end of a bar attached to it, you would need a 176m long bar - i.e. the radius for 1/(360*3000) of a circumference to be equal to 1mm, is aproximatelly 176 m. This of course has serious mechanical problems even if you remove the bar at the end of the process as the removal process itself would shift the potentiometer by much more than 1/3000 degrees)

The joke here isn’t even specifically about resistances and electronics, it’s that the real world has all sorts of limitations that when you’re doing things wholly in the mathematical world you don’t have to account for, and that’s a hard realisation for Physicists (having gone to study Physics at uni and then half way in my degree changing to Electronics Engineering I can tell you that’s one of the shocks I had to deal with in the transition).

(In a way, it’s really a joke about Theoretical Physicists)

See also the “assuming this chicken is a spherical ovoid” kind of joke.

We had a saying in my country which goes roughly like this: “It’s not the dog that barks which bites”

I’d say it applies here, and I ain’t talking about the corgies.

Religion really isn’t about knowledge and Science really isn’t about personal moral and motivation, which is probably why (from what I’ve observed from the handful of Christian Scientists I’ve known), it only ever works well when they’re kept apart and neither is used in the domain of the other - it’s perfectly possible to want to “discover the wonders of God’s creation” and “be a good, moral person” at the same time as practicing Science as long as one does not believe that the words of the Bible are literal and actual “knowledge” in the Scientific sense.

“Studying” in madrasahs is literally just the rote memorization of a version of the Koran in a language that students don’t even speak and don’t get me started on just how Christian belief was so thickly weaved into medieval university teachings that being against the Aristotelian earth-centric view of the Universe was cause to be burned at the stake (the medieval times aren’t called the Dark Ages for nothing and during the time of Medival Universities Europe actually went back a lot on technology and scientific knowledge)

Having studied Physics at university level in a country which still back them had quite a bit of religiosity, I have come across a handful of people who were both true believer Christians and Physicists and the only way to manage it was basically to keep them apart except for the single point of contact which was “by discovering the wonders of the World, I’m discovering the wonders of God’s creation” which is not a logic link in any way form or shape, just an attempt at getting two very different perspectives to be side by side, never really touching.

Religion simply does not inform Science in any way form or shape (and vice-versa), not in terms of logic, not in terms of information or knowledge and not in terms of methods - at best some people manage to have personal motivations to practice Science include Religious motivations, but any actually “knowledge” they have from Religion does not feed through into their Science because it doesn’t obey even the most basic criteria to work (for starters, it’s just “belief” rather than actual measurable or at least detectable effects that could not be explained in any other way than divine intervention).

Religion is absolutely fine when it’s about how people feel, but it ain’t fine when it tries to intervene into the domain of Science: back in the Medieval times the most advance civilization was Arab and mainly Muslim (such as the Moors, who invaded and occupied the Iberian Peninsula) - they were the true inheritors of the knowledge of Ancient Greece and Rome - but at some point in the 15th century within Islam the idea that all that Man needed to know was contained in the Koran spread, hence why Madrasahs are “schools” were people rote learn the Koran and why those nations have been going back Scientifically and Technologically ever since.

If what you’re doing is database queries on large datasets, the network speed is not even close to the bottleneck unless you have a really dumbly partitioned cluster (in which case you need to fire your systems designer and your DBA).

There are more kinds of loads than just serving static data over a network.

Easy to measure (support manpower costs) vs hard to measure (business lost due to bad support).

Good engineering (and old fashioned business practices) would try to better measure the hard to measure stuff (for example using surveys).

Modern MBA business practices just uses the easy to measure stuff as guidelines and doesn’t even try to measure the rest, possibly because “if we don’t officially know it then I can’t be blamed for it”.

Mind you, maybe they’re right since most consumers get shafted and still keep on coming back for more.

Honestly, both here and on Reddit I see more of that blind faith for Google and Microsoft. It’s so weird that the open-source community has a slice of people insisting their giant company is somehow virtuous because it’s slightly less fashionable.

Even weirder when they write paragraph’s psychoanalyzing imaginary people.

Oh, the irony!

It’s funny how your attempt at psychoanalyzing me from my post ended up relying on the idea that because I’m not pro-Apple then I must be for some other large company.

What you just did is called Projection - you’re interpreting others as if they were you and had your drives and motivations.

Allow me to introduce you to the idea that some people simply don’t think that having an emotional relation towards a brand, any brand, is healthy, and that not everybody is some brand-fan fighting against the fans of other brands like they’re sports teams.

The obvious Apple fanboy is the kind of person who sings praises to every single new version of every Apple product even when it barelly differs from the last one, never criticizes their products and goes to a queue outside an Apple store the evening of the day before a new release of an Apple product to be one of the first to buy it next morning when the store opens.

I’ve personally came across a couple of people just like that over the years.

(Granted, they were more common a decade or so ago)

Every single person here doggedly defending Apple’s choice whose argument boils down to “it’s fine it’s as I like it” (whilst ignoring that everybody else has their own likes and dislikes) to justify Apple only having a closed-down environment without an open environment as another option, is probably a fanboy.

“I love it the way it is” isn’t logical, it’s emotional, and there really isn’t a natural human tendency (in most people) to want to have their choices taken away, so something else is at play when somebody defends nobody having any options with Apple other than Apple, with the argument that “I like it like that”, since logically, having the option of an open system won’t take away the option of the closed system for those who like it.

That said, an alternative explanation for such behaviour is that they’re just self-centred people who are extremely used to a specific environment and couldn’t imagine why anybody would want it to be different, a posture which is often associated with fanboyism of the brand which makes that environment, but not always.

Also another explanation is paid sockpuppet.

We leave our little donkeys to graze on the fields and grow up to become big donkeys.

We certainly don’t stick them with knives and forks!

There is a ton of fanboyism around Apple, same as there was for Musk some years ago.

I love BRAND is just another form of tribalism and one that Apple cultivated for themselves for decades.

(Curiously, going down the thread I saw fewer Apple fanboys that one would find in, say, Reddit)

Works best if you’re with enough like minded individuals that you can all form a testudo.

(The irony of this meme is that what made the Roman military superior wasn’t as much the equipment as the group work: the meme uses a photo of somebody posing as a, judging by the uniform, member of a very specifically group highly trained in cooperative tactics - not even auxilia but actually a legionaire - to illustrate extreme individualism, hence the irony).

More broadly, I would expect UBI to trigger a golden age of invention and artistic creation because a lot of people would love to spend their time just creating new stuff without the need to monetise it but can’t under the current system, and even if a lot of that would be shit or crazily niche, the more people doing it and the freer they are to do it, the more really special and amazing stuff will be created.

Also the energy for those datacenters has to come from somewhere and non-renewable options (gas, oil, nuclear generation) also use a lot of water as part of the generation process itself (they all relly using the fuel to generate the steam to power turbines which generate the electricity) and for cooling.

It varies massivelly depending on the ML.

For example things like voice generation or object recognition can absolutelly be done with entirelly legit training datasets - literally pay a bunch of people to read some texts and you can train a voice generation engine with it and the work in object recognition is mainly tagging what’s in the images on top of a ton of easilly made images of things - a researcher can literally go around taking photos to make their dataset.

Image generation, on the other hand, not so much - you can only go so far with just plain photos a researcher can just go around and take on the street and they tend to relly a lot on artistic work of people who have never authorized the use of their work to train them, and LLMs clearly cannot be do without scrapping billions of pieces of actual work from billions of people.

Of course, what we tend to talk about here when we say “AI” is LLMs, which are IMHO the worst of the bunch.

Just thinking out loud, I’m wondering if there’s not a mix of two innovations - the big innovation such as whole new software or hardware to do something that wasn’t possible to do before or at least not in that way and small innovation, i.e. incremental improvements.

In Tech, companies usually start with one big innovation (consumer OS for Microsoft, web search with automated crawling for Google, universal discussion forum for Facebook and so on) and after that mostly do smaller innovations on it. Whilst they often have a couple more big innovations in them (for example Android OS for Google and Office for Microsoft) they seem to eventually run out of such innovations or maybe just become too much “play it safe” when it comes to them so don’t really do the break-through big innovations anymore.

I believe corporatisation destroys the environment in a company for big innovation (certainly it matches my own experience in working in all sizes of company) - it’s a lot easier, ntaural and safer for a big company with a large infrastructure, big costs and an internal preponderance of well-entrenched managers who have their own internal fiefs and spend their time on internal company politics, to keep on milking the existing cow than to try and come up with something completely different and the very mindset of the company changes from “try crazy ideas” of the small, poor and desperate startup to the relying on steady and safe income streams that more appeals to the bean counters that take over those companies when they get big enough.

Under a sales model, you need a steady stream of small innovation on the core product to keep the steady and safe income stream going - people need to be convinced to buy the latest and greatest version of the product so it general need to offer something more than the last one, and although marketting can be used to convince people to buy a new version which has little more than the last one (look at iPhones of late), as the product matures there is less and less small innovation on it that’s actually usefull so there is less and appeal for consumers to get the latest version and that income stream falls over time.

Both subscription models and paid-by-advertising upend that need for even small innovation - a company doesn’t need to regularly make a new and improved version of their original big innovation, they just need to keep on getting the steady stream of revenue from their existing product. I would say that this appeals even more to bean counters that the small innovation cycle since it’s even more predictable, hence you see big companies shifting to it even in things were it makes no sense for the product itself.

They’re starting to reek of fear…

That second formula is for how much power gets dissipated in a resistance (hence the R in it) , not how much power travels through a line.

That said the previous poster was indeed incorrect - the required thickness of a cable through which a certain amount of power passes depends only on current, not voltage: make it too thin and it can literally melt with a high enough current and the formula of the power it is dissipating as heat that can cause it to melt is that second formula of yours and the R in that formula is inverselly proportional to the cross-cut area of the cable, which for a round cable is the good old area of a circle formula which depends on the square of the radius - in other words the thicker the cable the less current it can take without heating up too much or, putting it the other way around, the more current you want to safely pass through a cable the thicker it needs to be.

In summary, thinner cables heat up more with higher currents (and if they heat up enough they melt) because even pure copper has some resistance and the thinner the cable the higher the resistance. If you need to move Power, not current specifically (such as to charge something), you can chose more current or to have a higher voltage (because P = V x I), and chosing a higher current means you need thicker cables (because as explained above the cables would overheat and even melt otherwise) but a higher voltage doesn’t require a thicker cable.

… we should further have a system with carrier pidgeons carrying USB Flash disks for ultra slow but highly private Internet access.

LLMs have already massively slowded down in terms of improvement from generation to generation and they’re not at all improving when it comes to logical errors (because they’re not structured for that at all - they’re massive statistical engines for language, not reasoning devices), so it seems unlikely that this stage of LLM evolution is the beginning of something massive, rather it looks like it is has gone as far as it can.

Not saying they’re useless, just not at the early days of a game changer technology.

When Apple got into personal computers, that tech was just about to go from a niche thing to mass adoption (from big machines in universities and very large companies to mass adoption by consumers and businesses) and 3 decades of advancing by leaps and bounds, and similarly Apple’s entrance into portable networked computing (with iPhones and iPads) pretty much turned the niche of ultra portable computing devices (such as the Palm Pilot) into an omnipresent mass market product.

A lot of that was getting in early and then ridding the wave of incremental tech improvements in those areas and related areas.

What exactly wave of tech improvements is there going to be from now onwards on LLMs given that they’ve barelly improved in terms of output and the only significant improvement in the last couple of years was Deepseek’s significant reduction in required computing power from “insane” to “massive”? Even some kind of amazing fall in required resources crossed to mass adoption of NPUs and TPUs would still not solve the reliabilty problems of the Technology and so far nobody has managed to crack that specific nut.

I was there when personal computing took off, when mobile networked personal computing took of, when the interned took of and so on, and what I’m seeing with LLMs now (not 2 years ago, but now) doesn’t at all feel like being at the brink of a revolution like with at least the personal computer and the internet (the smartphone looked more like a cool gimmick back then, to be honest).

Frankly the AI “Revolution” at this stage feels a lot more like the Bitcoin “Revolution” after a few years and it having been taken over by greed and speculation, than the Personal Computer Revolution or the Internet Revolution.