While the star of the show might have been Nvidia Blackwell, Nvidia's latest data center processor that will likely be bought up far faster than they can ever be produced, there were a host of other AI technologies that Nvidia is working on that will be supercharged by its new hardware. All of it will likely generate enormous profits for Nvidia and its shareholders, and while I don't give financial advice, I can say that if you're an Nvidia shareholder, you were likely thilled by Sunday's keynote presentation.
For everyone else, however, all I saw was the end of the last few glaciers on Earth and the mass displacement of people that will result from the lack of drinking water; the absolutely massive disruption to the global workforce that 'digital humans' are likely to produce; and ultimately a vision for the future that centers capital-T Technology as the ultimate end goal of human civilization rather than the 8 billion humans and counting who will have to live — and a great many will die before the end — in the world these technologies will ultimately produce with absolutely no input from any of us.
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But isn’t “weird” just making fun of people? Well … yes. And that’s good. It’s good to mock and make fun of people who are bad or want to do bad things. It’s also necessary politically. One of the challenges of the Trump era is that Trumpism is very threatening and dangerous. It aims to upend and destroy the foundations of our civic democracy. But in cataloguing these threats and pumping up outrage over every Trumpian transgression we can also build up the image of their power like inflating a vast flaccid balloon, a sort of collective psyching yourself out. Good thrusting mockery cuts right through that. Yes, they’re dangerous. But they’re also insecure, stunted degenerates. They’re weird. Normal people don’t want to be around them. They think this kind of talk is normal because it’s common parlance in the far-right podcast subculture they live in. That’s really the JD Vance story right there. In his world, raging at miserable cat ladies trying to rule our lives doesn’t seem strange.
Most journalists have an admirable instinct to be fair to the people they cover. But it often emerges as the traditional “both-sides” approach, which has become discredited in an era when one side consistently lies.
Feminism boosts sexual satisfaction for both men and women, a new study suggests.
Une étude montre que la majorité des Américains se préoccuent des questions liées au changement climatique et sont en faveur de mesures pour lutter contre celui-ci. Mais plus intéressant : la majorité des Américains sont également persuadés que seule une minorité de leurs compatriotes partagent ce point de vue. Cette "fausse réalité sociale" peut à son tour dissuader les politiciens de prendre des mesures fortes.
Distorted beliefs about support for climate policy, and about concerns over climate change in general, are so commonly held among the more than 6,000 American adults in the researchers’ nationally representative sample that the study’s authors call these misperceptions a “false social reality.” Recent polls from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that 66 to 80 percent of people in the U.S. support major climate mitigation policies. But participants in the new study estimated that only between 37 and 43 percent do so. A range of 80 to 90 percent of those polled by the researchers underestimated the U.S. population’s climate concern and support for major climate mitigation policies.
Le web est désormais tellement rempli de contenu généré en masse dans un seul but marketing (SEO, spam etc) que Google est en train d'abandonner sa mission d'indexer le web tout entier. En sélectionnant les sources de valeurs (ou d'autorité), il se rapproche progressivement d'un catalogue exclusif, réservé aux grands acteurs du web.
97 travailleurs Kényans cosignent une lettre ouverte demandant au président des États-Unis, Joe Biden, de mettre fin « aux conditions de travail qui s'apparentent à de l'esclavage moderne » dans l'industrie du numérique.
Vidéo de la chaîne YouTube Computerphile qui explore l'hypothèse (papier scientifique à l'appui) selon laquelle l'IA pourrait bientôt atteindre un plateau en terme de performances —contrairement à l'idée (très complaisante et pas du tout étayée) d'une progression linéaire illimitée, voire exponentielle.
Resilient Web Design, un livre en accès libre sur l'évolution du web.
Théorie fascinante qui propose un modèle pour expliquer l'émergence de la conscience dans le vivant.
Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?
You’ve heard this refrain before – giving money to homeless people is not the best way to help them because it might be squandered, or spent on harmful habits. But a new Canadian study makes a powerful case to the contrary.
I work in tech. I think a lot of cool stuff is being built and a lot of good work is being done. But tech is a mature industry, and most of what is interesting these days has to do with bringing the things we learned from 2000-2015 about how to use software into places that have not yet modernized. We’re at the tail end of what’s interesting and good and novel. Software technology has very little left to change in a major way. And the entire ethos of a16z and the like has utterly failed to produce breakthroughs in computer hardware, biological sciences, energy, environment or any other major sector. The last decade of innovation has been entirely about reducing friction in commerce. That’s it. And it’s not that profitable and will end up with a very small number of winners.
One of the world's largest investment banks wonders if generative AI will be worth the huge investment and hype: "will this large spend ever pay off?"