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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Human bodies are terrible electrical power sources…even if you harvested all their metabolic heat or chemical energy, you would get far less usable electricity than a comparable mass of conventional fuel or batteries. Much more efficient ways to turn biochemicals or biomass into energy exist.

    And to use us as batteries we need food. I would venture to say at least 99% or more of human food production requires sunlight. So just use sunlight for energy. No sunlight because of horrible nuclear winter or something else blocking the sun? Create satellites to collect it and beam it down with microwave lasers.

    Anytime you convert a form of energy to another you lose energy. So sunlight->food->human->electricity is not only inefficient but dumb. An AI would never do this. The Wachowskis were writers, not scientists or engineers, and it shows. What would we be good at? The human brain is exceptionally good at massively parallel, low‑power pattern processing: recognizing, predicting, and adapting in complex, noisy environments. This sounds like the exact sorta thing you’d need if you were creating a virtual world. The trick would be getting the interface right. Assuming they had enough time that could be accomplished. So the whole reason the rumor of us being used as processors instead of batteries, is because it makes WAY more sense.







  • I’m not sure that’s possible with multiplayer games, at least the central server part. They could release the central server code as an open source project… that would be very useful. But MMOs need that central communication to even work. I mean I guess you could engineer some sort of peer to peer but I’ve dealt with weird firewall rules in various DCs I’ve had servers located in or god forbid the lack of incoming connectivity in peoples homes. Outbound traffic is usually fairly unrestricted so a publicly available server is the way to go architecturally.









  • Not to sound like a tankie but China has made smarter decisions with regard to power generation. The current shift away from renewables (and shift back to fossil fuel) AND more reliance on central power generation are great for billionaires but just dumb for every other reason. And with the what appears to be advancing in battery technology more distributed solar cells with local storage would free up more power for the power hungry data centers. Not to mention the AI programs there are not run by douchebags like Sam Altman and Mustafa Suleyman.

    I also think the current path of AGI study via more advanced LLM research is the wrong path. A language generator is never going to be “smart”. But what do I know, I don’t have billions of dollars and lie constantly.