NaibofTabr

Well sure, we have to narratively excuse it somehow. Otherwise... take a Pokémon game and replace all the Pokémon with pit bulls and rot weilers &etc and then you have dog fighting simulator.

• "The web" is an open protocol aimed for interoperability

Yes, although the reality today is that you have to spend a decent amount of money to be on the web effectively. You could run a webpage on an RPi on your home network, but that won't do for much more than a few visitors a day, and it involves several compromises and some security risks.

There isn't really an equivalent to the web's interoperability with these AI systems, except maybe if you're using it to control smart home devices.

• "The AI" is a bunch of competing, mostly closed and private services

Yeah, although being able to run OpenClaw &etc locally is interesting. Most people won't ever be able to train their own models, but at least self-hosting some of them is an option.

The problem is how much computation is required to handle every user request.

When the Internet was starting out, most websites weren't much more than text, maybe some low-resolution pictures. Even in the '90s, serving that content to users was computationally cheap. A company's web server could just be a desktop in the basement.

AI models are expensive to train and expensive to operate. Just maintaining the environmental needs for the massive data centers is a significant cost. Charging users for access is not nearly enough to cover the expenses, by orders of magnitude, and they're already in massive debt.

Robots can fold a shirt

Yeah, kinda... not really...

https://www.theverge.com/featured-video/860104/we-tried-to-get-humanoid-robots-to-do-the-laundry

Heh, if Skynet just crashes at the BIOS load then I think we'll be fine.

Also apparently Skynet runs on a 1.1GHz Celeron with 1GB of DDR3...

This is part of the reason anarchists believe there would be less violence under anarchy. Withholding food from another person would not be allowed,

Er, and who would enforce this?

Agreed. Anarchists don't claim to be able to eliminate violence. That would be almost impossible.

Also, the measures necessary to enforce it at large scale would probably be unethical.

Food is withheld from millions of people in our current system simply because they cannot afford it.

Well OK, this is getting more into socialism or communism, but the next obvious question is where is this food coming from, if people are not required to pay for its production?

Even if you want some sort of idealized currency-free economy, it costs resources to grow food and to distribute it to the people who want to eat it (land, water, infrastructure, time, labor, etc). Does everyone contribute to food production with their own labor? Is this a purely agrarian society? Is food withheld from people who do not contribute labor?

Large-scale farming as it is done today depends highly on the socioeconomic structure around it. Sure, there's a lot of waste, but the system also supports a large population who do not have to participate in agriculture in order to eat.

While I'm sure other systems are possible, I'm not sure that other systems can operate at a similar scale. Which is to say that the impression I get from everyone who argues for such things is that they carry some form of idealized "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" agrarian society in their head, some romantic idea about small-scale farming and simple life. Mostly these are people who have never worked on a farm themselves. The whole idea sounds regressive to me, practically tradlife conservative.

But none of my mice or keyboards work. They'll work briefly for a few seconds and then stop. Nothing works to get them going again forcing me to shut down yet again.

This sounds like there's a hardware problem with either the motherboard or CPU, or possibly the power supply. What motherboard model do you have? Is it one of the Asus models with a backup UEFI/BIOS storage? Does it have one of those 2-digit error code displays?

Is the failure with USB peripherals true for both the fixed USB ports on the back and front USB ports connected via one of the headers? Is it true for both USB 2 and 3 ports?

It's possible that a bad component is shorting a signal on your board.

To troubleshoot:

1. Strip everything from the motherboard except for the CPU and the PSU connection. Yes even the RAM. Disconnect all external cables.
2. Connect your monitor to one of the motherboard video outputs (not the GPU, that should be removed).
3. Connect a keyboard to a USB 2 port on the back of the motherboard.
4. Power on the motherboard. Does it POST? Can you interact with the UEFI interface?
5. If not, don't panic yet - some boards will POST without RAM and some won't. If yours did not, then insert one RAM stick in the first slot and try powering it on again. We want to define what the bare-minimum startup configuration is.
6. Is it behaving any differently? Does the keyboard continue to work, or does it stop working after awhile like before?
7. If everything seems OK at this point, reinstall your OS hard drive and test again.
8. Continue re-adding components one at a time and testing between each until failure happens.

The goal is to isolate the source of potential problems. You have to do it systematically. Rushing will make the troubleshooting worthless. Take notes.

When you have a moment, a list of the system hardware would be helpful. Also if you have the paper manual for the motherboard get it out.

I mean... don't we consider dog fighting to be animal abuse?

Cory Doctorow made a very specific point about this on This Week in Tech 1074, in the context of comparing the growth of the Internet with the current AI market:

The web lost money for a long time. And it's true, they did, but they had good unit economics, right? Every user of the web made the web less unprofitable. Every use of the web made the web less unprofitable. And every generation of the web made the web more profitable. Contrast this with AI, where every time they sign up a user, they lose more money. Every time the user uses their account, they lose even more money.

And every generation of AI accelerates the rate at which they are losing money.

I think it sums up how unsustainable this is very nicely.

Bringing back highly communicable diseases like measles might have something to do with it.

But what will I do without Copilot in Notepad

AI is more of a content blender.