Ok, I searched the term Chipocalypse and found a bunch of trustworthy news sites stating it is real.

What. The. Fuck.

This is so unhingened that I am completely lost just now.

l have already seen this under another post and decided for myself that this is definitely some satirical fake because completely absurd on so many levels.

Please tell me that I’ve been right…?

Great.
Next stage in the enshitification-process. 😒

In short:
Goldberg wanted to open a Cannabis store and rented a location by the other party that claimed it to be approved to house one.
Turned out, it wasn’t.
Legal stuff followed, as is to be expected.

10% higher prices for the US, right?
…RIGHT??

Google <-> Browser

[Add “They are the same” Meme here]

Depending on the age of the EEE, you might run into problems because the old low end CPU doesn’t support instruction set extensions that are assumed to be present by distros nowadays. I think it was SSE2…?

Yes, water combined with earth is scary stuff. The ground not being as solid as one expects is a stuff of nightmares… And growing population numbers let people build houses in areas they shouldn’t.
Be it flood zones, mudflood-prone mountain valleys or areas with unsuitable underground for settlement.
Combine this with this happening predominantly in poorer regions that don’t have the financial and technological means to omit the causes or at least handle the effects and you get the shockingly high number of effected people mentioned in the report.
And this will only get worse as extreme weather conditions increase in the coming decades…

Sure you do… BONK!

You mean Hannah Fry? No, I think this isn’t her.

They are not that common here in Germany in general, but my city has in the past years put up a dozen or so, mainly in public parks.
They are maintained by our municipal utility service and are basically always in perfect condition.
At least during summer. Being outdoor installations they are shut down (actually completely removed) during the winter months.

Other than that I only had one in elementary school 30 years ago, which also worked and a lot of actual natural springs with drinking outlets that are often maintained by rural communities.

Our city also has one of those natural water drinking fountains, but as it is the (still maintained and monitored) remains of a thermal baths project from a hundred years ago, it is not so suitable for actually quenching your thirst. Full of crazy salts and minerals with a faintly sulfuric aroma on top - but supposed to be healthy :-)

So, in general: no complaints where I live.

Well, as almost all our industrial scale electrical energy sources boil down (this pun definitely intended) to rapidly heating up huge amounts of water, the pun seems to be obvious for a nuclear fusion power plant. But maybe it isn’t and it is just a coincidence. Who knows…

I see, so probably based on the resemblance to “Kathy Deeds”… Wow, that is not even decent dad humour level…

Interesting insect, never heard of it before!
Although I am slightly sorry as I can’t stop giggling at the moment since I realized how silly all the references to feet sound in this description. 🤭
What I don’t understand is the text in the speech bubble… Is that some kind of insider joke? Seems not to be a valid information…

Also I have the impression that lifetime of products has increased again over the past decade or so.
Still rocking my Sony ebook reader from 2011 and a Samsung Galaxy S5 as backup and Whatsapp handy. Both are using Micro USB, so I have a small cable with me anyways.

You are probably quite right, which is a good thing, but the authors take that into account themselves:

“Our team’s median timelines range from 2028 to 2032. AI progress may slow down in the 2030s if we don’t have AGI by then.”

They are citing an essay on this topic, which elaborates on the things you just mentioned:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XiMRyQcEyKCryST8T/slowdown-after-2028-compute-rlvr-uncertainty-moe-data-wall

I will open a champagne bottle if there is no breakthrough in the next few years, because than the pace will significantly slow down.
But still not stop and that is the thing.
I myself might not be around any more if AGI arrives in 2077 instead of 2027, but my children will, so I am taking the possibility seriously.

And pre-2030 is also not completely out of the question. Everyone has been quite surprised on how well LLMs were working.
There might be similar surprises for the other missing components like world model and continuous learning in store, which is a somewhat scary prospect.

And alignment is even now already a major concern, let’s just say “Mecha-Hitler”, crazy fake videos and bot-armies with someone questionable’s agenda…
So seems like a good idea to try and press for control and regulation, even if the more extreme scenarios are likely to happen decades into the future, if at all…

I think the point is not that it is really going to happen at that pace, but to show that it very well might happen within our lifetime. And also the authors have adjusted the earliest possible point of a possible hard to stop runaway scenario to 2028 afaik.

Kind of like the atomic doomsday clock, which has been oscillating between a quarter to twelve and a minute before twelve during the last decades, depending on active nukes and current politics. Helps to illustrate an abstract but nonetheless real risk with maximum possible impact (annihilation of mankind - not fond of the idea…)

Even if it looks like AI has been hitting some walls for now (which I am glad about) and is overhyped, this might not stay this way. So although AGI seems unlikely at the moment, taking the possibility into account and perhaps slowing down and making sure we are not recklessly risking triggering our own destruction is still a good idea, which is exactly the authors’ point.

Kind of like scanning the sky with telescopes and doing DART-style asteroid research missions is still a good idea, even though the probability for an extinction level meteorite event is low.