Apart from getting funded by crypto-bros, BlueSky promised to allow federation, and hasn't. Seems any time VCs or talk of IPOs happens, the only way is down.
Most people seem to hate the idea of AI versions of dead celebrities, but I can't help but be a bit intrigued. I'm a fan of golden-age Hollywood movies from the 1930s to 1950s. Most of that era's stars are dead now, but I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before we see some of their likeness in 'new' versions of old movies. Some people may not like it, but where there are dollars to be made, things tend to happen.
What would 'Casablanca' be like with Spencer Tracy instead of Humphrey Bogart? 'Gone with the Wind' with Vivien Leigh swapped out for Bette Davis. Orson Welles always said his masterpiece would have been 'The Magnificent Ambersons', not 'Citizen Kane', if the former hadn't been destroyed by the studio in editing. Maybe his vision of it can be resurrected by AI versions of the actors recreating scenes from the original script.
"Of the world’s four largest greenhouse gas emitters the EU has made by far the most progress in slashing emissions. A report released last week by the UN Environment Programme calculated that EU emissions fell 7.5 percent last year -- compared to a 1.4-percent drop in the United States, and a jump of 5.2 and 6.1 percent respectively in China and India."
This is largely driven by swapping out coal for renewables, which means the EU is on track for its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. China and India have growing electricity demand, that even China with its vast renewables manufacturing capability, can't meet from renewables alone. There is talk in the EU about speeding up efforts to try to reach carbon neutrality sooner. Crucially, this can now be tied to a pro-economic growth agenda which will get more right-wing parties in the European Parliament on board.
Researchers have been trying to get robots to autonomously wipe tables and fold towels for years with only very limited success
Yes, this has been true up until now, but I think we are in a phase of rapid advancement. Look here at how DeepMind is using current LLM AI so that robots can train themselves - https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/shaping-the-future-of-advanced-robotics/
I would guess robots capable (perhaps messily at first) of general purpose skills like cleaning aren't far off.
The UBTECH one is definitely not as advanced as the Atlas one. But I would expect, like everything electronic, China will eventually have commoditized versions of robots that are functionally almost as good as more expensive ones, but much cheaper.
https://www.techeblog.com/unitree-g1-humanoid-robot-mass-production/
Customer relationship management software puts its details into structured fields, like many other types of software, a database of sorts. This user is saying that extra step is no longer needed. The AI is capable of extracting, summarizing, and structuring the data from emails, Slack, etc - thus no more need for the software anymore.
Microsoft has cash reserves of $75 billion.
Microsoft - If you really want to convince us that nuclear power is part of the future, why can't you use some of your own money? Why does every single nuclear suggestion always rely on bailouts from taxpayers? Here's a thought, if you can't pay for it yourself - just pick the cheaper option that taxpayers don't have to pay for - you know renewables and grid storage? The stuff that everybody else, all over the world, is building near 99% of new electricity generation with.
As sad as this topic is, this is a much better way to go than a prolonged miserable painful death where you suffer the last months of a terminal disease.
Any time I hear claims that involve hitherto unknown laws of Physics I'm 99.99% sure I'm dealing with BS - but then again, some day someone will probably genuinely pull off such a discovery.
Good news for pigs. I'll be delighted to see factory farming disappear and be replaced by tech like this.
I think fediverse people are wildly overestimating how much 99% of Reddit users care about this. The mod team on r/futurology (I'm one of them) set up a fediverse site just over a month ago (here you go - https://futurology.today/ ) It's been modestly successful so far, but the vast majority of subscribers seem to be coming from elsewhere in the fediverse, not migrants from Reddit.
This is despite the fact we've permanently stickied a post to the top of the sub. r/futurology has over 19 million subscribers, and yet the fediverse is only attracting a tiny trickle of them. I doubt most people on Reddit even know what the word fediverse means.
If BlueSky were federated it would mean you could move to another server and keep the followers you built there. All the Big Tech offerings keep you locked in, and at risk of losing the work you put in at their whim.