It's not strictly true that it didn't mean anything, but I would say that it consisted of a couple weakly-defined and often mutually incompatible visions is what could be.

Meta thought they could sell people on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on specialized hardware to allow them to do real life things, but in a shitty Miiverse alternate reality where every activity was monetized to help Zuck buy the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago for himself.

Cryptobros thought the Metaverse was going to be a decentralized hyper-capitalist utopia where they could live their best lives driving digital Lambos and banging their harem of fawning VR catgirl hotties after they all made their billions selling links to JPEGs of cartoon monkeys to each other.

Everybody else conflated the decentralized part of the cryptobros' vision with the microtransactionalized walled garden of Meta's implementation, and then either saw dollar signs and scrambled to get a grift going, or ran off to write think pieces about a wholly-imaginary utopia or dystopia they saw arising from that unholy amalgamation.

In reality, Meta couldn't offer a compelling alternative to real life, and the cryptobros didn't have the funds or talent to actually make their Snow Crash fever dream a reality, so for now the VR future remains firmly the domain of VRChat enthusiasts, hardcore flight simmers, and niche technical applications.

McCarthy needed Dem votes to maintain a hold on the speakership, but the concessions he would have needed to make in order to get them would have meant making himself incredibly vulnerable to a career-ending primary challenge. The political incentives don't line up.

All these companies that are suddenly having layoffs and/or enshittifying everything at once all shared the same basic business model (pardon the Bronze Age meme format from Slashdot...):

• Give goods or services away for free
• Attract customers on the basis of getting goods or services for free
• ???
• Profit!

Years of basically free debt service and stupid VC money let them kick the can down the road for a long time in terms of figuring out what Step 3 was gonna be, up to the point that many such services didn't even bother, replacing both Steps 3 and 4 with "Sell to whichever FAANG is sucker enough to think they can leverage our userbase for their own product." High interest rates have suddenly put a stop to the money party, though, and now they're all scrambling to find ways of aggressively monetizing their services.

I work in architecture, a field that is also notorious for long hours, excessive crunch time, and mediocre pay. Real-time 3D graphics have started to become important to the design process over the last several years, and at a previous firm I met a 3D vis guy who'd transitioned into my industry from a job at a game developer, "because the hours and pay are so much better." It boggled my mind that conditions could be so much worse in game dev that my own field would be an improvement.

as a counterpoint, when the use-case for the tool is specifically "I want a picture that looks like it was painted by Greg Rutkowski, but I don't want to pay Greg Rutkowski to paint it for me" that sounds like the sort of scenario that copyright was specifically envisioned to protect against -- and if it doesn't protect against that, it's arguably an oversight in need of correction. It's in AI makers and users' interest to proactively self-regulate on this front, because if they don't somebody like Disney is going to wade into this at some point with expensive lobbyists, and dictate the law to their own benefit.

That said, it's working artists like Rutkowski, or friends of mine who scrape together a living off commissioned pieces, that I am most concerned for. Fantasy art like Greg makes, or personal character portraits of the sort you find on character sheets of long-running DnD games or as avatar images on forums like this one, make up the bread and butter of many small-time artists' work, and those commissions are the ones most endangered by the current state of the art in generative AI. It's great for would-be patrons that the cost of commissioning a mood piece for a campaign setting or a portrait of their fursona has suddenly dropped to basically zero, but it sucks for artists that their lunch is being eaten by an AI algorithm that was trained by slurping up all their work without compensation or even credit. For as long as artists need to get paid for their work in order to live, that's inherently anti-worker.

M1 gets most of its performance-per-watt efficiency by running much farther down the voltage curve than Intel or AMD usually tune their silicon for, and having a really wide core design to take advantage of the extra instruction-level parallelism that can be extracted from the ARM instruction set relative to x86. It's a great design, but the relatively minor gains from M1 to M2 suggest that there's not that much more in terms of optimization available in the architecture, and the x86 manufacturers have been able to close a big chunk of the gap in their own subsequent products by increasing their own IPC with things like extra cache and better branch prediction, while also ramping down power targets to put their competing thin-and-light laptop parts in better parts of the power curve, where they're not hitting diminishing performance returns.

The really dismal truth of the matter is that semiconductor fabrication is reaching a point of maturity in its development, and there aren't any more huge gains to be made in transistor density in silicon. ASML is pouring in Herculean effort to reduce feature sizes at a much lower rate than in years past, and each step forward increases cost and complexity by eyewatering amounts. We're reaching the physical limits of silicon now, and if there's going to be another big, sustained leap forward in performance, efficient, or density, it's probably going to have to come in the form of a new semiconductor material with more advantageous quantum behavior.

As always, the radical flank is perfectly happy to leave unimportant issues like "can we help people in small ways now even if helping them in the bigger ways we'd prefer isn't achievable within the limits of our current democratic system?" And "how do we stop the right-wing fascist takeover of the country?" by the wayside order to focus on the far more critical problem of enforcing maximal ideological purity.

As a corollary, should tweeting on The-Platform-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter be tested to exclusively as X-ing? Just to rub it in?

Because, frustratingly, Biden isn't the sort of LBJ-esque power player who can haul miserable DINOs like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema into the Oval Office to threaten them with political death unless they fall into line with his agenda. The fact of the matter is that just like in Obama's first term, Democrats really only had control of Congress for two years, and by a margin so slim that they needed unanimity to actually advance rules changes in the Senate, let alone legislation. That meant that Biden's entire agenda was bottlenecked by two of the most worthless assholes in the whole party, people who are definitely guilty of the short-sighted political gamesmanship that you want to ascribe to the entire party. Their obstructionism meant that, because of Senate rules, there's only one chance or year to pass major legislation, and even then it has to ostensibly be budget-related.

Despite all that, Biden and the rest of the Democrats did manage to get major legislation on climate enacted, in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act. Was it the whole Green New Deal? No, Manchin the coal baron wasn't going to vote for that. But it's still major change in a positive direction. Your frustration that there hasn't been more is misdirected at the party generally, when it should be aimed at two senators in particular -- and the solution to that is not to throw up your hands and declare "both sides are the same!" It's to get out the vote for more progressive legislators to make those assholes politically irrelevant.

the kid that was tracking his jet

The kid that was reposting public flight tracking data of his jet. He's so fucking petty.

Speculations indicate that Navi 3.5 might enable integrated graphics with performance comparable to an Nvidia RTX 3070.

Uh huh. Given that the Radeon 780M that represents the current state of the art in Zen4 iGPUs is still trailing a discrete 3050 (by no means a strong performer itself) by about 30% on average, this seems wildly optimistic. Don't get me wrong, I would love a beastly iGPU, but this seems less like informed speculation and more like fanboy hype.

I'm about 99% certain that the image in the article is some AI-generated nightmare fuel. There's a link to the actual paper at the bottom of the article, and it has this figure showing a few example organoids, which are ~10mm across and look a bit like white mushrooms.

The ethical dilemma posed by a brain in a petri dish is an interesting hypothetical, but probably not one worth worrying about at this point. There's less brain tissue here than in the average lab mouse, with no sensory inputs and little differentiation relative to a real human brain. The neurons in the organoids are probably able to do as neurons do individually, but they lack the structure or infrastructure required for them to have basic awareness, let alone consciousness.

Organoids like these can be useful for in-vivo study of brain tissue without the ethical troubles of rooting around in somebody's head now, but that's about it. We're a very long way from growing a brain-in-a-jar and hooking it up to The Matrix.