Archive link: https://archive.ph/KJ2n9

Archive link: https://archive.ph/reWOG

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12399007

By the way, in order for AI to indeed create wealth and "abundance", it needs to increase productivity - which pretty much means it needs to replace some jobs.

That's one of the contradictions in today's public discourse on AI: we simultaneously scaremonger around it destroying jobs and hope it creates unprecedented abundance, without acknowledging that the latter requires the former.

The thing people should be more scared by, IMHO, is if AI does NOT increase productivity because it'd mean the size of the cake stays the same, only distributed differently.

That's, in a way, the core of the battle between closed source and open source: the Anthropics and OpenAIs of this world want to appropriate, thanks to AI, a big share of the global wealth cake, while open source ensures the AI cake slice gets shared rather than captured.

You want open source to prevail even if the cake overall gets bigger but you REALLY want it if the cake stays the same size, because then it's a zero sum game - purely a question of who takes from whom.

That would be the real AI dystopia: AI not increasing productivity and closed source winning. In that scenario, AI becomes nothing more than a wealth transfer mechanism to major AI firms.

It's also, unfortunately, probably the most likely scenario.

First of all, there is a precedent: it's exactly what happened with the internet. Contrary to popular belief, the internet did not increase productivity: Total Factor Productivity growth fell from 1.4% (1780-1829) to 0.9% (1830-1854) (congress.gov/crs-product/R48…). So: peak internet penetration coincided with the worst productivity performance on record.

In effect, what that means is what we all witnessed: the so-called FAANG captured a massive share of the economy's value without actually expanding it. They became trillion-dollar companies not by making the pie bigger, but by redirecting where the money flows - from Main Street retail to Amazon, from local advertising to Google and Facebook, from the entertainment industry to Netflix.

It's also what initial data on AI's impact on jobs suggests: so far the displacement isn't showing up anywhere. Anthropic's own economists (anthropic.com/research/labor…), an NBER study of 25,000 Danish workers (nber.org/papers/w33777), the Stanford AI Index (hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/20…) - all three reach the same conclusion: no aggregate job losses. Which, if you follow the logic above, is exactly the bad news.

And it's of course what AI frontier labs keep lobbying the US government for: they want to deploy lawfare against Chinese open source precisely because they understand better than anyone that their trillion-dollar valuations depend not on AI growing the economy, but on establishing a toll booth position to extract rent from it.

In fact it's a vicious circle: the more successful closed source labs are at extracting rent, the more the economy's AI gains go to them rather than to the businesses that could use AI to actually produce more. Rent-seeking and productivity growth actively work against each other.

So, yes, paradoxically the best-case scenario is the one the media scaremonger against: AI replacing jobs and Chinese open source prevailing. Because the first means the cake is actually growing, and the second means no one gets to hoard it.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48695

Source: https://xcancel.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2084116343012626942#m

Boot disk is Microsoft Windows 95 OSR2 - Boot Disk (Dell OEM) (3.5-1.44mb) and is mounted to Floppy Drive 1 (A:)
Windows 95 ISO is Microsoft Windows 95B (4.00.1111) (OSR2) [English] and is mounted to CD-ROM drive (D:)

I was able to run FDISK to set up a DOS partition and format the hard drive (C:) without issue. I then ran SETUP. SCANDISK confirmed that there were no issues with the drive. Then I got the line "Copying files needed for Windows setup" and... the installation process hung up there. For several hours. Obviously, something had gone wrong, and it was never going to end.

While troubleshooting online, I found a post that suggested copying the contents of the Windows 95 CD to the hard drive and running SETUP.EXE from there. I was able to do this (verifying that the drive is properly formatted) but I still got stuck on the "Copying files needed for Windows setup" step. Any recommendations for what I should try next?

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9193158

For years we’ve been told that China’s dominance in batteries and electric vehicles is mainly down to cheap labour, government subsidies and an uneven playing field. But is that really the whole story? This week we take a closer look at what China’s battery boom can teach us about the future of energy, manufacturing and the global transition away from fossil fuels.

Benchmarks: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-flash

What was frontier 6 months ago now possible to feasible to run at home and borderline free via api.

Recommended by Marxist tiktok creator @leessyndikaat, the article argues that Chinese AI technologies (described as a "Productivity Singularity") should be developed and disseminated globally as part of a revolutionary marxist strategy, building the material conditions for communism.

The article is too long to digest in DeepL or Google in one pass so I can't past here unfortunately!

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12364408

https://archive.ph/DMGaS