This might sound frivolous at first, but the more you think about the less that it seems so. Prada are famed for their minimalist aesthetic. If they can successfully bring that to spacesuit design it will be a bonus. But they can add more. They have expertise in materials and garment manufacturing that space companies won't have. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this collaboration. It might become a "classic" space suit design, used into the 2030s and 40s.
This is a great idea on paper, but I'm curious to know how they can make it a reality. Realistically, there are only a few companies in the world who can pull off manufacturing this. They have two former senior Airbus people on their advisory board.
I'm curious to see where they go with this. I'm guessing making it a reality will cost a LOT of money. For context - Airbus Group research and development expenses for the twelve months ending June 30, 2023 were $3.422 billion.
Is the play here to hope they get bought out by the likes of Airbus or Boeing? I don't know, but they do seem to have spotted a gap in the market and the idea seems sound.
Both the US & EU have been explicit about using tariffs against Chinese car imports, but will Chinese made cars predominate in the rest of the world? If China could make cars like the The $11.500 BYD Seagull quick enough, I'd guess it could sell them in the 10's or even 100's of millions around the world.
Differing regulation regimes are often used to mask protectionism (removing them in Europe was one of the main aims of the EU becoming a single market) - will we see the same happen for cars? I'd guess there are vast numbers of people in Europe or America who would jump at the chance of a $11.500 car like the Seagull.
A common dystopian narrative around AI is that Big Tech will own all the gains, yet reality doesn't match up to that. What we're seeing instead, is that freely available open source AI isn't far behind the leading contenders.
What will it mean for the future? Who knows. But I feel reassured when it comes to AI power is being more decentralized.
Anthropic has developed an AI model called 'Claude' that many think is as good, or even better, than the other current leading AI models. So they have some credibility in their pitch to Amazon about 'Claude-Next', the AI they talk about beginning to automate large portions of the economy.
Anthropic estimates Claude-Next will require on the order of 1025 FLOPs, or floating point operations — several orders of magnitude larger than even the biggest models today. Amazon AWS computing resources will presumably be a big help with that. They are not just scaling up current AI, but say in addition they want to make their AI self-teaching to solve some of current AI's problems with mistakes/hallucinations.
Given all the concerns around Amazon and its monopolization of online retail, I'm surprised more in the media haven't cottoned on to it investing so heavily in a firm whose stated goal is automating large portions of the economy.
If you don't know much about the topic, this is an interesting overview of some current AI concerns. I think characterizing them as 'warring' seems simplistic. Also, it's very American-centric & lacks a global perspective. The authors don't seem to have digested very different approaches to AI in the EU & China. Although it mentions mass unemployment, it doesn't elaborate further - an oversight as I expect in 5-10 years it will be people's number one AI concern.
Yes, its hard to understand. On the other hand our results on cloudflare look way too good to be true. They say the fediverse site had 180K unique visitors in its first month and almost 3 million of what it calls "total requests".
It's hard to figure out what this means in terms of how many people on the fediverse are seeing the content, both from our site, and where its coming up in federated instances.
and why would they? ........... they are pretty happy with what they have now.
Exactly. Only a very small number of people are motivated as the pioneers who've setup the fediverse now are. Again looking at this through the lens of r/futurology & our fediverse site. Why would a user also want to go to a second version of the exact same thing, but way, way smaller.
My hunch is that long-term the fediverse will prosper. Reddit still isn't too bad even with these changes, at least not compared to what an absolute shithole Twitter has become.
But people who care about making it bigger, should be asking themselves hard questions - this meme comes across as very complacent & out of touch, if many people really believe the sentiments it's expressing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/15wi75l/rfuturology_is_now_in_the_fediverse_at/
It's hard to know exactly how many people see them from the stats Reddit gives Mods. Reddit gives a figure within the post for views, which stands at about 160,000 for the post I mentioned. That includes the times people have been served the title in their feed & and the times people clicked on it (sadly Reddit doesn't differentiate further).
The fediverse site has been going for 6 weeks and has about 620 subscribers. My guestimate from looking at addresses in comments is that maybe 100-150 are reddit migrants. So roughly speaking 1 in 1000 r/futurology people who saw something about our fediverse site were motivated to join.
A sobering thought for people who think the fediverse is about to crush reddit.
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.
Glad to see this but I'm more interested in Level 4 buses for public transport. These are starting to pop up around the world, and mean driverless buses can follow fixed routes without drivers. When are we going to see cities served by thousands of these vehicles? That would revolutionize public transport.
AI is making content automation at vast scales so easy it seems what is just a trickle now will inevitably become a deluge. What's the solution? Perhaps using AI to moderate the AI content? I think there's a market for someone to make personal AI moderator software that filters out all these people and their garbage from wherever you are on the internet. I'd sign up for it.