You can understand it but you can’t interpret the value. How many movies is a CD? Or a DVD? Or a 1TB SSD? Or even Avatar in 3D (presumably not 1)? How many movies have even been released in total/last year?

The number awes non-tech savvy folk but it doesn’t really inform them of anything. You could just as well write “more movies than you will ever need”.

And besides that, I personally think that news should try to educate folk. I’m completely fine with a comparison in the article. But why in the headline?

Fair point. I personally think that AI lives up to enough parts of the hype so that there won’t be another AI winter but who knows. Some will obviously get disillusioned but not enough.

There are quite a lot of AI-sceptics in this thread. If you compare the situation to 10 years ago, isn’t it insane how far we’ve come since then?

Image generation, video generation, self-driving cars (Level 4 so the driver doesn’t need to pay attention at all times), capable text comprehension and generation. Whether it is used for translation, help with writing reports or coding. And to top it all off, we have open source models that are at least in a similar ballpark as the closed ones and those models can be run on consumer hardware.

Obviously AI is not a solved problem yet and there are lots of shortcomings (especially with LLMs and logic where they completely fail for even simple problems) but the progress is astonishing.

Totally agree, though I haven’t really participated that much on Reddit. Seems like any disagreement is quickly framed as trolling over there.

Sure, no worries! I haven’t been disappointed yet by responding to downvoted comments so I will keep doing it :)

Just another similar metaphor: Power hungry. Not the stove kind but the dictator kind. To be honest, there are quite a lot of body related metaphors, e.g. drowning in trouble, blinded by ambition. I guess it comes down to evoking some strong emotion.

Consider another association with thirst: Desperation. In the mind of the author porn consumption is negative so anyone consuming porn is doing this out of desperation, despite knowing better. It essentially describes people being controlled by their base instincts. And thus this site is a trap, luring people against their will.

That is how I would interpret the word thirst in this context anyway. It’s not about a critical need, it’s about thirst being irrational and highly compulsive.

Sure, that’s certainly a valid point. But at the very least it shows that they don’t expect the sanctions to stop anytime soon. Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean that a war with Taiwan is coming.

Country builds up industry to not rely on opposing country in preparation for war.

Maybe we should be slightly concerned about that? IMHO it shows that Chinas ambition for Taiwan are quite serious.