Sorry, biofuels CAN be carbon neutral. But it's more expensive to do it that way, so nobody does. Generally they're just greenwashing PR, so they don't try to make it actually work. Alternatively, they're a research project that gets written up as if it were a reasonable operational choice. (Or both, of course.)

This is more a problem with our decision making strategy than it is a technical problem, even though of course there are technical components. We are really poor at dealing with long term problems. Less poor at recognizing them. But we highly discount future costs.

Yes it was essentially free. Of course I brought a bottle I scrounged from home along with other school supplies, but what else would I have used Glue-All for in college classes? I'm sure that the one bottle I had went bad before I finished it.

Back then, time was essentially free. Dorm life had a prison-like economy: With room and board prepaid by parents, most people just had some pin money for beer. Everything was evaluated in terms of beer equivalents. Genuine tokens for a load of laundry cost at least 3 or 4 beers. Few would be willing to forego those drinks to save a couple of minutes squirting glue.

Betcha 100 bucks Xi also grabbed Facebook and Xhitter user info. Most commercial sites are not fortified against deep-pocketed state-sponsored hackers, only typical private hackers.

Bob, you lived a DRAM good life!

Dammit, I told them to STFU about it; I need free laundry, with the expensive tuition and all. Next ya know, they'll spill the free Top Ramen and condom dispenser bugs. Those are show-stoppers for me.

What "fundamental" AI research requires $30 billion? I'd like to see the proposal first, otherwise the gov't will waste it on silly crap if it's too open-ended.

In other words, I don't trust gov't with a 30b blank check, and I'm a liberal.

Our dorm used plastic tokens that would be dispensed from some central site. (I assume the idea was to discourage people from prying open coin boxes on washers and dryers.)

However, when we arrived we learned from the upperclassmen that you could make a wax mold from a real token, then manufacture all the free tokens you want from Elmer's Glue-All. Nobody I knew ever paid to do laundry, but the University never bothered to change out the system while I was there.

Sometimes the glue tokens would jam the mechanism, but that could usually be fixed by using a chair to deliver a firm blow to the slider.

Use hot air with a hydrogen fuel to keep it hot. (Batteries MIGHT work for that.)

OTOH, it would be slow. There's no way around that. It could be a good replacement for a luxury liner, I suppose. And it might be useful for freight that wasn't too heavy and didn't have an extremely urgent delivery requirement. That's a pretty niche market.

You can't make things work by just building wind-turbines. (Or solar cells.) You need to add large investments in energy storage and voltage regulation, and the ability to pour power into the grid episodically from random locations. This *is* the right way to go, but don't oversimplify things.

The current grid is not designed to accept random amounts of input from random locations. It's designed to be driven by base-line loads, like hydro, nuclear, coal, or gas. That's what was available when it was being designed. When variable sources get to be around 40% it becomes less stable. (That's what the various huge batteries have been added to handle...but the problem gets worse when the base-line load becomes a smaller fraction.)

The grid is **In the process** of being redesigned. But the redesign is not near completion. This is only partially because of existing commercial interests.

Hydrogen is a more realistic choice. I.e. it's known to be possible, and CAN be generated from water and electricity.
There are lots of problems with it, but there are known plausible answers to those problems. (Except the ones about expense. This requires different engines on the airplanes.)

The easiest plausible answer is synthetic kerosene. This is doable, and requires feedstock of things like methane. It CAN be done in an approximately non-polluting manner. Expect this to be MORE expensive than the hydrogen approach at scale.

The processes involving things like food waste will always be non-scalable, because the feedstock it to varied. (Well, you could compost them anaerobically and pull off the methane...but doing that at scale is both difficult and inefficient as a source of methane.)

Batteries are too heavy to be a suitable replacement for air fuel This is true even of Lithium batteries. There *do* exist short range electric airplanes...but I expect them to always be :"technical tour de force demonstrations".

Clearly, they've been reading Slashdot and know true AI is far off.

Yes, true AI is far off. The optimist in me believes that the OpenAI team realizes their system isn't going to be sentient anytime soon, so dedicating a team to prevent an impossible reality is just a waste of resources.

But the pessimist in me still is anxious about another matter. AI is still a threat, but not the one most suspect. The real problem we face is humanity entrusting AI to make life-altering decisions without any human review or intervention. This is happening today: prosecutors are using AI facial recognition to falsely convict people; Israel is using AI to decide where to bomb in Gaza; insurance companies are using AI to decline health care procedures for senior citizens. In short, letting AI make decisions is the blind leading the blind, and it will cast our world in darkness if we don't put a stop to it, and soon.

No, I'm saying it was a lucky coincidence due to the way the domain changed, or didn't change. We can't expect lucky coincidences to happen often.

Where the gov't often does help is with forming standards to reduce vendor repetition and incompatibility. It may take R&D to test such standards, with the help of industry.

But hiding such research is only allowed for secret projects. Commercial AI wouldn't be able to use it. So who are you expecting it to boost? I don't believe Space X got special access to secret info, but don't quote me.

The Cloud business is kind of like the nuclear power business. Even though the average risk is probably lower than the alternatives, mistakes make the news and quickly damage your reputation. All the big cloud vendors will probably suffer at least one embarrassing outage or breach.

[disbanded] research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators.

They figured they were SOL, so instead bulk-ordered tombstones for each team-member that say:

Here lies an actual human. Sorry the bots won. We couldn't put GenieGPT back in the bottle, but are truly sorry for letting it out.

The COBOL team did something like that. Turns out COBOL became a zombie and runs the back-end of civilization.

Actually COBOL survived because they ended up just cloning most of Grace Hopper's and others' beta languages when they ran out of time, since those betas were working in practice, and thus the concepts were road-tested.