At least in the current climate (and quite possibly indefinitely; depending on how prudent their investments are and whether they have any uncontrollably expensive hobby) there's not really any reason for the 'AI' guys to take such a servile attitude.

If you actually need the job, or are invested in the company's mission for some reason, it's a good idea to care at least slightly about how your paycheck doesn't bounce; but that's not really the position these guys are in. Exceptionally in-demand skillset and reputation; existing net worth almost certainly already enough to at least keep them comfortable indefinitely if they feel like quitting the rat race or get fired. Why settle for doing sordid adtech if you think that, best case, your boss in the sort of dumbass who would lose billions of dollars on the idea that Second Life would totally have the GDP of western europe, because reasons, and you can keep him paying you a handsome salary and providing you with the GPU compute time and dubiously sourced datasets that you find personally interesting; and worst case, if you lose the fight, you'll just be told to go sling ads, not fired and blacklisted.

Facebook isn't running a charity; but neither are these guys. Why wouldn't they try to take what they can get? Especially when the actually-profitable business units are fat enough that there's plenty of room for boondoggles, so long as you can sell them, rather than there being fairly tight constraints on how much you can waste before the company starts bleeding out.

It would honestly be more surprising if they signed up with facebook out of a genuine willingness to do adtech swill and sordid 'engagement' hacking; rather than on the assumption that there's enough desperate dumb money sloshing around in Zuckerberg's fear of missing out on the next big thing that they can get paid to pursue their pet projects without much concern for having to deliver short term impact on the bottom line.

I assume that at least some of the tension here is that facebook hired these guys to be the hotshot golden boys of sucking less at AI; so it isn't just an it's-only-money thing. I don't know whether or not this belief is accurate; but Zuck and friends certainly hunted down and paid for the various new AI hires as though they were capable of things that in-house or more readily available alternatives are not, so the battle over where their attention will be focused is presumably being waged on the assumption that having someone else do what they aren't doing isn't really a substitute.

What I would be curious to know is why the 'build god-machine' goal isn't being treated as the obvious winner just because you can have the god machine make facebook more addictive and better at serving ads. Do they think that the AI guys are drinking the kool-aide and the only thing they'll actually be able to deliver is incremental improvements; so they want those churned directly into products? Some degree of confidence that they will eventually manage it; but fear of missing out on some sort of short term advantage means that they don't care about what is achievable in 5-10 years? Genuinely zero interest in anything except making social media more of a hellscape; so they simply don't care?

I suspect that, while it would be socially controversial, planetary colonization would be a very strong case for IVF and some population planning.

For the amount of volume/mass required to ship a single human and support them in transit and on site you could ship a lot of embryos in cryo(it's careful plumbing; but a big dewar flask kept at cryogenic temperatures is downright lightweight compared to a full life support system); and shipping embryos gives you the option of bringing massive genetic diversity, thousands to tens of thousands of genetically screened parents worth of embryos in the space a single person would require.

Unless you've got some sort of advanced growth vats you would obviously need people onsite; but instead of dealing with the probably-impossible task of keeping a tiny breeding population's gene pool in order you'd just be defrosting and gestating specimens from a much larger pool of diverse embryos as needed. Presumably you'd initially go with an all-female colony, and only start defrosting males and trying to maintain a viable natural population once you had at least high single-digit thousands to low-mid tens of thousands.

I'm sure that such an arrangement would freak some people out; and you'd probably need to do some reasonably intense social engineering to keep everyone on-mission; but in terms of efficiency of genetic diversity there's a fairly compelling case to be made.

What sort of disaster do you have in mind that would render earth less habitable than mars?

Short of unstoppable replicator nanites turning the entire crust into grey goo; or very long term issues with the sun reaching EoL that will be an issue for basically anyone in the solar system, it's honestly hard to think of ways you could break it more badly.

Plenty of possibilities that will make people deeply miserable; or cause 80+ percent of the population to die horribly; but you'll still have a planet with the right gravity, an atmosphere and magnetosphere, some sort of ecosystem(even if it's just algal scum and cockroaches); some soil that isn't riddled with perchlorates, and so on.

NO! This is an outrage! [slams table]

Our religious war should be about reader's choice vs writer's choice!

As John Taylor Gatto suggests in "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher": https://www.informationliberat...
        " ... Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.
        Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community.
        With lessons like the ones I teach day after day it should be little wonder we have a real national crisis, the nature of which is very different from that proclaimed by the national media. Young people are indifferent to the adult world and to the future, indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence. Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the twenty-first century cannot concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
      All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are nourished and magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. No common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical thinking tools -- like the dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ -- would last very long before being torn to pieces. School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith."

So most teachers earn their money doing well what it is teachers are supposed to do (as planned in Prussia in the 1800s when compulsory schooling was introduced to make Prussia a military power).
https://odyssey-fm.com/why-sch...
https://metropolis.cafe/2017/0...
https://dukereportbooks.com/bo...
        "The Prussian Blueprint
        In tracing the roots of American education, Gatto illuminates the foundational influence of Prussian schooling. In 19th-century Prussia, the state constructed a comprehensive education system to mold loyal, obedient subjects. The purpose was explicit: to instill uniformity, suppress individuality, and ensure that children would grow into citizens who followed orders. America adopted this model eagerly, not because it worked educationally, but because it aligned with elite interests.
        This importation was neither organic nor public-driven. It was orchestrated by a coalition of industrialists, politicians, and academic theorists who viewed schooling as a tool to engineer society. They believed in planned progress and social stability, achieved not through democratic participation but through controlled upbringing."

So, the big -- and usually unacknowledged -- issue is that what teachers (and schools) are supposed to do (turn kids into obedient dumbed-down low-initiative robots for industry and warfare cannot fodder) is no longer something our society needs (if it ever did) or wants.

Until people accept compulsory schools are doing exactly what they were designed to do, and are doing it very well, it is hard to have a productive discussion about changing -- or abolishing -- them. And likewise, it is hard to have a productive discussion about how educational computing should be used in schools when compulsory schooling has very little to do with education.

Ok, but which of those things came with the new law? A lot of what you're describing (I suspect all of it) was already in place. What changed for non-banned users?

Oh, so they're doing it the same way I take "good" photographs: by taking a fuckton of mostly-shitty photographs and trawling through them for the rare few which actually look decent.

Vaporware. If this feature doesn't make it into the Open Source driver so that I can know where my computer is, then I'm not going to buy any Nvidia hardware!

Realistically the two things that will make it happen are

1. China is doing it
3. Billionaire joyrides

I was going to say something snide about how MCP is a laughably thin standard; but 'agents.md' is literally just a text file(encoding unspecified; I guess UTF8 but nobody actually says) that you put text in and hope your bot will react appropriately to. It describes the contents as 'standard markdown'; without mention of which markdown variant they mean.

Given that the whole thing is just an exercise in getting away with bots being more or less as OK-ish with poorly structured inputs as they are with anything else it's not like it would be a better 'standard' if there were a thicket of XML schema involved; but saying:

:"AGENTS.md emerged from collaborative efforts across the AI software development ecosystem, including OpenAI Codex, Amp, Jules from Google, Cursor, and Factory.

We’re committed to helping maintain and evolve this as an open format that benefits the entire developer community, regardless of which coding agent you use."

About a 'standard' which is 'put some kind of markdown, y'know, stuff you'd tell someone about your project in a text file called Agents.md' is a little grandiose.

If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant

It was good enough for us!

Forget the kids, they don't vote so they can be safely trod upon. Who cares what their experiences are.

But seriously, what about the not-kids? Australian adults, are you having to show your ID when you get a DHCP lease? Do a lot of websites who didn't have mandatory logins, now have 'em?

How does it work, and what has changed for you?