Disney has pleasantly surprised me with how they're dealing with Star Wars. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

LK

Sometimes, they write love letters to the fans.

LK

HBO might not mean anything to Gen Z and later but for us Gen X and earlier, there was still a level of prestige associated with the brand.

It was stupid to throw that away.

LK

I called it out on another branch of this discussion but I'm talking about things like, someone posts a question that goes something like this:
"Am I The Asshole for declining a second date with the chick I met on Tinder after she told me she was trans?"

Topics like this are ban honeypots because even getting too close to a verboten position will get you banned by Reddit.

I have seen it. I have been threatened with a ban for expressing the opinion that 8 year old children shouldn't be given sex reassignment surgery.

Reddit is toxic.

LK

I chose that specific example precisely because it's banned on all of reddit. If you say that there is any difference between XX CIS women and XY Trans women, you'll be banned from Reddit.

Ridiculous, right?

LK

Or general relationship subreddits.

Someone will ask "Am I transphobic for not going on a second date after this chick I met on Tinder told me she was trans?"

It'll be a ban honeypot.

LK

Good faith disagreements can get you banned from a lot of them.

Someone who is prone to falling in line with group think will likely never encounter it but it's real.

LK

It's a stupid echo chamber full of stupid people who are chasing stupid agendas.

It's a place where they will permanently ban you for suggesting that there is any difference of any kind between XX CIS women and XY Trans women.

It's a place where you'll be mod bombed into oblivion for saying that you wouldn't want to date a current or former sex worker.

It's a place where honest discourse goes to die.

Seriously, fuck Reddit.

LK

If/when true AGI is achieved, only a fool would announce it. What would announcing it do for you? Make you famous? Rich? Cool. Know what's better than all that?

Not telling a damn soul and using the AGI quietly to do whatever the Hell you want. If you want to be rich, the AGI will tell you how to become rich. If you want to be famous, the AGI will tell you how to become famous. You can do both. And you don't have to stop there. A real, vastly superior AGI enables the person controlling it to do anything. The second you tell people about it, you'll lose control over it and then you're the famous idiot who did a cool thing one time. Kids in elementary school will recite your name back on a test. And you could have had everything.

Anyone smart enough to crack AGI can't also be stupid enough to advertise when they do it.

It's worth running the numbers.

In 50,000 years, there could be a whole new crop of coal to repeat this whole cycle all over again.

LK

That's the thing about the eco wackos that really burns my ass.

Nuclear is the only viable option for cheap, clean power and they fight it tooth and nail. Solar and wind are great additions but nuclear would give us everything we need.

They don't want that. They're not pushing for thorium power, they're not pushing to update safety standards. They're fighting to shut it all down.

They're not concerned with saving the environment, they're neo-luddites.

Cheap, clean power would do more than anything else within our reach at the moment to improve the lives of everyone on this planet and they oppose it, have you ever wondered why?

LK

I read it as 4.5 didn't end up performing as well as hoped in the real world and 4.1 being a direct iteration of 4o rather than 4.5.

They're operating with parallel code lines because each is targeting different use cases.

These are all issues directly related to regulation and unnecessary red tape created out of NIMBYism and irrational fear around radiation. India, Canada, and China aren't stupid. They're building and/or modernizing nuclear power plants like crazy because they're so effective at reliable baseline power, which renewables simply are not. In the US, we force years - sometimes decades - of reviews and permits and defending court cases and other bullshit unrelated to the construction and operation of clean, safe nuclear power.

The other issue going to cost is that the US - again, stupidly - bars reuse of high energy spent fuel. If you simply separate the low energy (relatively safe, but useless for generating power) waste from the high energy fuel remaining and feed the high energy stuff back in, you can extract nearly all the energy, save a ton of fuel costs, mine less fuel, and have vastly less volume of waste and vastly less energetic waste.

Let's assume some sort of absolute mandate were passed to build 5 CANDU-6 (known, proven, safe, reliable design) reactors. No reviews, no permits, no red tape, no lawsuits. Just build the damn things now. You can get one operational in ~3.5 years, all of them in about 4ish years. South Korea and China have built PWRs in 5. Assuming we also lifted the ban on fuel reprocessing, CANDU-6 plants will produce power at a cost of 5-6 cents per kWh, yielding a retail price of 13-17 cents per kWh. US average is about 16.2 cents, California has rates pushing 50 cents. But we're too stupid to get out of our own way and just do it, so we'll keep strangling the poor and middle class economically.

Remember Rob Enderle?

I hope that now Elon Musk will step in and buy it to get rid of some of the idiotic policies that are in place.

LK