Wait until you find out about American car companies

Good points, but not necessarily eternal truths. I suspect you could use magnetic fields to strengthen the cable. Of course, that would collapse if the power failed. But perhaps there are other alternatives that nobody has thought of.

Still, my favorite skyhook is the PinWheel, though it needs a hefty mass in a fairly low orbit (as well as long arms that reach into the stratosphere). But you need to lower as much mass as you raise (on the average) or the orbit decays.

Looks like you're implementing LISP.

What I wonder is whether it's any good. Admittedly, I don't wonder hard enough to listen to it, but then I generally (almost always) avoid podcasts.

I do most of my shopping there, at Grocery Outlet, and at Costco. I actually do more shopping at grossout, because they are the closest thing that doesn't suck. We have a local market and mini-market, and I'm not a big fan of either one. (The market is somewhere around "OK", the mini market is disappointing.) I got Costco's card honestly just to get fuel quicker as the card is a membership card, and it's convenient for me to stop in there on my way to work.

Winco is an employee-owned co-op, and their pricing seems to be dynamic in general and the prices actually go back down, so I'm really happy with them. Grocery Outlet has beer I want to drink and high quality local dairy products, and an interesting and ever-changing stock of weird shit, and neither of the local ones are scuzzy. I have a chest freezer...

There will be tools. But there will also be the more general intelligence. One can argue about the time-line, and that's quite reasonable, but denying it requires accepting spiritualism or some such.

For that matter, people are often used as tools. It's not an "either/or" choice.

Of course it does. It doesn't have to do with just one thing. Keeping the machine spinning is the reason why even heartless fucks should be interested in workers' needs being met, if they weren't idiots. But that's the problem with such people, if you're smart then you realize that you don't want to live in a world of shit.

Just because there are people available to work that doesn't mean they will be hired. And they won't be hired because of AI.

If the GOP continues to run the government the old people won't be a problem either because they will die when they lose health coverage.

Creating icons in the game is part of creating the game. You just said it wasn't used for that and then said it was used for that.

"I'm against AI slop as much as anyone, and in general a fan of regulation, but this really is something that should be solved by the market. If people don't want AI slop, let them not buy it"

This isn't about the slop. If you're a fan of regulation, and saving jobs isn't a good enough reason for you, wait you're not actually a fan.

My local supermarkets, at least the ones where I shop, don't allow purchases with credit. This is irritating AF even though I have the money in the bank because I get a percentage back.

The only way you could reasonably predict what jobs will be available would be to predict exactly how much more advanced AIs are going to get and how quicly. And any prediction is a "Wild Ass Guess".

FWIW, there's a company in China building humanoid robots for assembly line work. So far it's only sold less than a thousand, so it's probably still in the experimental stage, but if it's "nearly ready" then it will soon be ready.

Now most assembly line work is basically rote repetition, with only a limited number of special-case scenarios, to this is far from a general purpose robot...but it's enough to eliminate LOTS of jobs...if it's cheap enough. And if it is, one can expect incremental expansion into other roles.

It's not going to be an LLM. The LLM is just what it's going to use to talk to you. But "world models" are being built, and that is going to be the basis of real intelligence.

The thing is, it wouldn't help things for one player to quit.

OTOH, as someone else pointed out, the government isn't exactly trustworthy either. (I consider accepting funds from lobbyist groups to be accepting bribes, just like accepting funds from individuals.)

On the third hand, open source approaches can't limit the use to which something is put.

Perhaps the "corporate powers" are the least bad choice...but that sure isn't encouraging.

Sorry, but "death by GPS" is a label, not a reality. Someone decided to follow the instructions of the GPS. So this is not analogous to an actually self-driving car.