When I was in college circa 2000, my undergraduate macroeconomics professor pointed out why the US is so attractive to corporations. "If you want to setup shop in China," he said, "you will need to pay for your own backup generator because the power grid isn't reliable like it is here." He went on to explain similarly about labor - how the US constantly produces a supply of educated people (referring to us in the classroom). So when you incorporate in the US, you have everything you need.

For decades people have predicted this would change, and the time has finally arrived. From 2010 to 2020, the US built 1 new nuclear reactor, while China built 30. Education? While we debate subsidies for solar, China covers entire mountains in solar panels. Foreign student enrollment dropped 15% overall, with big universities seeing as much as 63% decline (DePaul University). The foreign students paid disproportionately more tuition, so universities are going to experience a budget declines next year.

We are digging our own grave.

Adverts pay for the web. And also clutter it up. Both of these things are true. Without advertising, there would be very little content that isn't paywalled, and there would be far less content than there is. Slashdot wouldn't exist, for example. The key is to keep advertising sufficiently profitable that it can fund the web, but not so intrusive that it make the web awful.

How do we do that? The best idea I've seen is to use adblockers that selectively block the obnoxious ads. But not enough people do it, so that doesn't work either.

There are already enough dependencies between food and energy production without intentionally making the problem worse.

If you've never been subjected to an SEO report, I'd understand that take. For a time I had a site set up to support my books, and the SEO reports continually told me to shit-up the content on the site with the typical nonsense. You can tell the difference between a site where someone is excitedly discussing something they're interested in, and a site that was SEO'ed into a dumpster fire. When you go to look at a recipe and have to read about how the family dog likes to accompany the owner to the grocery store, and grandma used to bake this over an open fire, that's SEO prescribed bullshit.

We've let algorithmic rot dictate the direction of the web for far, far too long. There's no turning it back into a good resource for humans if we don't *STOP* throwing layers of algorithms at it, but it seems like all the decision makers, and most of their clingers, are convinced the only way forward is to pour more algorithmic syrup over the whole mess in the hopes of getting something better. It's all feeling extremely backwards, while all being done in the name of "progress."

This. There seems to be a widespread assumption that random genetic changes are somehow less problematic than carefully-selected ones because they're "natural" or something. It's not like cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals, transcription errors and other sources of random genetic mutation are somehow careful not to make harmful changes. Engineered changes might not be better than random mutations, but they're clearly not worse.

Maybe we shouldn't have allowed SEO to insist we garbage-spew single sentence answers into novel length diatribes that require AI to sort through to turn into something a human would want to read. Adding AI slop on top of the slop we created for ourselves is *NOT* good for humans. De-junking the lot and getting the machines out of the way would be, but apparently we're too far down the rabbit hole to turn back now.

I don't see anything suggesting that AI will make the web better for humans. Seems like he's arguing it'll make the web better for machines, and the AIs that run on those machines. Well, yeah. That's why us silly humans are calling everything being done to the web today "enshitification." Because, as stupid as it may seem to the hardcore tech crowd, sometimes humans care about the human experience. I know, how anti-progressive of me.

Ok plz ignore, thet whole thing blew over in 2024 and I missed it my bad

Also adseece got bammed by the EU iirc, unless thst has been resolved I eat that kind of impacted their revenue

The internet and the web are to different things, noramally I wouldn't point it out but this is slashdot amd us nerds shuld really not confuse them. Fair enough the web depends on the internet as a data network, but so does Netflix ( at least for lastt mile, ler's not confuse the issue with cdns rouning their private vans)

You might consider not using AIDs as an acronym due to the being a rather nasty STI, lets not confuse things by overloading tharpt acronym

Obviously, sooner or later we will want to do things that require our physical presence. And be it because the ping time to Mars really, really sucks.

Robots are way easier to engineer for space than humans, even though space is so unforgiving that that's not trivial, either. The same is true for other planets. Building a robot that works well in 0.2g or 5g is an engineering challenge but doable even with today's tech. Humans... not so much.

But let's be honest here: We want to go out there. The same way humans have found their way to the most remote places and most isolated islands on planet Earth, expansion is deeply within our nature.

So, robots for exploration to prepare for more detailed human exploration to prepare for human expansion.

And maybe, along the way we can solve the problem that any spaceship fast and big enough to achieve acceptable interplanetary travel times (let's not even talk about interstellar) with useful payloads is also a weapon of mass destruction on a scale that makes nukes seem like firecrackers.

Has What If? already done a segment on "what happens is SpaceX's Starship slams into Earth at 0.1c" ?

Er, I guess I couldn't decide whether to say "closer" or "more closely" and munged them together. :-)

If only there were a way to preview posts before submitting them...

I'm not seeing why "launch and loiter" is beneficial. If Mars transfer windows were only hours, or even days, long, I could see that it's useful to launch early so that you don't end up missing your window because of weather or ground equipment problems, but the transfer windows are weeks to months in duration.

It seems to me that this strategy is mainly driven by lack of confidence in New Glenn, which makes sense given that it's a completely unproven platform. Over the 8+ weeks of the 2026 launch window they could certainly get to space with a reliable platform. Something like Falcon 9 might have some delays due to weather or minor technical issues, but it's extremely unlikely it would miss the window entirely. But New Glenn might have weeks of delays, so launching early might make sense.

What would make even more sense is if NASA is concerned that New Glenn might fail catastrophically. Making the attempt a full year early might provide enough time to build and launch a replacement.

Does anyone who follows this more closer have a better explanation?

This, exactly.

The most immediate thing about being cool is that nothing that is forced, is cool. Copilot existing, with some cool demos and higher thresholds on the free version, could possibly gain some opt-in usage. Copilot being forced everywhere means that people are going to associate it with something intrusive, and no amount of marketing is going to undo that.

ChatGPT didn't force anything onto people's desktops or into their spreadsheets, they didn't run TV commercials and they didn't give sponsorships to 101 Youtube personalities...they existed, and they improved the service, and word-of-mouth was all they needed.

If Microsoft wants their level of adoption, they need to stop pushing...but the problem is that nobody will accept a slow ascent, so they need the accidental, unwanted usage to show the 'growth' being demanded by the MBAs.

One day they'll figure it out...probably the day after they have a fire sale on nVidia GPUs that have sat dormant for months.