It's a bad thing when you're raising $1.5 trillion in capital. You raise capital to grow a business. If the business can't grow that's a scam. The investors will lose their money. There won't be enough revenue to sustain that valuation.

SS and Medicare come from a completely different tax pool. It's not part of the main budget. You're spouting weasel words.

SpaceX is a scam. The too long didn't watch is they don't have any more customers. There aren't any more launch customers besides muskrat's own satellite internet company and there is a limited pool of people who can afford high-speed internet but that don't have landlines. The service is too unreliable to be used in a military setting and as soon as there isn't a favorable administration for Musk he's going to lose his government contracts because he has actively interfered in international conflict making him a national security risk.

You can't be a defense contractor if you're going to fuck with the military when it's suits you.

All of this means that SpaceX is already at its maximum value and they are seeking 1.5 trillion.

Mark my words they will dump that into your 401k.

Trump is already loosened rules around putting bad stock in your 401k. At first if you are really paying attention and one of those fancy sophisticated investors you will be able to catch when they do it. Your company will gradually sneak dodgy index funds into your portfolio but you're smart so you will catch them doing it and stop them right? Right?

So you're not one of those other suckers but here's the thing they will go after the low hanging fruit first and when they have exhausted them they will come for you and they will change the rules again. Eventually you're going to find that your options are locked down and your money is just evaporating and there's nothing you can do about it.

Basically better start picking out your favorite flavor of cat food for your retirement

Yeah but the people who banged on about how Doom was the problem got a lot of press out of it and some of them built entire careers out of it.

That's what this is about. He knows damn well they are covered by section 230 of the cda, and as much as the right wing would love to strike that down so that they could finish taking over the internet this isn't going to be the case that does it.

He is just after a bit of press and a little bit of think of the children bullshit.

The Engineer had agency. The AI (or google search, or a stack of text books) does not.

Of course, if the mad bomber instead posed as a student and found some non-evil reason for wanting the exits to collapse first (even a thin one like directing the dust upwards), the engineer is less culpable or not culpable at all.

But we need to be very careful about imagining an AI has agency. There are many legal and philosophical implications behind that.

Not always. Grown-ups had been able to purchase games with a debit card, which does not prove age, or with a PlayStation Store gift card purchased with cash.

There are a bunch of billionaires, going on trillionaires, working to that goal. If we get to that point money doesn't matter anymore any more than money mattered to the kings.

Basically we are looking at the end of capitalism without socialism replacing it. Instead you will have a hereditary class of kings and queens, and they will have a handful of engineers to keep everything running and a handful of violent thugs to keep the engineers in line and to occasionally exterminate the masses of they become a problem.

I'm aware of that wholesale pricing fucks small businesses, I'm assuming that your business is so much better that you are able to compete without the bulk wholesale advantage.

Whenever I bring up the fundamental problems of capitalism people tell me that it's okay because capitalism is self-correcting. If a business does bad things people will stop patronizing that business because there will be a competitor that does a better job with a better product.

You're actually just kind of proving my point. You are pointing out that it is even harder to compete with large businesses.

So what I'm saying is it's already hard to compete with a large business and now that large business is going to Target you as a potential competitor and get away with it because we don't enforce antitrust law.

If you go tits up because you can't buy them bulk enough to compete that just means you didn't get to the point where they noticed you and crushed you. That doesn't mean they aren't crushing people who get to that point.

Ok, to clarify a few things:

Current designs I've put up:

1. A modernised version of the DeHavilland DH98 and Merlin engine, where I basically fed ChatGPT and Claude with all of the known historic faults and some potential solutions to various problems, then let them run wild, feeding off each other to fix, refine, and clarify the various design. The premise here is that we're using known designs with known properties, changing only materials but doing so carefully so as to ensure that the balance is unchanged from the historic design. The aircraft is probably the least interesting part, as it would be very hard to make that safe, but a fully modernised Merlin that starts where Rolls Royce left off is something that could be built with minimal risk and could be quite interesting in its own right.

2. A High Dynamic Range microphone. This basically riffs off assorted physics technologies for measurement and the basic idea in many HDR schemes that you can split an input into the fine detail (essentially an equivalent of a mantissa) and a magnitude (essentially an exponent), producing a design that aught to permit (if it works) the same microphone with no adjustments handling everything from a nearby whisper to the roar of a jet engine -- but with all of the fine detail still captured from that engine.

3. An electric guitar that operates not by magnetic pickups but by accurate mapping of string behaviour in two dimensions via lasers, where this is then turned into an accurate representation of the sound in an external device. So it's not a synth guitar in the classic sense, it's actually modelling the waveform for each string in two dimensions precisely. The reason for doing 2D modelling is that this has the potential for novel behaviours but without an obligation for it to do so.

4. A synthesiser/wave processor that looks at everything that they knew how to do, and allows you to link it together arbitrarily. It is designed in two forms. The first is engineered to match the components, materials, and knowledge available in 1964, so it is something they could have built if sufficiently insane. The second is a modernised extrapolation of that, using modern digital electronics, where I can show that the modern version is a strict superset of any existing DAW, simply because I started with none of the assumptions and metaphors around which DAWs were subsequently designed.

5. Multiband camera. An attempt to build a digital camera that is far smaller and more compact than a 3CCD camera, but (like the 3CCD design) produces a far better picture than a conventional digital camera, where I don't stop at three frequencies but support many, albeit with the limitation that the time required for a photograph is abysmal.

Each design I've put up has a detailed hardware specification (including wiring where appropriate), validation/verification documents, and testing procedures. Software is defined by means of formal software contracts and occasionally Z-like forms. The designs are extremely detailed, although not quite at the level you could build them right there and then. However, the synthesiser is described right down to the level of individual transistors, diodes, and connectors, and the Merlin engine specifies precise materials, expected temperature ranges, material interactions (and how they're mitigated), and other such information.

Again, it's precise but not quite at the point where an engineer would feed comfortable feeding the specifications into an AI, having it order the bits online, and be sure of building something that works, but it's intended to be close enough that (provided the AIs actually did what they were supposed to) that an engineer would feel very comfortable taking the design and polishing it to working level.

If, however, an engineer looking at these designs comes to the conclusion that the AIs were utterly deluded, then obviously they can't handle something as simple as selecting candidate items from ranged data.

First yeah we're all going to chime in and say this will backfire.

It doesn't matter if it does. It's a blows up and costs a business some money odds are very good that the savings from wages will more than cover that.

What's worse is because we don't enforce antitrust law if a company goes down to tubes because it relied too heavily on AI it can just buy out any potential competitors and jack up prices on products you need to live and make back all the money.

Second there's basically two possibilities here, either the AI works and they got the fire a bunch of people or the AI doesn't work but they fired them anyway and the survivors have to work harder to keep their jobs.

Remember no antitrust law enforcement so if you get shit canned and try to start a business then you will be targeted and best case scenario you might get a buyout if you are under the radar long enough but more likely they just run you out of business.

Companies don't need good products anymore because they don't have to compete. So there is no floor and they can make things as shitty as they want and if you have a problem with it tough shit.

You could of course just stop consuming all together but at the very least you need food and shelter and medicine and some minimal financial services and transportation. So good luck stopping all consumption.

The point I'm getting at is that fundamental underpinnings of a functional economy have broken down and we refuse to acknowledge that fact.

AI training data was going to be the major problem and sticking point. Previously they could just soak it up for free from the internet but now that the internet is 70% AI slop that's not really going to work.

It does still raise the question of how the name of hell are we going to train AI to do programming tasks when we've replaced most of the programmers. But I guess we will cross that bridge when we come to it. I suspect that over time programming languages will be built AI first and programmer second.

One thing is for sure everything is going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. And we are going to keep blaming the wrong people because that's what we've always done.

There is way too much danger of collusion and antitrust violations with surveillance pricing. It's been a common workaround for companies looking to collude. Instead of getting in a smoky room and agreeing on price fixing you put all your data on a shared platform and use that to do your pricing decisions. The end result is the equivalent to the aforementioned smokey room but on an app so it's passed off as legal.

Apartment owners did this and it caused rents to shoot up an extra 20 or 30% over what they would have been without it. Several attorney generals pushed back against it but the damage is already done. Also the courts are packed with pro corporate judges so long term it's probably going to die and we're going to go back to having these policies in most places.

That's not really enough. Don't get me wrong it's the best hundred billion we ever spent. We basically kneecapped Russia and took something that could have been a competitor nation and turned them into a laughing stock. If we hadn't put a pedophile lunatic in charge of our country after that it would have been pretty good for us.

But what we needed to do was give them more weapons and give them faster so that they could push Russia back harder. We also needed to give them long-ranged missile systems that could hit Moscow. Not a lot of them but enough to be a threat. Basically we needed to call pooty poot's bluff on the nuclear weapons. In the meantime though we needed to give them a shitload more defensive options and weapons to push Russia back so that Ukraine would be less likely to actually hit Moscow since that wouldn't actually be good for Ukraine but desperate times can make people do foolish things, like vote for an orange pedophile in the hopes that egg prices will go down...

Nonetheless $100 billion to take out a potential competitor Nation by drawing them into a quagmire War was one of the cheapest and most effective things we ever did on the world stage. It's also disgustingly probably why we didn't give Ukraine the weapons they needed to win. We gave them just enough weaponry to bog Russia down because we were trying to take Russia down to third world status and keep them there instead of trying to help a democracy remain a democracy.

That's pretty par for the course for US foreign policy but it doesn't mean I like it.

It's genuinely hilarious that the bot somebody wrote to reply to all of my comments in order to soak up mod points is constantly talking about how Trump fucks kids.

I was wondering if the bot was so simplistic that just repeating Trump fucks kids a few times would make that happen and sure enough it is.

A long time ago we had sophisticated actors manipulating opinion on this website because it was a pretty big part of the internet believe it or not but these days this is the best we get. Meanwhile Trump still fucks kids and he's still president and he still has a 40% approval rating despite Trump fucks kids.