You debunked your own comment, there's nothing for me to do here :)

However, most people who ask that do it while pointing to people who are actually quite important producers, such as financiers. Be careful not to conflate "don't produce anything of value" with "do something I don't understand the importance of".

Of course there are people in every profession who get paid a lot more than they're worth. This is less true of manual labor jobs where the output is easy to see and measure, but it's true across the board. Even in manual labor jobs you can have people whose output is negative. They may pick X apples or whatever, but they might do it while making everyone around them work slower.

Just to complete the description of the "empty chair" tactic, this is why lawsuits typically name anyone and everyone who might possibly be blamed, including many who clearly aren't culpable. It's not because the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney actually thinks all of those extra targets really might be liable, it's so that the culpable parties can't try to shift the blame to an empty chair, forcing the plaintiff to explain why the empty chair isn't culpable (i.e., defend them). Of course this means that those clearly non-culpable parties might have to defend themselves, which sucks for them.

So... you didn't actually look at the size of WikiMedia Foundation's bank account.

WikiMedia absolutely has enough money to run Wikipedia indefinitely if they treated their current pile of money as an endowment and just used the income from it to support the site. They don't have "billions upon billions", but they do have almost $300M, and they spend about $3M per year on hosting, and probably about that much again on technical staff to run the site, so about $6M per year. That's 2% per year. Assuming they can get a 6% average return on their assets, they can fully fund Wikipedia forever, and then some.

So, what do they do with all of the donations instead, if the money isn't needed to run Wikipedia? It funds the foundation's grant programs. Of course, you might actually like their grant programs. I think some of their grants are great, myself, and if they were honest about what they're using it for I might be inclined to give. But they're not, and the fact that they continue lying to Wikipedia's user base really pisses me off, so I don't give and I strongly discourage everyone I can from giving, at every opportunity.

Me too, but it took a lot longer and I was a lot less thorough. I would skim a half-dozen links from the search result, the LLM reads a lot more, and a lot more thoroughly.

I do. I tell the LLM to always include links to its sources, and I check them. Not all of them, but enough to make sure the LLM is accurately representing them. Granted that other people might not do this, but those other people also wouldn't check more than the first hit from the search engine, which is basically the same problem. If you only read the top hit, you're trusting the search engine's ranking algorithm.

That seems like a potential risk. I have't actually seen that happening in any of the stuff I've looked at.

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.

What you're missing, as usual, is that IT DOESN'T EXIST YET but you're claiming that it does, as usual.

FTFS, "it's the first version of UNIX in which the kernel and some of the core utilities were rewritten in the new C programming language"

Yes, this place really has gone to shit.

Yes, but we could also develop the same technologies and then not spend the money going to space, and instead implement them here, and think about space exploration once we're sure we have a future.

People do it to me constantly (a day without a 3-5 comment serial downmod is unusual) and I don't have to post AC to keep my Karma in the excellent range.

Maybe this is incentive to help design data centres that are less power demanding, such as using computers that use ARM and are better with how their code is implemented?

Then combine that with roof top renewables.

This is a hard problem, but if the economic incentive is there, then someone will want to address it.

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.

"I invented everything wonderful! I even invented Al Gore, believe me! Radios and TV's used to have big glass tits and wankers that glowed orange, such a wonderful color, but they were big and heavy, like Rosie O'Donnell, so nobody wanted them.

So I got one of my bone spurs med tablets, soaked it in Diet Coke for 3 days, stuck wires into it, and it became the very first Trans Sister. I hated that woke name so called it Capacitor instead, and even made it flux. Some say it can go back in time, which I may do to get my Nobel Prizes back, that Hannibal Lecter and Autopen Joe stole from me. Everyone knows they are Filthy Antifa Crooks!"

The game alpha centauri is a lot more applicable here. However what you are talking about requires future technology. You would need self repairing machines for that. While this is arguably semi-feasible (design machines to be more modular and therefore serviceable by robots which could swap modules) they don't exist yet. And once they do we will be too busy dealing with the upheaval from the destruction of service jobs to think about colonizing other planets or moons.

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...