My situation is a machine with two versions of Linux on it.

According to the comment in the configuration file, the reason involved some kind of esoteric problem scenario where the scan could cause problems. It was so peculiar I cannot recall any details.

Once I managed to get into the other partition I was able to get things back to normal by protecting the old GRUB config during the update. The "vintage" MacBook Pro has a tiny font problem with the default GRUB configuration... It's almost like Apple is trying to make things hard to force people to buy new boxen.

If the google actually wanted to fix the problem, then they would fix it. Putting bandages over the "naughty" URLs is just stupid. The scammers will merely create fresh URLs.

The solution is obvious, but the google doesn't want to see it because they are profiting from the problem. When they get a copyright complaint, the google needs to find the WEBSEARCH that led to the scene of the crime and they need to fix that WEBSEARCH so it only points to legitimate results, not copyright abuses. In other words, the google would have to reduce their profits by maintaining whitelists for the stolen content, rather than focusing on selling more ads for the wannabe criminal websearches.

Not bloody likely since (a) copyright law is totally broken and (b) the google is profiting from the broken situation.

"More bandaids!"

Another rich target missed...

Only joke on the rich target? I was looking for some kind of joke about Isaacman being too smart to accept the job.

The YOB's actual intention is to demolish NASA like the East Wing and route the money to Musk, who will then donate "appropriately" for the 2028 campaign. No quid pro quo there! It really is hilarious, but I lack the funny bone to make the joke sound funny.

But you ACKed it and propagated the vacuous Subject (even though the Subject was older than the troll's sock puppet, which confuses the situation). Maybe you could clarify your point, starting with a Subject that actually describes what you're trying to say?

My [fresh? tangential?] point is relating the self-driving cars application to the space-settlement problem as described in A City on Mars by the Weinersmiths. They actually like the idea of living in space, but think it needs to be based on a broad infrastructure developed over time, rather than basing settlements on a mad race to grab profits. I would map it to the "gold rush" mentality that motivates some suckers, but mostly destroys them with the actual profits going to the middlemen selling shovels (or cars in this story). Seems to me as though Europe is taking a more reasonable attitude of trying to solve the problems in a thoughtful way and letting the gold diggers kill themselves in other places until the technology actually matures. (Not sure if I actually recommend the book. It's well written, but I'm almost finished and so far it hasn't said much that seemed new or surprising. And a major omission regarding solar power via mirrors and ye olde steam turbines... The water-in-space problem does need to be solved first, but if you have enough water then steam-powered electricity is a quite mature technology.)

I'm not dismissing the employment problems, but they are much bigger than self-driving cars. And I am increasingly skeptical that we can find any solution compatible with the continued survival of homo sapiens. I hope our AI successors do better, but they can't do worse...

The more I hear from economists the less I want to. I think the last economist who had a useful idea was David Ricardo. Websearch says 1817 for "comparative advantage", though I thought it was a few years earlier, when Adam Smith was still peaking...

Perhaps it would be useful to consider it from an applied versus theoretical perspective? Similar to psychology? Theoretical economists and psychologists are quite verbose and like to give themselves various prizes, but what do they actually know about their fields of "expertise"? In contrast, the applied economists are creating huge "piles" of virtual and imaginary money, while the applied psychologists have become quite skilled at pulling our strings to keep us playing the applied economists' games... At some point reality will intervene, but does a virtual bubble bursting in the woods make any sound?

Meanwhile many of the "important" people with more imaginary money than gawd have a philosophy something like "poor people deserve to starve to death for the crime of not having enough money to buy food" and ignoring any piddling questions about why those poor suckers don't have any money...

And my point is that AI wouldn't just stop being used even if the bubble imploded so heavily that all of the major AI providers of today went under. It's just too easy to run today. The average person who wants something free would on average use a worse-quality model, but they're not going to just stop using models. And inference costs for higher-end models would crash if the big AI companies were no longer monopolozing the giant datacentres (which will not simply vanish just because their owners lose their shirts; power is only about a third the cost of a datacentre, and it gets even cheaper if you idle datacentres during their local electricity peak-demand times).

Your scenario is impossible, so try again.

Because we're discussing a scenario where the big AI companies have gone out of business, remember? And the question is whether people just stop using the thing that they found useful, or whether they merely switch to whatever alternative still works.

It's like saying that if Amazon went out of business, people would just stop buying things online because "going to a different website is too hard". It's nonsensical.

They believed you could mimic intelligence with clockwork, etc. Why do you only count if it if it involves computers?

If you want to jump to the era of *modern* literature, the generally first accepted robot in (non-obscure) modern literature is Tik-Tok from the Oz books, first introduced in 1907. As you might guess from the name, his intelligence was powered by clockwork; he was described as no more able to feel emotions than a sewing machine, and was invented and built by Smith and Tinker (an inventor and an artist). Why not electronic intelligence? Because the concept of a programmable electronic computer didn't exist then. Even ENIAC wasn't built until 1945. The best computers in the world in 1907 worked by... wait for it... clockwork. The most advanced "computer" in the world at the time was the Dalton Adding Machine (1902), the first adding machine to have a 10-digit keyboard. At best some adding machines had electric motors to drive the clockwork, but most didn't even have that; they had to be wound. This is the interior of the most advanced computer in the world in the era Tik-Tok was introduced. While in the Greco-Roman era, it might be something like this (technology of the era that, to a distant land that heard of it, probably sounded so advanced that it fueled the later rumours that Greco-Romans were building clockwork humans capable of advanced actions, even tracking and hunting down spies).

I think this is an oversimplification. Musk dreams of a sci-fi future. Isaacman does too (and is friends with Musk). Duffy wants to gut NASA. Hence, Musk strongly supported Isaacman. It's not too complicated; you don't need to search for subtext when what's out in the open makes perfect sense.

They don't have to "understand" anything. They just have to know that "If I go to this website, I can still ask the AI questions, even though ChatGPT shut down". Or that "If I click to install this app, I get an icon on my desktop and I can ask the AI questions there".

This is what got me. Why the hell are they calling a crypto auction something aimed at "the AI generation", when they clearly mean "Cryptobros"?

This is unscientific, but long ago I once conducted a poll on the Stable Diffusion subreddit, and one of the questions asked about peoples' opinions of crypto and NFTs. Only a small percentage liked it. The most popular poll choice by far was one with wording along the lines of "Crypto and NFTs should both go drown in a ditch."

It's an entirely different market segment. Crypto and NFTs appeal to gamblers, criminals, and anarcho-libertarians. AI appeals to those who want to create things, to automate things, and to save time or accomplish more. There's no logical relation between "This high school kid wants to save time on her homework" and "this 42-year-old mechanic thinks this bad drawing of an ape is going to be worth millions some day because a hash somewhere links its checksum to his private key."

The GP's comment wasn't accusing there of being a nuclear waste problem (there isn't). They were talking about how nuclear waste can be burned in a breeder reactor, producing orders of magnitude more than the burning of a couple tenths of a percent of the natural uranium in a conventional reactor does.

Despite the press hype about thorium (which is way more popular among the media and nerds on the internet than with actual nuclear engineers), nuclear power is already basically unlimited, even without breeder reactors (which are very much viable tech, and much more mature than thorium). Only with an incredibly weak definition is it in any meaningfully way "limited" - if you limit yourself to currently quantified reserves, at current fuel prices, with production mining tech, you have a bit over two centuries worth at current burn rates. But this is obviously nonsense. Uranium production tech isn't going to advance in *two centuries*? Nobody is going to explore for more in *two centuries*? And as for "at current prices" - fuel is only a very small percentage of the cost of fission power, so who cares if prices rise? And rising prices or advancing production tech doesn't just put linearly more of a resource onto a market, they put exponentially more onto the market. As an example with uranium: seawater uranium could power the world's current (overwhelmingly non-breeder) reactor fleet for 13000 years, and current lab-scale tech is projected to be nearly as cheap as conventional uranium production at scale.

Also, if you switch to breeder reactors, you don't just extend the amount of fuel you have by two orders of magnitude - the cost of the raw mined uranium also becomes two orders of magnitude less relevant than its already very small percentage of the cost of fission power generation, because you need so much less per kWh.

As for any thoraboos in the comments section: thorium fuel is more complex and expensive to fabricate (fundamentally - thorium dioxide has a higher melting point and is much harder to sinter), it's more complex to reprocess (it's more difficult to dissolve), its waste is much more hazardous over human timescales, the claimed resistance to nuclear proliferation is bunk, the tech readiness level is low and the costs are very high, and it's unclear it'll ever be economically competitive - most in the nuclear industry are highly dubious (due to what's needed to actually burn it vs. uranium). Hence the lack of investment. And I say this with the acknowledgement that nuclear power is already a very expensive form of electricity generation.

Easy for you, a technical person familiar with LLMs and WebAssembly

I'm not talking about how to develop LLM inference servers. You don't have to understand WebAssembly in order to run a WebAssembly program in your browser any more than you have to understand Javascript to run Javascript in your browser. It's *less* technological knowledge than using the Play store. And installing Ollama is no more difficult than installing any other app.

Your difficulty conceptions are simply wrong.