All that money for data centers full of cutting edge hardware that can't be turned on because nobody in tech thought about building the nuke plants ten years ago. By the time they finally get all four of Stargate's reactors online the computers will all be obsolete and it will cost another trillion dollars to replace them. The next round of data centers will be fuzz of empty racks awaiting the arrival of their own nuclear reactors. Assuming that the entire bubble doesn’t pop first.

Meanwhile China already has AI datacenters running on nuclear, solar, hydroelectric, and WtE power. Huawei’s chips are slower, but in the ten years it will take the Americans to get their shit together SMIC will be producing badass chips with a 4nm process.

Who will write the curriculum? Why, an LLM, of course!

Because someone still has to take time to read the slop. Over and over. That's the kind of thing that makes volunteers go volunteer somewhere else. And this shit is going to snowball; if Google keeps getting away with it so will other companies, then it will be students testing out their AI hacking skills. It’s better to send a public message to Google before the situation gets bad.

China's government prioritized green energy in the 1990s. They've mastered manufacturing and deploying solar panels. They crank out a new nuclear plant every 8 months and have developed a thorium breeding reactor. Their hydroelectric plants are many, massive, and keep coming. China has even mastered waste to energy; they build incinerators with clean emissions that run on solar panels. And their electric cars are better than the internal combustion cars anyone in the world builds. Everything you've been told by western news outlets about China not cooperating with the world on carbon emissions and green energy is a lie. The truth is that they're years ahead of everyone else and the industrialization of the global south will be powered by Chinese technology, engineering, and construction.

I bought an iPad Pro last year for the screen. I didn't care about storage or the M4 CPU, because there's almost no software for the iOS that benefits from the CPU or storage space. What I bought it for was the screen. I'm a designer and I wanted something to draw on. The big, high quality screen combined with an Apple pencil is great for that. It replaces all the pencils, pens, markers, and paper I would otherwise need. For artists and designers who spend hours a day drawing the iPad Pro will pay for itself by replacing those art supplies. If I want to sit on the couch and draw the iPad Pro is awesome. The same goes for traveling. Everyone I know with an iPad Pro bought it for the same reasons.

All that said, what I really love it for is reading The Economist without having to sit at my desk. A big tablet is perfect for that app. And I believe that if Apple sold an iPad with a cheap CPU and the same screen nobody would buy an iPad Pro.

I talk to high school teachers all the time, and they tend to be ideologically captured by whatever the next big thing is. There's so much groupthink going on, it's ridiculous. When we complain that students are reaching the workforce without useful skills, teachers love to say, "you see, we're not teaching students the skills that the workforce needs right now... we're teaching them the skills the workforce will need decades from now." This is just a mantra they repeat. So sure, they think AI must be the next big thing and everyone needs to learn it, instead of the fundamental skills that explain how it's all working at the base level.

They're also obsessed with equality to an absolutely absurd degree. One younger teacher we spoke with said, "I don't give homework because it's only the students who are already going well who do the homework, so it doesn't benefit everyone." An older more experienced teacher nearby said, "you understand that we're still going to need doctors in the future, right?" The first teacher looked confused.

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?

Some born with golden spoon in mouth boy is learning the expensive way that no, money can NOT buy everything. The laws of physics don't care how rich you are or how much money you throw at them. :-)

American big tech knew that they would eventually run out of power for their clouds, social media, video, etc. AI just hastened the problem. They should have been planning for this years ago. Nuclear power was always the solution. Tech companies should have been funding their own nuke plants and lobbying politicians to loosen America’s regulations on building new plants. But they fucked around, didn't plan ahead, and it bit them on the ass. Meanwhile the tech leaders in China saw this coming and worked with their government to crank out nuclear plants to run their datacenters. China has been adding a new plant every 8 months for years, and they're only getting faster at it. America's tech companies are going to lose the AI battle with China, even if China can't get the fastest chips, because Chinese business leaders were thinking ahead instead of thinking about their yacht collections and pleasure compounds.

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" ?

So this is Geniza from between the First and Second Temple? Sorry, just had to ask. :)

It does not matter how broken the DRM is, circumventing it is still illegal according to copyright laws.

That’s the plan. The AI industry and its dependents will never make enough money to cover their current CapEx and then replace everything in five years when the chips are obsolete and components are breaking down. But if they tank every company that's using AI software will be fucked and the NASDAQ will tank. So the Fed will print a trillion dollars to bail them all out and everyone else will end up with higher grocery prices.

Itâ(TM)s easy to bribe one president to keep the federal government from reigning in a bad corporate actor. Itâ(TM)s hard to bribe fifty state AGs who all aspire to higher office and need big wins to show off on the campaign trail.

Four simple apps that do four different things. Or one bloated app that tries to cram four apps’ worth of functions into one messy UI. Nintendo made the right decision.