As I proposed in 1988: https://pdfernhout.net/princet...
"As outlined in my statement of purpose, my lifetime goal is to design and construct self-replicating habitats. These habitats can be best envisioned as huge walled gardens inhabited by thousands of people. Each garden would have a library which would contain the information needed to construct a new garden from tools and materials found within the garden's walls. The garden walls and construction methods would be of several different types, allowing such gardens to be built on land, underground, in space, or under the ocean. Such gardens would have the capacity to seal themselves to become environmentally and economically self-sufficient in the event of economic collapse or global warfare and the attendant environmental destruction.
        During the past semester, I have written one paper on this concept, entitled "The Self-Replicating Garden". Its thesis is that this concept provides a new metaphor for thinking about the relation between humans and the machinery that constitutes our political and technical support systems. Writing this paper has helped me organize my thinking and has given me a chance to explore the extensive literature relevant to the design of social and technological systems."

Still want to do it, but lots of distractions and small steps along the way.

On DOGS (Design of Great Settlements) see from me from 1999:
https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...

and also from me in 2005:
"We need DOGS not CATS! (Score:2, Interesting)"
https://slashdot.org/comments....
        "So, as I see it, launch costs are not a bottleneck. So while lowering launch costs may be useful, by itself
it ultimately has no value without someplace to live in space. And all the innovative studies on space settlement say that space colonies will not be built from materials launched from earth, but rather will be built mainly from materials found in space.
        So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
        So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored ... or a couple other sites I made in that direction ...
        My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now. ..."

Reprised in 2017:
https://science.slashdot.org/c...

Jeff and I took the same physics class from Gerry O'Neill as Princeton... We have related goals, but we took different paths since then though...

I've had... let's see... six iPhones. 3GS, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13. I reliably skip a major revision. And I would skip more than one, except that my mother gets my last gen. So when her phone needs battery service after being 4 generations back, I shop for a new one. But this time, rather than get a new one, I paid Apple a hundred bucks each to refresh the batteries in my 13 and her 11.

The 13 is a damned good phone, and there is not a single thing I would upgrade. No compelling reason exists. Thinner? Who cares? I carried the brick in the 90s. I've toted around flip phones, blackberries, pagers... this 13 is pretty much perfect.

I'll give it up when I drive over it, or LTE becomes a thing of the past.

Side note: Apple tech cracked my screen separating the shell. For my $100 I got a screen refresh too. :)

Single mothers with children, and grandmothers were getting hit with multi thousand dollar demands from the music police over intellectual property violations from their 10 years old kids and grand kids downloading a song or two. Now, these oligarchs piss all over any intellectual property in the name of "training ai", and it's too big to fail investments.

Another way to go would be to keep burning jet fuel but purchase bricks of carbon from a sequestration company that captures it from the air.

I know there are more efficient types of carbon credits, like investing in cleaner energy in the first place, or increased efficient at the point of usage such as insulation, or preserving rainforest that would otherwise be developed.

The problem is all that gets complicated and thus subjective. Maybe carbon credits could work if it is based on a new type of 'coin' that is 1 kg of pure carbon that is chucked into an old mine.

That truly is the question for Apple. I don't know how they've held off smartphone commoditization as long as they have.

I agree with GP, it's a big kickback scheme for employees that have discretion over business expenses. Most types of card rewards are not reportable as income, which sweetens the deal even further. Score one for the upper-middle-class little guy, I guess...

Barring pretty exciting advances in biotech(along with either the psychology or...less wholesome methods...of keeping people on-task when they learn that their 4-century lifespan will be dedicated to a period of drifting through nothing and a life sentence studying the surfaces of Kuiper belt objects inside a tiny habitube or something) you are going to hit a line where (human) exploration is not going to be readily separable from human colonization; just because shipping times become prohibitive: Anywhere on earth you can just pack some extra canned goods and a few spare parts and be there and back in under a decade even with age of sail era tech; even faster now unless the obstacle is political objections by people who already live there, in which case it's 'espionage' more than 'exploration'. Hasn't really been a notable case of 'exploration inextricably linked to colonization' since humans crossed the Bering straight into the Americas, with some weaker alternatives from the colonial period where it almost certainly wouldn't have been as cost-effective; but would have been theoretically feasible.

Near-earth objects are mostly in the same board. Shipping cost are higher, so presumably lunar mining overseers will receive less frequent breaks than offshore drill rig workers; but the moon is only 3-ish days away. As you move further away the numbers get less favorable; though they still remain within the realm of "there were people circumnavigating the earth in that time, even before we knew how scurvy worked" or at least "modest chunk of your expected working life"; and it may well be relevant that a lot of the more distant objects are either gas giants that you would only ever observe rather than land on, or very small solid bodies that you could potentially just have a robot slap an ion drive on and bring back for your perusal.

Ultimately, it seems like it boils down to an irrational emotional position. Some people, don't know why, just look at a situation and are all "the most fulfilling outcome possible would be making this the next generation's problem!" Leads to enough bad calls earthside; I assume there will be some particularly grim outcomes in more hostile environments.

When people describe DEI as hiring unqualified minorities what they mean is that people should be considered unqualified if they are a minority.

He's not writing for AI, but rather the Oligarchs who refuse to respect intellectual property and seek to redirect the work and value of creatives for their own profit and exploitation. Writing for these parasites does not give your work any greater importance. No matter the source, to the oligarchs, its all just raw data to be assimilated and aggregated. Loosing the individuality, importance and relevance for the purpose of training their difference algorithms. In his ignorance, he's not increase his value, he is losing it; and while doing so bowing to the robber barons of the technical age.

The real solution would be a citation system.

Something like LexisNexus has every court case that happens in the country.

So... why not have an official version of that, tied in with the official court transcripts and when you cite a case, you need to give that citation number from the official database. If you're citing only a few lines, you link to those few lines.

You wouldn't be able to cite a non-existent case, at best the case you cite wouldn't match what you claim it does, and with individual statement citations (HTML literally does it already), you could prove in one click that that series of words actually appears in that cited case.

You want to stop this? Then open-source the law instead of hiding it behind stupendously expensive private commercial services like LexisNexus.

It's not going to get any easier to find definitely bot slop free software as time goes on; but we can be fairly sure about this stuff. Like hunting for low background steel.

People paying $2.99 for a flash game on their phone have finally figured out that you can play them for free on the interwebs. News at 11.

Erm... so a minimum wage employee has to risk their lives so you an feel better about "something" being done. I bet you also wonder why the modern world is fucked.

Also clue by four: if shops could stop shoplifting tomorrow they'd not lower prices, they'd just increase their profit margins. Hence if there is anyone to blame it is really the stores themselves. There's a load of changes they can make to store layouts to minimise theft and shrinkage, however they wont as it will reduce the purchase of impulse items significantly. Until shops are willing to do that, they're just complaining that someone else hasn't fixed their problem and protected their profits.

The local ASDA (UK supermarket) recently installed barriers that only open one way at the entrance to the store but still keeps impulse items outside the barriers... which makes them about as useful as a chocolate teapot. The barriers are waist height so they won't stop anyone and if you want to leave the shop you can just walk through the dozen or so unmanned checkouts. I suppose it will deter the casual theif... sometimes.

Conspiracy implies a degree of secrecy.

I can't say that I'm entirely surprised, given what else they've been getting up to; but it seems downright crazy to just unleash a slop engine without even giving your volunteers a heads up; then patronizingly ask if you can perhaps arrange a meeting to understand their concerns.

If your options are 'nothing' and 'hire bilingual tech writer' you can see the attraction of having a not very good but extremely cheap option; but just tossing away the expertise you already get for nothing out of some sort of weird technophilia? Is there actually some nutjob out there who was all "Oh, but machine translation makes my CI pipeline so efficient" or something?