He's probably like one of those people who knows that Africa has been fucked over by other nations as long as there have been other nations to fuck them over. Everyone's had a turn abusing Africa.

Your first full paragraph is 100% opinion. Run along now.

China is building a maglev line between Beijing and Shanghai, which will then extend south. Given how fast they build conventional high speed rail, I expect that expansion will be rapid.

It's an interesting design too, and a largely domestic one. They do have a German built maglev in Shanghai, but the new EMUs they have been showing off bare little resemblance beyond using electromagnetic suspension. I'm looking forward to comparing it to Japan's electrodynamic suspension.

The reasons for not travelling seem questionable though, and you could argue that it wouldn't be safe for Indian staff to travel to the US.

Singing is pretty much a commodity service now. With autotune almost anyone can do it, but you can hire a professional for not a lot of money. It's good that people get work instead of AI slop, but also the rates are very low and it's a side gig at most.

The people who making a living from it tend to have other talents too. Song writing, stage performance, looking conventionally attractive, building up a social media following, etc.

AI probably won't change much in that respect.

It's incredible that anyone still invests in it, after Musk publicly admitted it was a scam.

And "the only solution for trips over 300 miles"? Less than an hour via existing maglev technology, which both Japan and China are deploying as we speak. That's just the start though, maglev can probably double that speed, close to the speed of sound. The issue is the noise, and you don't need a vacuum tube to solve it.

I'm hoping for more than normal. Big floods of used but perfectly serviceable drives and memory hitting the market, at bankruptcy prices.

Also can they please hurry up and get LTO 10 out the door, so that LTO 8 drives get cheap? Thanks.

It's a borderline scam, where so many jobs, even minimum wage ones, need a degree just to get past the application submission stage, that a degree is almost mandatory in many fields. A lot of it is employers transferring the cost of training to the employee.

It also blows the meritocracy arguments out of the water, because a person's ability to get high level qualifications is highly dependent on their ability to pay. Not just pay for college, but to not work so much they don't have time to do extra studying or non-core activities.

Good lord, we agree on something.

Anyway I think the issue is that there are idiots everywhere, and a lot of people who jump on bandwagons and are too proud to jump off once the evidence comes out it's a scam. And while I hate the idea personally, it sounds worse than flying, I would assume a lot of people look at the transportation speeds involved, and just assume it would be successful for that reason, especially in an era where a significant number of people believe America's railroads collapsed due to "flying", when the story is way, way, more complicated (essentially a systemic shock from all sides, over regulation, poorly thought out taxes that weren't applied to rival transportation systems, poor management, and out of control dumbass unions. A perfect storm of crappiness.)

The bubble will need to last 5 years before there's any chance of new players.

40 years ago, sure, you might have been right: silicon fabrication was still a relatively cheap industry to get into. Leaving aside environmental concerns (our old friend MOS Technology of the 6502 managed to end up as a superfund site...) it was quite simply a lot easier to make foundaries that worked on a micrometer scale than on today's nanometers. Gordon Moore said that while his eponymous law predicted a doubling of transistors per IC each year, he also saw a doubling of how much it cost to build a new foundary.

If it were cheap, even in countries that already have fewer regulatory hurdles, someone would have build new factories anyway. It's not like there wasn't any profit in memory production until a month ago. They're not commodity devices.

The article talks about a rise in temperature of half a degree causing a societal collapse over multiple centuries.

By comparison the Earth has heated by 1.1-1.2C in the last 150 years and is still rising, currently at a rate of about 0.2C per decade.

So, meteoric rise vs slight rise within the Earth's usual temperature fluctuations. This should tell you two things:

1. The current rise is, indeed, unnatural, and not due to the Earth's usual changes.
2. This is going to cause a hell of a lot more damage than one civilization smaller than the size of a typical European city collapsing.

> * rise of AI that takes control

I think that's unlikely, but I think the AI crap we're currently following suggests a different path.

The LLM fad is most probably going to eat itself, but take down a lot of things with it.

Let's take a look at it: We had the World Wide Web.

The web was built over a period of a couple of decades maybe (by the mid-2000s it could be considered the primary source of knowledge for everyone in the developed world), with virtually everyone switching to it en-mass. Newspapers went online and closed their paper versions. Magazines closed, to be replaced by websites that were vaguely related. People who once might have written books now wrote blogs or maintained websites with information that was dear to them. Manuals went online. Programmers I think know this more than most, it's easier to search for "Java list to array" than it is to actually go to a physical book and, even with the help of an index, find the method that does that. (Spoiler: Java's version is an ugly hack! I wish Java had kept the original versioning scheme as that'd have made it easier for them to make a Java 2 that didn't rely on the way Java 1 does things, breaking some backward compatibility but implementing things properly. Anyway, I digress.)

So then the first hit came, social media. Not a major hit, and not an obvious problem at first as the first social media sites were glorified blogging platforms. And that was fine, except one of these, Facebook, felt that it was in its best interests to hinder search engines from working with it, which undermined the web.

Then the next hit, the iPhone and Android. Again, not initially a major problem, but over time they encouraged massive amounts of content to be locked behind "apps", with any web interface being a third class option or worse.

Then Facebook came up again, they REALLY didn't like Google. How could they kill Google? By making normal content unsearchable, not just content posted behind Facebook's registration wall. So again, not caring about the web, they came up with a scheme to encourage everyone to post everything as videos. They lied about their own metrics, claiming it showed videos caused a crazy amount of engagement, and the rest of the content providers saw this, and put autoplaying videos on every web page, very often (as was Facebook's intention) without any readable text. Google's search couldn't actually search the videos at that time, so it undermined Google.

Meanwhile... Google was fucking around too. They intentionally made their own search engine less useful, noting that their competitors were apparently just copying them rather than trying to make their own search engines more useful than Google's. So now a Google search is very, very, unlikely to give you relevant answers without a lot of adding quotes to things.

Finally, LLMs. LLMs are the nail in the coffin. They remove any incentive to post anything on the Internet aside from documentation, advertising copy, and rants. There is decreasing incentive at this point to post anything you'd be paid to write or just to make the world a better place. Whether it's journalism, fiction, research, or even a Wikipedia page, fewer and fewer people will ever read what you have to say, but an LLM will, combine it with eleventeen other sources, and produce a summary that's inaccurate and dubious but is "good enough" for people looking for a quick answer.

So what we're left with are LLMs that will tell you things based upon the latest information as of 2025. They'll tell you the latest information as of 2025 today. And they'll tell you the latest information as of 2025 in five years. And in ten years, unless someone's willing to employ an army of researchers whose sole job is to write well researched and accurate articles to be ingested by an LLM, they'll be useless.

But so will the web.

And we don't have a replacement for the web, which is unfortunate because we don't have a replacement for the things we replaced using the web.

And as should be obvious, that means a world without information.

And I can't see how our civilization survives that.

Biden doesn't have dementia. He was showing signs of normal age related decline, sure, as would anyone his age. But his handlers wouldn't have let him out in public, even to speak from a teleprompter, if he had it. As someone who's lived with two people with two different types, I can attest that if he had it, it'd have rather more obvious than "mumbling", which isn't a symptom anyway. (And reading the transcript of the debate where his mumbling was *such* an issue, I think it's rather obvious he's thinking clearly throughout.)

The only neurological condition Biden had was his long term stuttering issue, which he's always had. Unless you're suggesting he had dementia in the 1980s, when his reputation for "gaffes" started, I think the argument he had it during his presidency is a thin one.

I find it all the more ludicrous Biden's opponents keep bringing this up as some sort of gotcha when their own guy very obviously has a major issue. Does Trump have dementia? Can't say! But certainly his constant incoherent streams-of-consciousness speeches raise alarm bells, and are far closer to what I saw in my FiL than anything Biden said, and Trump's actions appear to be substantial enough that his doctors are interested, hence the constant MRIs etc. And Biden's opponents are the ones that would fight to the death to condemn anyone who suggests St Reagan should have not run a second term.

As for orange suits, Biden followed the law. Trump's only getting away with what he's doing because of a scared Republican congress and a SCOTUS that's made it clear they believe in the supreme executive theory, despite that being literally unamerican, a rejection of the entire foundation of this country.

It's easy to have unique keys in your spreadsheet so that you can easily relate information on different sheets to one another. The problem is, actually doing the processing that a SQL server would do trivially is irritating, and then it will be processed slowly every time. Whatever Excel does or doesn't cache, it isn't enough. You can do big complicated things, but they work slowly, and maintaining it is irritating at best. When you do complicated things either your formulas get long, or you wind up having to write code, or in fact often it's both. At that point you're way better off IMO doing it in something else so that at least performance is good when you're done, and you never have to screw with editing a long formula.

That's exactly why it should be in a database and not a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are best when you have a reasonably limited number of columns. It's also a horrible PITA to use them as a relational database (it's more or less possible, but you don't want to do it) so hiding pieces of that complexity in other sheets in order to limit the data the user interfaces with on the main sheet is just a lot of extra work you wouldn't have to do if you used another solution.

It doesn't really matter where it fails, if Excel can do it and Sheets can't then Google has to admit inferiority to Microsoft which is never a good look.