That's the scary part, and it's not talked about enough. AI is helping developers code, but developers are getting worse at coding from scratch because of AI, while juniors never get a chance to find a job because AI can replace them. That's bad enough, but what about new technologies? Who's going to develop new languages, and will AI be able to spit out code using a new syntax? And if not... will there be enough developers left that can build up a codebase in that language for AI to learn? Feels like AI will slow down technological advancement, while improving how we use current tools.

When I read "China’s emissions actually declined in 2025", I interpret that as absolute emissions. They've been slowing their emissions growth for a while now, that's not news.

You didn't reply to me directly, but... that's another excerpt:

You can say China is not serious about pollution, they're cost-first, but... hey whatever their philosophy, the ars technica article seems to indicate there are changes for the better. They may still use a fuckton of coal, but they're also investing in renewables at a pace we haven't seen anyone else do.

While state media and propagandist keep telling us China is evil for so many reasons, they're building robots, cars, their own AI-inference chips, and also more renewable resources than anyone else worldwide. This is an excerpt from the article:

We're witnessing the fall of an empire and the rise of another one in real time.

It's because we're older... I can't help but think of all the downstream impacts and the challenges and .. ugh yeah it makes me tired, so then I don't get excited. But still. Let's forget about all the context around it for a second, and then this becomes really cool. We're building humanoid robots that perform human-like activities! Neat.

Thank you. Almost all the comments so far are "machines > man duh", which... is true. But every time we make machines to be better than humans, we learn something, and we advance science. Deep Blue > Kasparov? At the time that was an achievement. Kids nowadays grow up knowing that they cannot beat a computer at chess if the computer is not handicapped, but that wasn't true back then.

This is cool stuff. It's a big advancement in the technology. It's 100% a nerd thing, on a nerd site. But no. The reactions we get is akin to saying "my horse can go as fast as your steam engine contraption" back in the 1880s. These robots are much better than humanoid robots from last year, nevermind from 5 or 10 years ago. Even if you think it's kind of pointless now, in another 5 years? Our wars will be different, but also maybe food delivery will go to robots along with a lot of other manual labor that is currently not automatable. You can argue that's concerning for the future, and on that I'd agree, but speaking as a nerd, it's still fucking cool.

I disagree with some of your statements (Chinese free healthcare is.. well, not always free), but overall infrastructure is bang on. Infrastructure broadly defined (public services, education, healthcare, power, water, telecom, etc.) is the foundation of a society. The reason so many countries aren't doing well is that they're playing out the tragedy of the commons; no one cares about the societal common good, and everyone is trying to (ab)use public services and goods. Combine that with some corruption and the structure of your country crumbles, which makes the economy crumble.

Historically the western world (European countries, US/Canada, Australia) has been pretty good at working for the common good. However the social fabric is eroding; we celebrate the rich (especially in the US), individuals and companies are maximizing profit over everything else, and the government is complicit. We've combined NIMBYs with greed, so almost nothing gets done for the people if it's expensive or doesn't have consensus.

China is profit-seeking like everyone else, but the government can say screw you to your rights and raze your house if a high-speed train needs to go there. The government is way more controlling, and as much as you can rail against their abuse of rights, some level of corruption, etc., they're fundamentally utilitarian and focus on the development of China as a whole (at the cost of individual freedoms). That philosophy and level of control on the whole country is what's helping them.

The advantage of that bookstore is it didn't shutdown its online store, it added cloud services as a secondary line of business, while the primary one kept operating and made money. And still, for normal companies, a second LoB that's so distinct from the first is a leap, but Amazon made it work.

Here we have a full scam operating. You can go from "I'm operating a convenience store" to "I'm now going to build AI data centers and shutdown my store", but no one is going to give you money for that unless something shady is going on.

That sounds awesome actually. Today there's waste in data centers (i.e. the chips create heat as a byproduct, which causes problems for the chips, so we use more power to cool everything down). If we could let everything run at their naturally high temperature, you not only don't need to cool it down, but can recapture some of the heat to "recycle" the initial power! One can dream...

Fair point. Here's hoping!

I hope you're right. Remember BlackBerry and their great keyboard? And when the iPhone came out with no kb, it was fine because corporate customers that still value a physical kb can still have it? Tesla came out with an iPad instead of buttons, but that's fine, other car manufacturers still had buttons and there were many of us who clamored our love of buttons? Yeah, me too. Big tech has the power to force consumer behavior, whether it's MS Office ribbon or folding phones.

You have to wonder what happens behind closed doors sometimes... I don't know that Trump understands anything at all of the current situation. From where I sit here's what happened:

The Israelis build a nice presentation that tells Trump he'll be the world savior if he attacks Iran, and that success is guaranteed. The US army generals disagree, but Bibi Netanyahu worked at BCG, a top consulting firm, and there's no way his folks aren't convincing. Trump buys it and thinks it'll also stop people from talking about him being a pedo, so launches missiles. A few weeks in he realizes it's not working out, victory is taking time, and the narrative is changing (aka the stock market is crumbling, which is one of the few things he cares about). He asks his team to fix it, and so negotiations start. Negotiations aren't going well, but he's pushing his team of sycophants to do something while posting on social media how this is a beautiful war, some say it's the most beautiful, and Iran will pay and be destroyed and also Allahu Akbar. His team manages to have a draft of a beginning of an understanding with Iran, so immediately that's announced via the official governmental channel that is Truth Social (also called Pravda by the USSR). In the meantime the peace plan has barely any shape and is not in any way advantageous to the US, but there's a whole room of sycophants telling Trump "we're winning". Cue Trump's announcement that the First Epstein War is over.

Your comment is modded as Funny, but it makes me realize I haven't heard of a good metric on AI and what it achieves. We shouldn't be measuring the power usage, but what else can we measure? "Operations per second" doesn't really exist, and even then it doesn't even measure useful work done. How many of those operations is "generate an image of X" that just leads to memes or porn, vs. helping coders develop software or something?

It's like the crypto-fans saying Bitcoin has value because it uses power... like no buddy that's not value, that's a negative. The value is in what is being achieved with it, but no one knows how to measure that. In the meantime, we'll just build warehouses in the desert, connect them to the power grid, and dump GPUs in, in the hope that's it's doing something for society other than make some individuals rich.

Not just oil, also gold and other minerals! https://apnews.com/article/tre...

Trump can give a masterclass on how to abuse one's position to extract as much wealth as possible for himself and his cronies, and unlike Kim Jong-Un, he has access to a massive military machine to enforce colonialism as well.

If I understand correctly, you're saying we should have continuous dialogue and not build the walls between each other for having different views? If so, I do agree.

I don't know if the GP will respond to you, so I'll express myself since we're having a conversation in good faith. I don't care about people being socially shunned, at all, from either side. I can understand why some people don't want to engage "with the other side". While it's not something I want to do or think one should do (I view it as small-minded), I can accept that people do that for their self-protection. It's, again, a divergence of opinion of what should be done, but they're entitled to it because it concerns themselves.

What I care about is what the government does or doesn't do. I don't believe the US should refuse entry to people for having a meme about Vance or Trump. I also don't believe we should refuse entry to people that have a meme about Harris, the "call me MA'AM" person, or a comic about the prophet Muhammad, or whatever. The "social cancelling" will happen naturally, always has, always will, and we need to decouple social vs. governmental.