So much this..

Yes except, we are not talking about keeping ourselves warm in the winter, cool in the summer, the lights on in the ER etc... We are talking about power for AI data centers; not even data centers for "traditional" computer applications and software.

I'd be the last person here to argue we don't to develop energy infrastructure. I would agree that could maybe even should include nuclear fission at least in the form of modern much safer designs with real consideration for who bears the cost for the 'common defense' when a commercial entity is permitted to paint a giant target on a community.

Never the less this is a societal cross roads, where it comes to AI. The choice isn't massive unrestricted AI build out or mud hutts. We options spanning a range of carrying on like it 2016...damn the torpedoes restart EOL reactors and generating plants to feed the things.

Nuclear power plants (particularly 3rd gen and older) represent an enormous socialization of risk. Their really isn't any getting around that. Historically a rising tide has also lifted *most* ships. Even if it is not immediately clear and their are short term employment impacts etc, AI driven productivity probably will make most American's better off and a small subset with a lot if direct financial interested in things like restarting aging nuclear reactors more fabulously wealthy than they already are. So the question is does this "Promote the General Welfare" in net or not in terms of should regulators really go along with it.

The problem with Nuclear power is that it looks really good in the abstract sense but where it encounters reality it does not suit society so well.

Someone on here a few days ago pointed out that with something like 400 power stations and large industrial reactors there have only been three serious containment incidents.

I would say that isnt actually that good a track record given the cost of such calamity. Which really is unbound as far we know because it remains unclear what dealing with Chernobyl may still require as there is still fissile activity producing enough heat it could destabilze the surroundings, and all kinds of weird fungus that might be attacking the structure of the buildings, and Fukushima while it looks like we have handle on the ongoing clean up requirements, there can still be surprises. If scale the numbers of 2017-19 Chevbolt fires to 30 years you still have a rate of about 2 tenths of percent where spontaneous ignition would occur. GM still did a a recall and that only burns down your garage...

The other problem is the size and acute nature of catastrophe when it does happen. Yes you can prove with statistics coal plants release more radiation and kill more people one way or another. That's fine but they tend do it over decades at a rate society can absorb those costs. Even when a tail pond lets go or something we are usually looking at the loss of one town not a 1000+ sq miles. That is difference between one these 100 year floods and 500 year floods right there, in terms of social cost.

The picture for modern reactors does not change as much as Bill gates wants us to think because humans. Sure maybe it can't meltdown, maybe it can't produce hydrogen and create explosive conditions that will scatter materials on their own. But that does not mean some nut job shouting "Death to America" won't crash a jetliner into it, or execute some other kind of attack potentially spreading contaminates over 100s of miles. Remember you don't need a blast its the fire and the smoke that pump stuff high into the atmosphere where it can rain down later.

I don't know the protocol but old phone headsets had a 2.5 or 3.5mm jack with an extra ring that got you play/pause/hook/next/last.

Hypothetically that could have been implemented. I had a collection of Alexas that got binned as soon as they got caught spying for police so I never got that far. ESP32 is better for nerds anyway.

One thing Australia does right is a statute naming removal of features as a violation of contract requiring full refunds in these circumstances.

Even though some regions or countries stay on a shifted time offset year-round (which might look or feel like being "ahead" like daylight saving time), standard time is legally and geographically considered the baseline time zone for those areas. They simply choose not to participate in the biannual clock adjustments.

Countries & Regions That Do Not Change Clocks
Most of Asia: This includes major industrialized nations like China, India, Japan, and South Korea, as well as most of Southeast and Central Asia.

Most of Africa: Almost the entire African continent stays on a single standard time year-round.

Parts of the Middle East: While countries like Iran and formerly parts of the Levant have experimented with it, places like Turkey and several neighbors maintain fixed times.

Parts of Europe: Iceland, Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan do not practice seasonal time changes. (The European Union has debated abolishing the practice entirely, but member states still currently shift together).

Much of South and Central America: Countries like Argentina, Brazil (which abandoned nationwide DST a few years ago), and most of their neighbors remain on permanent standard time.

I don't disagree with any of that. I see a lot of LLM and agents being thrown at problems we used to have much more tailored tools for that did at least as good a job, while consuming a tiny and by some comparisons almost immeasurably small amount of compute resources.

You're not wrong, Word 6 on a 486 with less than handful of megabytes of memory was able to perform grammar checking on word doc. Now you need 10s of gigs of primary storage, perhaps as much as 50 gigs of secondary storage between the model and the office suite. How much better a job it actually does is disputable. The experience is different, and a no-knowledge user can get started immediately. There is value there in both aspects. I don't see people who get paid access thru and employer etc to claude, gpt, etc stop using it or ignore it.

You're asking a deeper question though, how does that no-knowledge user become someone who understands the system when the system is getting bigger all the time and the short term incentives to learn anything about it get smaller smaller. I don't know. There is a lot of scifi on the subject, dated from before 2020, so thinking without being colored by recent economic interests, probably worth reading.

I love when the jackals start fighting each other..

Exactly, my top use of AI is probably, this prompt:

Please review the document below for typographical and grammatical errors and make the required edits. Do not suggest edits that simply alter style or tone. You may make clarity changes, such as splitting a compound sentence into two separate thoughts or exchanging a pronoun for the proper noun it references. Replacing a less specific nouns such as 'thing' and 'it', with a more concrete noun being referenced; as long as it will not read as overly verbose is appropriate. Finally suggest verb replacements where there is a more appropriate term of art, as and example it would be reasonable to rewrite "Next run the code." with "Next execute the code." Make all your changes with tracking enabled so I can review and accept any proposed edits.

I don't think that makes the document any less your own than having a human copy editor conduct a similar review which has been done since forever.

It's hard to believe that a Jordanian teenager learned the PeopleSoft vendor integration API well enough to exploit it.

Probably somebody whose dayjob is related.

Maybe he was just Vibesploiting, but it seems less likely.

In the same week, SpaceX launched every rocket in their lineup, 3 different vehicles, from 4 different pads, in 3 different states.

They also lifted basically every “category” of payload. Starlink, Crew, Commercial, and Military.

Maybe an exception for pay parking garages as they've become huge users of ALPRs. It's far more efficient than barcoded slips of paper used to use to check in and out.

Without exceptions like this the lobbyists will kill the bill.

Stupid and malicious are different.

The offered narrative is "let us build the data center AI control grid now because it's only temporary until we can move it to space".

You and I both know that's not thermodynamically possible with known science.

So do the people saying it.

We have a real problem with Positive Projection where we are decent folks so we project that on people who are not. That is an error even though most people are decent folks. The parasites are not.

I only recent learned that Hanlon's Razor comes from a humor book about Murphy's Law from the early 80's. It's not some ancient axiom of wisdom - it is used by the Cluster B disordered to mask their nefarious deeds.

If you talk about this with most people these days you'll get the Positive Projection script executed like an autorun.

Everybody should turn off autorun whenever possible. Major risk.