Its another tick in the evidence box for the "US doesnt have laws or a constiitution anymore, just executive orders" theory. Tiktok is straight up illegal in the US now, and the whitehouse opened that account *after* the ban took effect. Laws are for poors.

I think that damage is going to be something we see down the track. The kids who are getting their educations fucked up now because steaming goons are burning books and banning anything that doesnt look like an 1800s schoolmaster screaming at kids to do their 3xRs.. We'll see that damage in 10-15 years.

Whats happening now I think has a lot to do with the damage we're doing to our cognitive 00executive functioning by being glued to screens all day. There *might* be other things but this one seems obvious.

I used to finish a book every couple of weeks. And I *somehow* managed to hold enough of an attention span to spend a decade in academia, loads of reading. Now I struggle to get past the first chapter because my attention span is toasted before my attention span fritzes and I'm back to reading ragebait on scoial media. SOMETHING is going on, and I think its social media hijacking our reward circuits and fucking up our attention spans.

And the poor kids, they've had this damage going on all their lives. God knows we've already fucked our democracies up by losing grip with reality, what comes next with an entire generation of black-screen cooked ADHD-alikes is anyones guess.

We've taken to just putting documents in slack channels at work, and its *terrible* and as much as I complain to the boss that slack is neither "documenting everything", nor is it a sane file storage system, he seems enamoured with the idea.

Its really a case of someone getting the issue before regulators. They've got a lot on their plate.

But yeah, the legalities are obviously off. Amazon will stamp their feet and complain that "Hey its in the contract you signed" , but they are expecting you not to realise tht the "piece of paper" is not the contract, its just a record of the contract. The contract is what the two sides agreed on, and its important that this means what they two sides *think* they agreed on. While amazon *can* put "you agree that your first born heirs soul belongs to amazon" in there, in latin lawyerese, but a judge is gonna say "Hang on, thats not what the customer understood when they clicked the button that said "We totally dont want your firstborn heir!". Judges kinda hate fineprint. The reality is, the usual test is what "a reasonable person" would understand. And I think its pretty fucking stretching it to assume most people would see a "buy it!" button and thinkthebutton doesnt means "buy it!".

Companies have been raked over the coals before for this stuff. Repeatedly. But it really needs the regulators to get on board and say "Hey, honor the fucking agreement you made with the customer or refund the goddamn money" *or we'll force you to*.

I still think we should be looking very close at Bats for how to build the ultimate response to viruses. Bats are not immune to viruses, but they just dont seem to be hurt by them, almost *any* virus. As best we can tell this has to do with a lack of inflamatory response. Likely an evolutionary compromise where evolution said "Ok, we wont stop viruses, but we will stop reacting to them", as a sickly bat is a bat thats unable to survive. Now, I suspect that just doing that to humans wont be very useful, as we actually do need that strong response to viruses as unlike bats, humans have a long lifespan, and that gives viruses the ability to do real long term harm to the genome, cancer and all that. But combining a strong antiviral therapy with something that reduces or eliminates inflamation might at least make certain nastier viruses a lot more survivable.

Though this does seem at odds with the approach in the paper.

FYI, the actual paper is here: https://www.science.org/doi/10...

I suspect a lot of it is patents expiring. The university I went to had a giant solar power research lab thingo at the back of it, and I'd go down there occasionally on campus busibness. One of the guys there claimed part of the problem was BP and certain other oil companies had a number of the key solar patents locked up and where charging through the nose to use them, This was 25 years ago, and a lot of those patents have expired in the time since. Be very wary when oil companies get involved with renewables. Chances are , its to lock up the patents and sabotage the market.

I'd rather be the product than the subject of a hyper authoritarian government

But oh man is that a low bar...

Even if this project was technically feasible (which, to be clear, it totally isn't), it wouldn't ever get built. If you think the fearmongering about nuclear fission plants is bad, imagine the fearmongering that would break out as soon as someone seriously proposed implementing this. Hell, look at the first comments posted to this page, and this is on "news for nerds".

It wouldn't matter that there are straightforward safeguards to prevent accidents. The first, last, and only thing the rubes (and therefore the politicians that pander to the rubes by making them afraid of things) would hear is "death ray".

The only realistic accomplishment this project would have would be the quick passing of laws to make this sort of project illegal.

This is the thing that gripes me. I got an apple watch specifically because my doc recomended it to me to keep an eye on blood oxygen (I have a slightly lower , not quite emphysema, but it could go bad, O2 level) and cos it'll call an ambulance if my heart does something stupid. Worked great for 6 months then this lawsuit happened and that functionality just disappeared. This stupid lawsuit actually puts me in physical danger.

I still think the next major stock market crash is going to come from Tesla, rather than AI. A company that has maybe 2-3% of the car market with a higher market cap (roughly amount of shares multiplied by price of those shares) than the rest of the automobile industry combined is a market absurdity that is surely going to correct to, at a guess, maybe 3% of its current stock price, because inevitably it has to. At some point the shares must reflect reality or it implodes with stupid. And whether it corrects first, or it just implodes, a hell of a lot of very rich people are suddenly going to become a lot less rich, and thats how market panics start, and market panics are how stock markets crash.

Nonsense. Its not "radical islamic snake in the grass" running india into the ground, its radicalized hindu nationalists burning the country to the ground, and its been that way for a very long time.

Fascists poison everything.

Well, I dont think Trump can win a third term, firstly because its blatantly constititonal to the point that even the weird old vampires in the supreme court couldn't find him a loop-hole, and secondly because I geninuely suspect by the end of this four years nobody is going to be in much of a mood to forgive the republicans for a very long term. And shit, the dudes so infirm and unhealthy, I'd be unsurprised iif he simply doesnt live that long.

Well, unless they completely steal it , and we get president couch fucker. But if they do steal the elections, January 6 2021 will look like a picnic.

Being pegged to a dollar is just imaginary nonsense. "Stable coins" have proven themselves to be just as prone to market insanity as the earlier non-stable coins.

All speculation based dunning krugerands have exactly as much value as whoever is paying for them thinks it has. And if they think its worth more, or less, than the US dollar, then thats what its worth.

Sooner or later some bright individual will realize that instead of dumping that excess electricity, they could be using it to mine Bitcoins, or electrolyze hydrogen out of seawater, or (insert your favorite low-priority process here).

Curtailing electricity generation in an era where electricity is in such high demand is throwing money away.

Could be, but I'm not sure how you define "scarcity" in the context of things like Bitcoin mining, which is literally a contest to see who can burn the most electricity in a given period of time in return for money. In that sort of competitive scenario, no amount of electricity will ever be enough, because adding more generation will simply up the power requirements to mine the next bitcoin; hence electricity is always scarce no matter how much is generated.

AI isn't quite as bad as that (since presumably they will someday reach a point where AIs are "smart enough" and they no longer feel the need to scale them up any further), but at the moment it's rather similar -- a contest between OpenAI and Anthropic to see who can run the most GPUs at once, in the hope that something useful will come out of it.