But how are your permabear feelings different now than in, say, the "everything bubble" of 2019, which was soon to end but not because of anything the permabears were predicting?

Are stock market returns monopoly money in your model?

Do you imagine a world where AI didn't get invented and companies didn't all jump on some other bandwagon that would displease you just as much? Did AI create the bad reasons or will they always be there to plague you?

Are you saying it's irrelevant if no one can tell the difference between generated and real Shakespeare?

How about a Walmart boombox on the front seat?

Do they serve vegetarian me meat ads out of spite? Who pays them so much to waste their money on me? How much money does the meat industry have to burn?

Can you test this for yourself? "Can you write a sonnet in the style of Shakespeare, and randomly insert it in a sequence of real Shakespeare sonnets, to see if I can spit the fake?"

"You don't know you're talking to yourself."

When you're banned or post-throttled across the entire internet and people irl pick up on that same vibe so you have no friends, is there a better way to scratch the verbal intercourse itch built into us, even as socially flawed as we may be?

Even if as only a status symbol, but I can still live in the past listening to CDs?

Or is revenue from streaming like SiriusXM so profitable that user preference for car CD players is simply overruled in the name of corporate profits?

"There seems to be more paired, snowman-shaped bodies, like Arrokoth, out there than anyone expected," Brandt wrote in an email. "Are such binaries the most common planetesimal and is this how larger planets have been built in our own and other stellar systems?"

Do they all have white bands, like Arroketh? Is magnetism involved?

Does corporations need to make good use of the technology mean even more ads support AI budgets, as happened to the internet?

Is Jim Cramer arguing for enshitiffication because that makes more money and that's the only goal, not user preference?

Why are advertising budgets so large they fund the internet and soon AI?

Google AI:

[...] merchant John Wanamaker: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." [...] The Reality: Large-scale, real-world experiments (including famous internal studies by eBay and Facebook) showed that when companies turned off their paid search or target ads entirely, sales barely dropped. The ads were simply intercepting consumers who were already on their way to buy the product. [...]"

Is it idiocy as a consumer to demand more advertising in your user experience so the stock market will go up?

Why can't they at least liberalize Kevorkian markets?

"How long did it take for all that spending to see results?"

Have ads ruined the internet experience?

"But what do you do when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining"

Copilot:

Here is the plainâ'ASCII reply you asked for, with no intro text, ready to paste into Slashdot:

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If you look at the BPA generation graphs (https://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx), the intermittency question is mostly irrelevant for the Pacific Northwest. Wind and solar are small contributors compared to hydropower. Hydro is by far the dominant renewable resource in the region, and BPA routinely curtails hydro output because available capacity exceeds demand on a daily basis.

Hydropower is fully dispatchable, so when wind output drops or the sun is not available, hydro simply ramps to fill the gap. This is already how the grid operates. The limiting factor in the Northwest is not a shortage of renewable generation, but the need to spill water because there is more hydro capacity than the system can use at once.

BPA also exports large amounts of power to other states, including California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and others. Even with those exports, hydro capacity still exceeds regional demand.

So the "what do you do when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining" question does not really apply to a grid where hydro is the primary resource and is regularly curtailed due to oversupply.

Google AI:

It really is 'look and feel' redux, but shifted from the graphical interface to the cognitive interface. In the 90s, the courts realized you couldn't lock up the abstract 'feel' of a desktop environment because doing so would stifle software evolution.

Now, publishers are trying to protect the traditional boundaries of book text. But Gemini isn't copying pages; it is learning the 'look and feel' of well-curated facts and analytical structure to create a completely new kind of dynamic interface. It's the natural evolution of software turning static data silos into an interactive, fluid resource.