Efficiency of an electrical inverter: 90%

Efficiency of a gasoline generator: 20%

A gasoline generator might work as an emergency backup, but would not be economical for daily load leveling.

TFS says the inverter's extra hardware costs $650.

A 10kw gasoline generator would cost at least as much.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

Why? Is filling the Super Bowl blimp more important?

If nothing changed in 20 years, perhaps the looming helium crisis is overblown.

Nope. Warner Bros. was losing money before the merger and had accumulated $40B in net debt.

The headcount reduction was sorely needed, and the merger makes it even more necessary.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

That's what the in-class exams and quizzes are for.

The in-class exams and quizzes solved that problem too.

That is extremely unlikely, but if it happens, people will switch to other AI engines.

I use Cursor for coding, which SpaceX now owns.

SpaceX (which may merge with Tesla soon) has deep pockets and an in-house need for AI, so it is even less likely to "close shop".

Even if Anthropic and OpenAI get in deep financial doo-doo, they won't close entirely. They might stop updating their models, but the existing models in static mode would be fine for coding. More likely, they would be acquired in a consolidation.

There are currently dozens of AI companies. I predict there will be fewer than five in a few years.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

There are dumb TVs still being made.

That you don't even know that shows you are not a serious customer for such a product.

You can just click "Skip" when it asks you to connect to the Internet.

You can stop it, but most people can't or won't.

They don't need to block 100% of debloating.

99.9% is good enough.

The only ads I see are for video content like new movies or TV shows, and I don't mind those.

PG&E in California incentivizes me to reduce my power consumption from 2 to 7 pm, and gives me cheap off-peak electricity from 2 to 4 am, when I charge my EV.

I've been on this program for 11 years. It works well for me.

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.