230 prevents sites from being prosecuted. So, right now, they do b all moderation of any kind (except to eliminate speech for the other side).

Remove 230 and sites become liable for most of the abuses. Those sites don't have anything like the pockets of those abusing them. The sites have two options - risk a lot of lawsuits (as they're softer targets) or become "private" (which avoids any liability as nobody who would be bothered would be bothered spending money on them). Both of these deal with the issue - the first by getting rid of the abusers, the second by getting rid of the easily-swayed.

USENET predates 230.
Slashdot predates 230.
Hell, back then we also had Kuro5hin and Technocrat.

Post-230, we have X and Facebook trying to out-extreme each other, rampant fraud, corruption on an unimaginable scale, etc etc.

What has 230 ever done for us? (And I'm pretty sure we already had roads and aqueducts...)

I'd disagree.

Multiple examples of fraudulent coercion in elections, multiple examples of American plutocrats attempting to trigger armed insurrections in European nations, multiple "free speech" spaces that are "free speech" only if you're on the side that they support, and multiple suicides from cyberharassment, doxing, and swatting, along with a few murder-by-swatting events.

But very very very little evidence of any actual benefits. With a SNR that would look great on a punk album but is terrible for actually trying to get anything done, there is absolutely no meaningful evidence anyone has actually benefitted. Hell, take Slashdot. Has SNR gone up or down since this law? Slashdot is a lot older than 230 and I can tell you for a fact that SNR has dropped. That is NOT a benefit.

"Monopolies just Jack up prices and absorb the money back in."

Can we print faster than they raise prices? If the Fed printed 40% more money in 2020 and prices only rose 9%, is that a gain in purchasing power?

Have you considered Fischer Black's "Noise"?

"I think that the price level and rate of inflation are literally indeterminate. They are whatever people think they will be. They are determined by expectations, but expectations follow no rational rules. If people believe that certain changes in the money stock will cause changes in the rate of inflation, that may well happen, because their expectations will be built into their long term contracts."

What if engineers had a strong basic income, so they could tell their skeezy finance guy bosses to take this job and shove it, and worked on things they actually wanted to use and which were efficient in a physical sense, not merely an economic one?

Was McCarthy able to implement his Advice Taker? Has the attention mechanism used simple counting of token co-occurrences to realize his dream, without all the symbolic rules he thought would be needed?

See how vibe coding works yet?

Would there be a physical scarcity of basics, or merely a psychological mood that created a scarcity?

What if you printed faster than noisy prices rose?

Since 2008, the Fed has increased what economists call base high-powered (because it should cause inflation) money over 500%; does the fact that inflation has increased only 50% in that time frame indicate we can increase purchasing power by, again, printing faster than prices rise?

"the financial storm is about to collapse."

So should it affect billions who never invested? Or should the Fed ramp up QE again and cut interest rates to zero, so ATMs continue to work?

Or what if the Fed printed an indexed basic income and let financial firms fail but it wouldn't affect the little guy because they would still have access to cash to buy groceries and such?

Having spent time in windmill farms in eastern Washington, can I say they're an eyesore that half the time are curtailed anyway (count how many don't turn)? And why don't they let me legally camp in all that land they take up?

"Prehistoric clinker outcrops in the American West are the result of prehistoric coal fires that left a residue that resists erosion better than the matrix, leaving buttes and mesa. It is estimated that Australia's Burning Mountain, the oldest known coal fire, has burned for 6,000 years.[10]"

Do expert systems use explicit rules to try to solve context sensitivity while the attention mechanism just counts co-occurrences of tokens over very long ranges?

Seeing as the attention mechanism gave LLMs context awareness that neural networks could not touch, do you think the geological application uses the attention mechanism, and is therefore using the same tool that gave context-sensitivity to LLMs?

Can you use attention independently of neural networks?

Are you claiming the following response is a hallucination? Why?

"You can implement "statistical attention" using purely mathematical operations like dot-product similarity or cosine similarity without any neural layers."