It does not annoy the rich and powerful. It annoys the (human) executive assistants of the rich and powerful, but that's what they get paid for.

Makes sense. According to leading environmentalists, coal use produces less CO2-equivalent than natural gas.

Though probably the best way to react to that isn't to replace natural gas with coal, but just to ignore the environmentalists.

My guess of why Ding uploaded to the Google Cloud: this was the only way to get the information out. That is, it couldn't be physically transported out of Google's office(s) otherwise.

If he could display it on his screen, he could exfiltrate it.

Thinking they will surely never go extinct, despite that having happened to the, what, 6 other alternatives?

Homo sapiens subsp. sapiens is probably the REASON those other alternatives didn't make it.

No, unless and until they can produce a gallon of gasoline chaper than pumping oil out of the ground, refininging it, and shipping it to the gas station -- an economic miracle if you think about it

This makes sense for remote, off-the-grid locations where you have access to renewable power like solar that you don't pay for by the kilowatt hour. You could make enough gas from a modest setup to meet an inidvidual's needs.

It's one thing to man-rate a *technology*; but the *production processes* and supply chain need to be equally robust. The Apollo Command Module was flown a half dozen times before any manned mission.

Apollo was a project that had economic scale. Many test objects were created and many beta units produced of critical components like the Command Module. While managing larger scale processes has its own challenges, the fact that the processes are *repeated* make them easier to debug.

The low pace of manned missions in the current era adds to their risk. You can man-rate the *technology*, but (a) it's minimally tested and (b) produced artisinally instead of industrially. There were, perhaps, 180 space suits of various types produced for Apollo (not all of which flew), which while below "industrial" production quantities was a lot of repeittion of the operations needed to make them. The astronauts on Artemis missions will be wearing suits produced at a rate of a handful over a decade.

While the hindsight and experience from sixty years of manned space flight reduce the technological risk, that is offset by the production quality risk from low cadence production. Assembly personnel and even vendors can turn over between production orders.

I see this as a rich-get-richer scenario. Smart people, the ones who can outthink statistical parrot, will be able to use its speed at processing and digesting massive quantities of data to improve their productivity. People who can't outthink the things will have to use them *credulously*, and thus become functionally dumber than ever.

For a private company, making a profit is necessary for continued existence. Companies that don't make a profit get bought out and liquidated for the value of their assets.

The alternative would be to nationalize drug development -- socialized medical research. Or there's just waiting and hoping for the best, which is what we're headed toward.

Tax software is one of the last places I'd expect AI to take over. Tax software is implementing a whole lot of very detailed rules and regulations to produce forms. Any sort of AI approximation, hallucination, or other slop is entirely unacceptable if you don't want to have the IRS auditing you and threatening to send you to pound-me-in-the-ass Federal prison. So no one in their right mind is going to say "ChatGPT, here's my W2s, 1099s, etc, produce a 1040 for me".

Thanks for making our standard of living the highest in human history. Thanks for keeping my house warm and lit. Thank you for helping cook my food. Thank you for helping me to get from point A to point B. Thank you for natural gas derived fertilizer, which helps provide the food I eat. Thank you for lubricating oils (the whales thank you for this one too). Thank you for plastics, in all their various and sundry uses. And thank you for combating the hair-shirting environmentalists who would have me freeze in the dark in the name of the climate.

Perhaps the lack of students will cause the universities to cut their tuition charges

They'd rather die. And they will.

The tech companies have been waving around stacks of bills around and saying "please take our money and build some power plants". So if Trump says "Tech companies have to pay for power plants", the tech companies are just going to say "OK".

Had one last year -- a 12 v battery died and needed roadside replacement. Jump starts are still pretty common. So is overheating in the summer -- requiring coolant top-ups, even hose replacement can be done roadside. Some modern cars can go into "limp" mode because of faulty gas caps and you might have to reset the ECU in some cases to get home or to a shop. Those are just the ICE specific problems.

But yeah; ICE cars since 2000 have reached a level of reliability that would be unheard of when I started driving 40 years ago.

...if we're hyping our company's Ai snake oil. We should absolutely *not* classify them as people for other purposes, e.g., legally: it wasn't my company your honor that did that bad thing, it was the AI.

Sixty years ago it would have been "solid state". Ten years ago it would have been "block chain". Ten years from now it will be something else.

Standard interview rules apply, which is that your "failures" should be, at worst, things that turned out really well but not 100% as well as you hoped.