When I am looking at the contracts my company has for our company phones, I doubt your promise. As an American company, it has decided that providing company phones to its employees is not a core competency of the company. So it outsourced the task to the lowest bidder, and the lowest bidder has bought data plans for our phones which abruptly switch off everything above EDGE, as soon as the data allocation for the period has been exhausted. No warning. No graceful change. Just a hard cut-off. For everyone, including Field Service, who needs to have mobile internet connectivity to get and update trouble tickets.

No one who owns fine art ever needs to sell it. No one who owns vintage cars ever needs to sell them etc.pp.. Of course, you don't need to sell your bitcoins. As long as they are non-distinguishable from random bit patterns, they don't affect anything. But as soon as you selling bitcoins affects the real world, the real world notices and keeps putting up rules, may they be physical realities or legal requirements.

It's really the same problem that we see with quantum physics -- the subject matter is esoteric enough that common sense can't be used to determine whether what you're listening to is really advanced theory or utter BS (or some combination of the two); they both sound the same, and the situation isn't helped by the presence of large numbers of people who think they know what they are talking about but don't. :/

I think the distinction they are making is between technology that kills people, and technology that entertains people. If someone fitted actual weapons to a Doom engine, they'd probably object.

They don't have to. They get $2 Million for each ship that crosses the Strait of Hormuz.

They had that inflation since more than a decade, and they did not crumble. Inflation is something a free market economy cares about, but a dictatorship does not have to.

Donald Trump handed Iran the Strait of Hormuz to close at will. That was nuke enough for the Iranian regime to survive the next decade.

No, there is not. If you are not working in B and living in A, you are not generating demand for a daily commute between A and B. The demand only arises if you are actually moving to A and taking up a job in B. If for instance, house prices in A are too high for what a job pays in B, there is also no demand for a daily commute between A and B - completely independent how many lanes the highway between A and B has.

Let's make the hopeful assumption that the superintelligent AIs will not "go rogue" in any way, but will correctly try to carry out their tasks as assigned by the people who designed and trained them.

Pretty much every major nation has military AIs, at this point. So the Chinese AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Americans, and the American AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Russians, and so on. In the final analysis, no matter where you live, there is probably an AI that has been explicitly tasked by its operators with figuring out the most effective ways to do you in. Not because they've "gone wrong", but because they're working as intended.

The size of the universe is increasing...
but the rate at which it is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate is decreasing is increasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate of the rate is decreasing in increasing...
[... and so on, ad infinitum...]

People commonly overestimate the possibility of "all humans dying", and simultaneously underestimate the possibility of "billions of humans dying".

People are like cockroaches that way; a disaster could wipe out 99% of us, and there would still be millions of us left to repopulate afterwards. To truly wipe out all humans would take something more severe than the asteroid that did for the dinosaurs.

Whoever set up its reward function, really. Could be any of the above. The technology doesn't care, it only follows its algorithm.

I'm not. $2K is an eye-watering amount to spend on a cell phone, even in 2026, and especially on a design that seems almost guaranteed to start wearing a vertical line into the display at the folding-point over time. I expect a number of Slashdot articles about unhappy Duo users demanding redress over that issue, even if everything else works as advertised.

Maybe in a better economy, people would splurge on something like this, but I don't think that's the zeitgest this season.

n/t

It does not.

As Google did, you can also do the math. Duane Arnold had a net power output of 581 MW or 14 GWh output per day. To store 14 GWh of electricity right now, you have to pay about US$560 Mio (or $40 per kWh). With the 1.9 billion dollar grant, you could build enough capacity for four days of continuous rain. And differently than a nuclear power plant, this battery capacity could do power arbitrage, charging when electricity is cheap and provide it when prices are high, generating revenue and at the same time damping electricity price pikes and stabilizing the grid.

This is not exactly true. Demand for traffic is not static and just sitting there, waiting to be fulfilled. Demand indeed can be induced by an offering. If you know that from point A to point B, commute times will be X, you think twice about moving to point A if you work at point B, or taking up a job at point B, if you are already living at point A. But if due to road construction and adding a new lane, traffic times will lower to X-t, suddenly living at A and working at B will become viable, people living in A will work at B, and traffic between A and B increases, and travel times will no longer be X-t, but increase, until they reach equilibrium again at X, which was the prior cutoff point.

The same happens to businesses. A business incorporated at A might think twice about offering services at B, if roundtrip times are X. But if an additional highway lowers the travel times to X-t, it becomes a business case, until the additional demand has eaten up the advantage, and we are back at X times.