...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

The compute cost for DeepSeek V3 was $5.6M. Training costs for traditional US frontier labs model is about $70 to $200M+, with estimates of up to $1B+ to train the next generation models. It's expensive, but it's not even in the ballpark of "There is no viable economic model to do so." Google revenue in Q2 was $1.32 billion *per day*. $1B is trivially less than a day; $5.6M is just 6 minutes of revenue.

The cost problem is in the compute buildout and the subsidized compute to capture users.

> It remains to be seen if even using their models can be profitable,

I presume we can stipulate there exists some tasks that are cheaper to do using an LLM than doing it "by hand". As a such, using an LLM model can be profitable. To me, it is also obvious that the business of serving an LLM model can be profitable. There's large benefits to being able to get tokens quickly, and you can expect people to pay for that, even if we presume they could run the model locally with no maintenance overhead. There's even cases where using the cloud is cheaper than you can serve locally at all - I saw one guy that measured his added cost of electricity when his computer ran a specific LLM, and it was more expensive to run it locally than to buy tokens from the cheapest inference provider for the same model, presumably because they had better hardware and cheaper electricity.

I love a term a friend of mine used to use when talking about AI: "Narrowly superhuman" (before "superintelligence" got to be a thing).

AI is narrowly superhuman. It is able to do specific things that used to be defined as a "hallmark of intelligence" much better than a human. The easiest one? Summing numbers. It's both faster and more precise than a human.

AI gets more and more such areas it can do better than a human.

If we define "Superintelligent" to be "A computer system able to do absolutely everything we can somehow call intelligence better than any human", we will *never* have superintelligence. The things we define as intelligence will be in conflict; we'll land at the system being better at one at the cost of another.

I'm in favor with being careful about this development. But "prohibiting the development of superintelligence" isn't an option. It's already here.

Dividing the yearly US spend on Internet advertising by the number of people in the US that has Internet access gives $900-$970 spend per person per year, or $75-$81 per month.

Please choose the option you want:

1. I want to pay about $75 per month per member in my family into the ad auctions to not see any ads. Ie, keep the infrastructure, but let you opt to pay your share through money rather than attention.
2. I want to prohibit ads, and accept that everybody will have to pay for the sites they want access to, that there will be much fewer services, that there will be much higher transaction costs, and that the poor will have much less ability to access services. (Microtransactions won't solve this, due to the need for trust evaluation of same.)
3. I want some combination of 1 and 2, where some sides of ads are prohibited so it is possible to buy my way out of them at a lower price,. I accept that this will result in the loss of some services and lower access to others for the poor.
4. I want legislation that makes Internet ad blockers work more consistently. I accept that this just shifts the attention cost to other people, and have me getting the benefit without paying the cost.
5. I want to remove Internet ads and subsidize the sites through taxes.
6. I want to increase the requirements of Trust and Safety checks and format restrictions for ads, potentially accepting higher overhead (in what goes to content vs infrastructure) for less annoying/bad ads. I accept that doing this creates significant advantages of scale for ad networks.
7. Other, please describe, including where costs gets shifted with your proposal.

The above are my best attempt at listing possible options and their correct caveats. In most situations, I find ads annoying (who doesn't). Unfortunately, they are the main money highway of Internet content.

DISCLOSURE: I used to work for Google, where I rang infrastructure for stopping bad ads/advertisers and for removing fake clicks. I've also been interested at the use of sub-cent microtransactions to pay for content since the 1990s, though I've become disillusioned as I've learned more about the attention economics involved. Approving individual microtransactions has a higher attention cost than dealing with the ads, and bulking them per-site (through micro-subscriptions) will limit the number of sites that can have content.

Arkham House used to do absurdly small print runs-- 5000 copies. Sometimes they'd reprint them, sometimes not. Some of them have made their way to the Intenet archive, but the actual books are collector's items.

Whether we like it or not, whether we use Windows or not, Microsoft is going to insist on adding the tax whether the PC comes shipped with Windows or not. This is illegal bundling, Microsoft has essentially ignored prior rulings, and it's pretty much a certainty the courts will be fine with this.

"How did you get hired?"
"I was top at Fortnite. You?"
"Combat flight sims."

"Damn, two Boeings just crashed over an oil refinery on city limits and took out half the city."
"Did you remember to save your position beforehand?"
"Yeah."
"The reload and continue from there. No-one will notice."

I love computer games. I have XPlane 12 and many scenery packs. I rank well on Elite:Dangerous. From the sounds of it, the FAA would see me as over-qualified. In reality? There's no way in hell I'd be taking those kinds of risks with real lives. There's a huge difference between having good reflexes and a good eye, versus having the complex 4D spacetime relationship mental models needed for robust air traffic control.

Freenet is also based on middle-out compression.

No. Trying to push 30TB into Freenet will be interpreted as an attack on the network by other peers and they'll disconnect from your peer.

Freenet is better viewed as a communication medium than a storage medium. Data is prioritized according to demand, somewhat like an LRU cache. You can't upload 30TB and expect the network to preserve it for you.

On liability, running a Freenet peer is more like running network infrastructure that automatically routes and caches other people's traffic than intentionally publishing it. US law explicitly recognizes this distinction in the DMCA's provisions for transitory network communications and system caching. We discuss this in more detail in the FAQ.

You obviously haven't tried Freenet. You can join our room on River and you'll see no spam, no fraud, no hate speech, none of that.

Decentralized doesn't mean unmoderated. Systems built on Freenet can be moderated however their creators and communities want. River is moderated.

The difference is that nobody running one service gets to decide what everyone else is allowed to run.

You see, Linus has embraced transhumanism and is testing out the new kernel as a supplementary brain function, using MOSIX to offload all of the irritable comment generation at yet more nonsense on the mailing list to an Elizabot that he has written specifically to do this. This saves his actual brain for real work.

AI is not currently capable of performing any meaningful conceptual abstraction, it is only capable of very basic mechanical abstraction. Abstraction is itself multi-dimensional. Nor is there any indication that AI could ever perform multi-dimensional abstraction or multi-dimensional decomposition. Precious few humans are capable of it either, but some can.

No, AI would need humans because the best system is not a pure system but a hybrid system, and that means transhumanism with AI operating as an additional brain function rather than as a replacement for a brain.

Tool calling is, yes, but the current approach to it is (a) overt not transparent to the user, (b) not designed for the purpose I've outlined, and (c) not remotely good enough for the AI to be able to manage data through such tools.

Yes, you can connect an AI to a PostgreSQL database. Whoopee. Not even close to an AI detecting via classifiers that some of the data is relational in nature, transparently setting up its own PostgreSQL database in response, and using that proactively as an additional way to examine the data. You would need to explicitly set up the constructs, explicitly set up the databases, explicitly tell it when, where, and how to use the database, and if that particular usage conflicted with a way the AI actually worked, the AI would not be able to use it effectively. That's not remotely close to what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is much, much deeper than that. AIs lose focus when there is too much information currently in the system. Absolutely nothing stops an AI from using a document database as a virtual memory in which it can page in and out conceptual spaces so that the focus on any given step of a problem concerns just the problem. Other than such a concept not existing yet, which is kind of a limiting factor. But you need to know what connects to what. The AI could use an ontology reasoner for that, or a relational database, or an external graph. But you cannot provide those tools and you cannot configure them, for the simple reason that the AI is the only entity with any detailed map of how the underlying neural net is connecting those ideas up.

The AI itself has to select the tools, has to configure the tools, has to do all the work. Which means YOU cannot use any sort of API. YOU should have no involvement in the underlying mechanisms needed for the internal NN housekeeping.

And that's your other error. You're assuming this is about user data. No. It's about housekeeping operations within the NN itself to maximise functionality, it has nothing to do with the user side of things at all. If the user was capable of setting up dynamically structured databases that mutated with each step of a decomposed analysis, you'd have done everything the AI would be doing and you wouldn't need the AI to begin with.

You cannot do this work, you cannot even assist in this work, it has to be dynamic and it has to be utterly invisible to the operator.