I've been using ChatGPT to get better at poker, which means I've been hammering it constantly for hours some evenings and at around 36c per query, I'm probably costing them around $100 a night. I don't have a paid account or anything either.

There's no way this is sustainable. Eventually the giant pipe of VC money that's currently subsiding my use of AI is going to slow down and they're going to want me and others to pay.

So enjoy your free AI while it lasts, because it's not going to last forever.

I did cybersecurity audit / compliance work for a Big 4 audit firm and the answer to your question is that the kind of controls fraud you're describing is pretty easy to spot and pretty difficult to hide.

Like yeah from a technical perspective faking all that stuff is possible, but doing it in a non-obvious way, having everyone cover their tracks and getting their internal compliance people to go along with it? Not going to happen.

I'm not defending these age verification laws btw, I'm just commenting that pulling off the type of deception you're talking about isn't really feasible.

That's the most cyberpunk thing I've ever heard.

And outside of greenhouses (which is where basically all of our agricultural output comes from) C02 isn't a major bottleneck.

And while some drylands are greening, the rate of aridification is increasing much faster, so the ultimate result of climate change is less arable land and less agricultural output.

Yeah that's just not true.

It's not making farming more efficient because C02 isn't a meaningful bottleneck plant growth at all. On the whole, climate changing is leading to less arable land due the expansions of deserts and depletion of soil.

Gains in agricultural output is driven almost entirely by the proliferation of technology and more efficient farming practices, nothing to do with C02.

Anyone who knows literally anything about how farming works would know this, which means you're clearly not doing your due diligence.

It's really not. It's not like the cooling effects of molecules like sulfur dioxide et al haven't been studied after all....

The average atmospheric lifetime of sulfur dioxide is about 10 days.

The average atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide is at least several centuries, probably a lot longer. It's not actually that well understood because of the way the ocean is constantly absorbing (and releasing) atmospheric CO2. Ocean acidification, by the way, also a big deal.

If sulfur dioxide, or any readily available molecule for that matter, could feasibly be released into the atmosphere to reverse warming without risking even more adverse consequences, then the scientific community wouldn't be jumping up and down about how big a fucking problem anthropogenic global warming actually is.

If it manages another 16 million units sold then the Switch becomes the best selling console ever, which is crazy. I was skeptical of the Switch and the hybrid concept (And I owned a freaking WiiU) but man was I wrong. Incredibly ballsy move by Nintendo.

Will it? Because I've been using traditional Internet forums since 2001 and they were never as useful to me as these subreddits are.

I think the heat death of the universe is going to come faster than his response.

So when did the "prior times" you're talking about take place?

The problem is not that the climate is changing, a gradually changing climate is normal. The problem is the speed at which it's happening is not gradual.

Think of it this way; when you're driving your car and you go from 60km/h to 0 in the span of twenty seconds, that's not a problem.
Now when you're driving your car and you go from 60km/h to 0 in a twentieth of a second, that's almost certainly a very big problem.

In the last few decades we've seen the climate change to a degree that would normally take multiple centuries, millennia even, and it's still speeding up.

It didn't say "Hottest day ever." it said "Hottest day ever recorded" as in, of all the days that have been recorded, this is hottest.

Sure, and I'd love to see much stronger, more stringent antitrust and antimonopoly regulations enacted on tech giants world wide, but that's not even on the table right now.
Right now we're much more likely to see a complete dismantling of what little antitrust regulations remain.

A lot of subreddits, especially the larger ones, are easily replaceable sure, but there are a whole bunch of much more niche subreddits I use that simply don't seem to have good replacements. Yeah there are forums that touch on the same topics, but they're not current the way these subreddits are and other social media platforms might be current, but they're so awash with low effort discussion and clickbait I find it exhausting to find any quality discussion.

Don't get me wrong there are plenty of subreddits that are just as bad, but these days my reddit experience is largely consists to a couple of dozen subreddits that, for me at least, hit the sweet spot of having accessible, up-to-date, quality discourse for these areas.

I think I understood the point you were trying to make: Governments should break up or nationalise absolute monopolies and let the markets sort out everything else.
I just think your suggestion that the threshold for antitrust action be limited to absolute monopolies is a poor one, as it would effectively mean the legalisation of any anticompetitive practices that fall short of creating absolute monopolies.

The approach of "If it's just a store whose policies you don't like... don't shop there." has it's place, but I think it's naïve to suggest it's suitable as a broad alternative to antitrust laws. In the real world there are a myriad of market frictions that prevent markets from achieving the level of efficiency required for "if don't like... don't shop there" to be an effective remedy to anti-competitive behaviour.

I'm not sure why you're bringing up fines and corporate culture, because this is an injunction they're appealing. In this case the injunction means Apple can no longer prohibit developers from linking to competing purchasing mechanisms.
Antitrust laws do not need to change corporate culture to be effective, they just need to be enforced. And increasing the threshold of antitrust laws to the level of absolute monopoly would undoubtedly be to the detriment of both consumers and emerging enterprises.