> Funny, how the authors don't hate the would-be arsonists — nowhere close to their disdain for the "rich and powerful", who might (might not!) profit from the betting...

Not really funny, it's pretty obvious they're trying to discourage arsonists. If you'd read your own post before posting it, you'd have noticed they haven't written in opposition to people betting on "hurricanes, floods, and tsunamis", which you give as examples of "similar" things but give lipservice to the fact they can't be man made.

This is specifically about avoiding rewarding people for placing bets on wildfires existing and then organizing their creation. You'd have to be dumber than a libertarian or Trump supporter not to see that.

Given your username, have you not seen the sheer amount of pro-AI BS that's been infesting every aspect of society?

Even Bernie Sanders has bought the propaganda.

I use so little EA stuff these days Deluxe Paint is literally the first thing I think of when I hear the name!

I guess it's like hearing "HP printer" and thinking of those awesome postscript-running built-like-tanks laser printers nobody could afford in the 1980s/90s rather than $100 ink.

How the mighty have fallen *sighs*

Does this mean I can't use Deluxe Paint III on my Amiga any more? *sighs* OK then!

You're the one claiming it's well-known, but you are unable to provide a single link.

Figures.

Worth it for what? If the answer is a different financial motivation, then it's just a different form of corruption.

NONE of them have done this, not in 250 years. Not until Trump. Presidents make a lot of money after they leave office, yes, especially in recent decades. They command incredible speaking fees (Obama famously got $400k for one speech), they write books that make millions, etc. There are lots of people who are willing to give them money to get close to them, get their advice, etc.

But until Trump, none of them has used the office of the president to make money. No one else has sold pardons. No one else has set up a public stock and a memecoin to facilitate billions of dollars in bribes. No one else has brazenly sold insider secrets to stock traders.

Trump's corruption isn't just new in scale, it's a completely new thing that the United States of America has never before seen. We've seen plenty of corruption elsewhere in government, at all levels, but never in the oval office.

> But that narrative was the only thing that could have made the large LLMs profitable and it was what brought the employee-hating CEOs on board.

Doesn't have to be sustainable, just needs to keep businesses using them for long enough that critical business knowledge is lost among employees who become reliant upon the LLM providers for everything.

The question was never "Is this unsustainable if taken at face value", because the plot was never to sell useful services, it was to take over most US businesses by making them unable to run themselves. The question now is whether they managed to keep it going for long enough that this will happen, or whether the crash will happen before that to happen.

People often describe BigAI as a con. But BigAI is better described as a heist.

Because a lot of corps are saying the opposite right now, saying you'll be judge on your use of AI, and punished for your lack of use of it.

Which is why you get insane shit like people punching bullet points into ChatGPT telling it to expand it into a full email, and the recipient receiving it and putting that into ChatGPT to summarize it as a set of bullet points.

I'd say I'm glad the companies who have been doing this are the ones who'll eventually go tits up when the bill comes in (which is more than the cost of tokens, it's the lack of control over their own businesses), but the reality is that management isn't the group that'll suffer. The people fired for non-compliance with this stupidity are merely the first in a long line of people who'll get hurt despite never doing anything more than what their managers said they had to do.

This timeline absolutely sucks.

True, but it's almost always faster than the flow of electrons...well, if it goes at all.

They're both quite different from the US, but saying they're about the same is both weird and wrong. The Chinese are rebuilding the imperium, which was sometimes good and sometimes quite bad. The Russians...they seem to be in the process of destroying their country. The reports I have heard are now a couple of decades old, but they indicated that they country was largely run by non-government-based gangs.

No. But Cornish, however...

Well, Apple *appears* to be doing the right things. This may be accurate, but don't feel too certain.

So your mistake is thinking they're all alike. (Unless that was sarcasm or other humor.)