< RAM> prices are going to drop ... unless big-data ( AI / LLM / data-center ) is hell-bent on removing personal computers from almost everyone.  Like the  early Mafia removed Italian crushed tomatoes and olive oil from Irish-owned markets. Early computer executives ( IBM / Dec etc ) thought the idea of widespread computer ownership was ridiculous ... not because relevant tasks didn't exist  ... but because they were certain large companies could keep the PCs out of the retail market. For 30 years  THEIR monopoly  succeed ... then they failed for 40 years ... now again compute power is retreating to the "cathedrals" of BIG DATA . Welcome to the Feudalistic compute age.

Sorry Ami, but I'm gonna have to give a bit of a counter here.

Starfleet Academy was referenced in TNG and DS9 as a prestigious institution, only accepting the best. Wesley Crusher and Nog were both shown as really needing to be at the top of their game in order to be accepted into the academy. In Academy...pretty much everything was "find yourself and who you feel you really are, and the team will work around that".

Meanwhile, the setup for the story was that Holly Hunter left Starfleet because she was upset about a particular mother and son (Caleb) she separated when she was a judge, so she left, and now Starfleet needs Her In Particular to be a professor at Starfleet Academy (really, a whole universe full of people and we need one person who wasn't a teacher and resigned?), and she goes to find Caleb In Particular to join Starfleet because he's good at everything, in exchange for helping him find his mother...except that the "find my mother" plot thread is barely there, and not even Caleb seems to care for most of the season.

As the show gets going, Starfleet Academy (the institution) takes place on a ship that can just land and be a building, depending on what's necessary...and they go on a bunch of super dangerous missions that really require seasoned officers to do, but they have a bunch of cadets doing stuff they clearly shouldn't be doing...for, some reason. And they go out in space to do it instead of doing it all on the holodeck where it's far safer for...some reason. And, somehow, they're almost never in class in this college, except for one episode where we watch them be in debate class. Okay, fine, but...no engineering classes? No tactical training? No indication that they're actually learning to do the things we've seen Starfleet officers doing in the field?

Most of the show centered around the interpersonal drama, and I'll even grant some leniency here because it was pitched as having a "Dawson's Creek / Harry Potter" sort of coming-of-age focus. uhm...okay, fine...but quite a number of episodes had so much of that sort of focus, that it barely needed to be "Star Trek" to do it. They brought in the 'war college' to create some allusion to the Harry Potter houses, but do we spend a meaningful amount of time with sympathetic characters in The War College? No, we don't. Do we have any meaningful thought put behind the possibility that perhaps there's a need for a military-focused part of Starfleet in a universe that has physics-defying pirates (the last episode requiring an impossible feat of travel and resource acquisition), the way that Enterprise had the MACO's or the Elite Force games had the Hazard Team? ...no, they should join Starfleet Academy instead, where we learn nothing because Caleb already knows everything, everywhere, ever! And SAM only needed to realize that she's wonderful and perfect and had nothing to learn at all, so of course she's a perfect candidate for an institution of higher learning!

Finally, at least for my personal opinion, I found absolutely every single character insufferable for one reason or another. Holly Hunter is a captain-slash-professor who tells her leadership to get bent, and is shocked when the cadets have authority issues? I forget her name, but the Jem Hadar lady was generally annoying and useless, and somehow I got the feeling that half the cadets could have taken her in hand-to-hand combat. Caleb was "the key to everything", Genesis was every popular girl trope simultaneously, Ja'den was the living embodiment of 'not-Klingon'. The writers were clearly going for 'child-like' with SAM, but ended up at 'child-ish' instead. Tig Notaro was Tig Notaro playing Tig Notaro. You get the point.

Please note that I got through my whole list of exceptions without complaining one bit about "wokeness" or "politics in Star Trek" or anything related to it.

Your so right. The fear-mongering by AI /LLM vendors  < this escape .... that attack ... another danger ... >  is almost comic, and has zero sense of embarrassment. AI will find a nitch(s) at 5% of market projected by its /devs & evangelists. Shame on them, but good for tfor us.  But, did the tek really require the ( near fraudulent ) massive over-reach in financials, effort and propaganda ? Kinda like M-Theory with semi-colons.

Check the paper: < https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889157516302113 > .... the decrease in  vegetable nutrition may be small, while availability vastly increases.  Maybe it balances out. Of-course "food store" fruits and veggies taste like shite, compared to what you could pick  yourself.

After update-induced crashes, just switched my systems from Ubuntu to Debian-13. I will not get fooled again.

First the regenerative agriculture people manage to create cows with internal fusion, now plants can do it too?

Ntrogen and carbon can come from the air, the rest not so much.

I believe the point is ... Euro-elites reject  peasants  owning either horse or "car". Self-chosen travel for work or play or ... betterment? Beyond the kin of Franco-Italian-German warrlords ... and heresy to The Church. "Know your place -- peon".

Giving out work visas for some vague supply gap was always a bad idea with perverse incentives. Compounding it with the PERM fiction for green cards, even worse.

Democrats should have implemented immigration registry reform while they could.

Retired now, but this simplicity sticks in my craw and deserves to be called-out .  Read the "anti-solutions" paper on Navier-Stokes . They have chosen a special case of a special case namely : d<rho> = 0 ( incomprehensible ) is NEVER perfectly  true ... and  over any range of shear-gradients the viscous force  is NEVER linear. ... usually wildly so. So they say a non-existant fluid disobeys Navier Stokes.  An "exact" mathematical result that assumes an  inexact parameter choice is no proof to me.  Reminds me of anti-DeSitter space calculations / predictions  pretending to be "physics" ; instead it was a fairy-tail.

All you constraints you advise are reasonable. I have no problem with "socialization of risk" ... as there IS nothing else, but social wants/needs. i would of-course strongly limit :"privatization of benefits".  Wealthy workers can  with great effort reclaim enshitified land. Citizens of my home-town of Scranton Pa got screwed-over by the mining interests, who took their profits from raping the beautiful valley ...  ditched the miners ... and left town. Scranton never recovered, and I suspect the same will be true for those providing energy/land for the LLM-farms.

Home and hobby users already have such an "efficient" system. My Debian-13 / MATE / Librewolf system running on  10 Y/O XEON-1240 / GF 3050 and 24-Gig DDR3 barely uses 15% of RAM during active surfing. Eight-cores are mostly asleep. I'd guess many of us non-gamers  have skipped the "RAMpocalypse". Granted , I'm on a slow WiFi network.

A well-spoken argument ...  and to be balanced against the human desire for warmth in  icy winter and coolness in  roasting summer. Those are health,  productivity & agency  issues, crucial to risk/reward judgement, and  even more basic than toxic radiation. Stated crudely ... live like a savage or < threat of > die by radiation poisoning ... or coal-smoke ... of frack-contaminated water ... or three weeks of no sun & no wind ... or a huge solar-flare that takes out all common energy-producing electronics.  Indeed: the only case worth considering is the "worst case" ... because that's the one that kills you.  Thus ...  those  few who live unaccustomed to physical risk are poor judges of energy sourcing options.

Does not matter in this case, if they don't host an online version of it. My impression is that Siemens wants to shut down the project completely.

Altman really is a sociopathic piece of shite; toxic as lead-sweetened wine.  Probably thinks HE is in good company. As a deep red social conservative,  I can see  -- thru Altmans' et. al. behavior -- the triggers  for rational "progressive" social views  & actions.  Damnable person.

"ye olde genetic bottleneck means all humans are fairly inbred"

Yes, this is standard dogma. And yet ... look around you . How many base-pair changes are required to change an average-human into a raving "mongoloid" ? Is that number 10^3  or  10^6 or ... just ... 10 ?  One unfortunate change in amino-acid sequence can destroy  an enzyme function. I know ... "...compared to other species..." , but that is not the issue.