> collecting confidential intellectual property

Information just wants to be free.

This is great. I must be getting old since I'm actually finding buzzwords somehow useful now.

"no frills answers"

"vibe coding"

Such simple concepts and a common simple way of phrasing something to facilitate search and "communication".

A new shiny thing after cryptocurrency wound up as a commodity traded like so many others, and not the civilization-changing invention envisioned.

AI looks like it'll be hampered by power generation and delivery (or rather the lack thereof).

On the upside, there'll be ungodly amounts of money spent upgrading and expanding the power grid.

> Your copying that data digitally any way you cut it.

This, very much this. This is the reason we have the DMCA. VCR and DVD vendors were paranoid they were going to get sued for making "extra copies" inside the machine blitting video to your screen. So they "compromised" by signing the DMCA into law and creating a whole different landscape of rights and criminal prosecution for research.

I expect the other foot to fall soon, especially here in the USA. There will be new legislation and it won't be helpful or rational.

I think a better question is whether we are seeing capitalism's end game: concentration of wealth in the hands of so few they decide that it's in their interest to remove the governments power to regulate them. (As has been stated by more than a few national figures about deregulating to the point the US Federal government "can be drowned in a bathtub")

At which point the wealthy can simply assert the role they already hold: as our feudal lords. They hold all the means of production, all the means of information distribution.

They'll likely even have swarms of slaughter bots to enforce their will. What can the rest of us gonna do to stop them?

The problem is the same people are also entirely unable to see when they're being lied to / bullshitted in a different area. As a species, we just aren't skeptical enough in general, and we love when bullshit fits our desired narrative.

Context is important: The US had many of dead-ends that have been abandoned - Fusor (electrostatic confinement)) designs (still very useful, but not as a power source) lead the way for quite a while. Fusors are easily built by hobbyists, even. There was some hope that the Polywell would bring electrostatic to net energy production, but it seems that hope is gone.

The Soviet tokamak (magnetic confinement) seemed (and continues to be) more promising in the late 60's, and with that, most of the world started moving towards various forms of magnetic confinement - tokamak, stellarator and other more exotic forms of magnetic confinement. ITER being the biggest of the projects, and its construction expected to complete around 2033 currently.

The US's NIF seems to have reached the closest thing to breakeven, if only briefly, using inertial confinement.

As far as "winning" the race... well... it seems everybody is making claims about being about to do something. Lockheed made promises they couldn't keep a few years ago, there's this story, and no doubt China has their own overly optimistic predictions for their own prestige reasons.

At this point, I think ITER's delays are probably the most honest with the world about a reasonable timeline.

Yes. One wonders if it has an event horizon.

In fairness, Gates can afford to invest widely. And why not. It's not like he's gonna live forever.

> It's at first a statement of fact. "Not much of CO2 absoption by forests, soil and oceans in 2023".

The article linked by the article to the article wasn't very helpful.

Some mish-mash about "preliminary emulation of data-driven models" by someone focused more on climate policy changes than data collection. I'm not sure what standard models you are using that report on and predict how much carbon dioxide a tree "breathe's" in a given year, but I have trouble with the idea that a tree can simply cease to fix any carbon for a whole year, especially based on flimsy reporting like this.

I'd stick to more basic reporting from organizations like the Arbor Day foundation:

https://www.usda.gov/media/blo...

Trees do indeed fix carbon every year at a nearly constant rate. It doesn't simply disappear due to magic AI projected hokum. I'm not sure how much ambient temperature or other factors may affect that one tree's impact, but I don't think it will just disappear for no reason.

That prize already exists: You'll be swiftly extracted, and be transported immediately to a private island. It's excellent security a consequence of your unmarked grave.

> I know I'm an outlier here but this sort of thing...

Sorry, apathy really isn't an outlier in this focus group.

It was an HP-48G you insensitive clod!

RPN FTW !!!

OMG !! I almost forgot about those things. Do you prefer 1200 or 9600 baud?

> NT just didn't have plug and play back then

NT just didn't have plug and *pray* back then

Fixed that for you.

For what it's worth I never had troubles with drivers till they started getting "easier". (read manual, apply settings, possibly reboot, worked every time) There was a nasty period where I had to choose IRQ numbers manually, but even then it worked as long as they didn't collide.