Interesting. Mythologized an eon later, "Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat, the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.

—Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (c.1800 BCE)"

Those address the first application of spoken language to writing. Just to confuse matters a bit more, "The first writing can be dated back to the Neolithic era, with clay tablets being used to keep track of livestock and commodities." (per the wiki. I'll have to look more into this, I don't know if I've seen anything about it.) I have read that Egyptian hieroglyphics were originated for accounting. (Allegedly for beer, but I read about this in a "history of beer" article, so YMMV.)

I wish we had Feynman's insights around now. Besides the science of the small, here's what he had to say in '04 about what we have come to call AI today:

"Everybody who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to
the conclusion that the possibilities of computers are very interesting---if they could be made to be more
complicated by several orders of magnitude. If they had millions of times as many elements, they could make
judgments. They would have time to calculate what is the best way to make the calculation that they are about
to make. They could select the method of analysis which, from their experience, is better than the one that we
would give to them. And in many other ways, they would have new qualitative features"

Those are both the same stalker troll, I've seen it post over a dozen replies to a single post of mine, pretty much all pro-US propaganda. A lot of its post are just bot-like, and may be a poorly programmed bot, but the rest indicate a truly pitiful life. It may be the same one who stalks rsilvergun, although not quite as fanatically.

The 'Business Ethics' classes are what taught the up and coming execs that ROI, share price, and quarterly results are the only thing that matters.

It's a growing niche, with every indication of eventually turning what it is displacing into a niche. If we want to go by your last post about cars, 1 in 5 new cars sold last year worldwide was electric and it's a growing market. For the electric shipping question, you first talked about electric shipping like it couldn't be done. When I pointed it that it can, you acted like ships stopping at ports to fuel wasn't a thing and that, anyway, that would mean spending money on infrastructure and having to spend money on infrastructure somehow precludes a thing from happening, the entirety of our modern civilization somehow notwithstanding. From my perspective, it seems like you're on the losing side of a lost cause. You just seem to really, really want electrification to fail in the face of the fact that internal combustion engines appear to be at their peak, but EV systems are still developing and improving (I mean, the motors are at maximum efficiency, but the battery technology is definitely still improving). For the life of me, I can't really understand why you're so insistent on fossil fuel tech over more modern and sustainable technology.

Philips and Bell had executives who had come up through the ranks, knew their industry, and intended to stay with the company long term. Today's executives are uniformly MBAs and lawyers who have spent their entire careers hopping from one job to another in a game of 'Executive Musical Chairs', bumping up quarterly profits with short term fixes to ensure their bonuses, hoping to not be in the corner office when the music stops and the results of their bad decisions tanks the company. What interest do they have in long term investment when by the time it bears fruit someone else will be reaping the benefits?

When my wife started working at Target the CEO had started on the sales floor three decades earlier, by 2010 there wasn't a single person in the executive offices who had ever worked at a low level retail job. The entire company was being run by people who had no idea what the employees who kept it functioning day to day actually did, and the decisions coming from Minneapolis showed it.

Zeek teh Cockroach: "Must have something to do with those disgusting Scarabs."

The gift that keeps on giving. I was idly wondering why we have Bronze age, Iron age, etc., but no Clay age, then realized every age is a Clay age.

Thought a little more and wondered when pottery was first created, and found China was doing it around 18000BC, and we've been labeling the different potteries over time and space. So in a way we do have different "Clay Ages", but it's delineated in the descriptions of the technology and styles of the main product of the clay used by different civilizations.

Not yet but I’ll go see it soon What makes me really sad though is that being a “non franchise movie” is now enough of a thing for it to be pointed out specifically. All the big productions these days are in some “universe”, part of a franchise, a sequel or prequel or reboot. God forbid a studio dares to allot a blockbuster budget to an original work.

I put an awful lot of the blame on the introduction of the 'Business Ethics' courses in the '70s, and the flood of MBAs with no real-world employment experience in the '80s. When you have guys that have never worked a day in their lives (and six figures of debt) coming in to manage businesses about which they know little to nothing, having been erroneously taught that their one and only duty is to enrich shareholders, it's a recipe for disaster. Then combine that with executive pay plans hyper-focused on quarterly returns, and the resulting meltdown was utterly predictable and unfortunately unavoidable.

Once they come of age, they can verify their age by whatever means provided, and flip the adult flag.

Ah. I know this one. XKCD reference here. So that you don't have to follow the link if you don't want to, it shows one of the stock characters showing a bride a graph indicating that, since she had 0 husbands yesterday, and 1 today, she'll have over four dozen husbands by late next month. In other words, it's cute that you can only make linear extrapolations.

As for ships and trucks not having worked yet. They, in fact, have, but they're still a niche. Sensible extrapolation of the technology shows them becoming more and more mainstream.

So now we're talking about consumer BEVs? Quite aside from the fact that you're intentionally downplaying the capabilities of BEVs, you're also exaggerating the sales situation. Despite the dip in sales when the Trump administration eliminated the tax credit, 2025 was still the second best year for US EV sales on record. Then, of course, we come full circle to the actual point of the article after all your goalpost shifting. The large rise in gas prices due to Trump's war is renewing interest in EVs. While it is too soon to have sales numbers, other indicators like web searches, etc. indicate increased interest. Of course, if we want to reverse the goalpost shifting altogether, we can go back to your first post and point out, as throughout this discussion, that electric ships and trucks are indeed making their way into shipping from producers.

The latter, I think. For instance, Philips was by no means a monopoly, but they had a similar long-term vision. Philips Research generated a similar number of patents, and their researchers were very much encouraged to publish papers and engage with the wider scientific community.

Probably humanoid robots, it's already happening in China:

https://jingdaily.com/posts/ch...