Me from 2000: https://dougengelbart.org/coll...
        "Powertech -- Twenty years to widespread fuel cells, PV, wind, microturbines, etc.
  Source: My general reading in this area, like my previous post on energy issues. ..."

The referenced energy post by me from 2000: https://dougengelbart.org/coll...
        "The current land area used in the US related to fossil fuel mining, refining, storage, and distribution is roughly 1% of the US land area. So, it is not fair to say renewables would use a similarly large amount of area and disregard this amount of space used by conventional techniques. For example, the area under existing power lines in the US (for right of ways - a huge expanse) is sufficient to generate all electric power used in the US if it was covered with photovoltaics. ... Recent advances in photovoltaics (especially combining light collection of visible spectrum piped to interiors with power conversion of remaining wavelengths) may soon make them much more competitive. ...
        There are no easy answers, but remember the incredible number of people who use energy (all of us) and the large numbers of people who are already involved with the energy industry in some way. So, there are many people to implement solutions. Don't be too overwhelmed by large numbers and costs. If fossil fuel and nuclear solutions were fairly priced today in terms of external costs like tax subsidies, environmental damage, and military requirements, we would see an immediate switch to alternatives and more energy efficient technology.
          For that reason, I am quite hopeful for our energy future -- especially if developing countries can be given advanced technology, rather than having them simply duplicate the current antiquated American fossil fuel infrastructure. Unfortunately, the politics and finances of development often entail developing nations being sold the technology that no one wants anymore in the developed world (like for example DDT or old nuclear reactor and dam designs).
        We need to figure out ways to prevent that from happening with energy technology the same way it has happened in the past with other technologies. ..."

Me from 2010: https://groups.google.com/g/op...
        "As I've said before, if you look at the exponential growth of renewables, in twenty to thirty years we will be completely running off renewables. This [questionable "Net Energy Limits and the Fate of Industrial Society"] report is like a report in the 1980s saying there is no way that most people will own cell phones because only about a million people a year are buying cell phones and it would take seven thousand years for everyone to get a cell phone at that rate. But now half the Earth's population does have cell phones? What happened? Exponential growth."

Ray Kurzweil also predicted exponential solar growth back in 2000 or so.

So yeah, who would have thunk it?

I mean, it's not like there might have been financial incentives for industry groups to provide misleading predictions, right?
"Why Does the IEA Always Underestimate Solar Energy's Rapid Growth?"
https://247wallst.com/energy/2...
        "Using data from the agency's World Economic Outlook (WEO) for 13 of the past 16 years, Hoekstra graphed the actual growth of solar PV installation (the thick black line on the following chart) against the IEA predictions from the WEO. The starting point for each year's new prediction moves higher and in some years sharply higher. Hoekstra notes that "every single time since the future of photovoltaics was first predicted in the IEA WEO in 2002, the WEO has assumed the sector would hardly grow or even contract, even though this runs contrary to the observed reality."
        Because the IEA's WEO is a widely used source for policy makers around the world, consistently underestimating the growth of solar PV when the data say otherwise discourages investment in solar and can hold back even faster growth. ...
        Hoekstra, in a blog post last June, offers some possible explanations for the IEA's low and inaccurate predictions: ... The IEA could have been captured by the old fossil energy order in terms of thinking or interests. This could be conscious or unconscious. I would guess largely unconscious because I'm a firm believer in Hanlon's razor. ..."

Everyone knows that 10x engineers validate inputs and carefully manage dependencies; so clearly there's no risk of unexpected behavior.

It seems worth noting that one of the items in Wyden's rather pointed inquiry is the fact that the feasibility of doing this is known to have been demonstrated for the DoD by outside people familiar with it at least as early as 2016; so while this is the first confirmed case of adversarial use it's the outcome of at least a decade of just ignoring the problem; and a significantly longer period of failing to reasonably anticipate the problem. It's not like there's No Such Agency you could ask about "how could you spy on someone with the internet even?" if you wanted to know how well or poorly readily available information matched a nation state signals intelligence apparatus.

Purely as a matter of cellphones being expensive and somewhat tepidly capable in the before times I assume that there was a period within living memory when merely telling people not to Gordon Gekko on their DynaTAC where the russians can hear you was good enough; but that would have clearly and rapidly been getting less true for at least a quarter century.

The whole 'responsible disclosure' preaching and the not-terribly-subtle threats seem particularly bad given that there's an entire industry of actively more dangerous people who are not only treated as legal but actively courted by state agents and cops(and often even less savory customers, though they tend to be cagey about those); the ones who actively seek to keep vulnerabilities quiet so that they can continue to sell exploit tools and services based on them. Throwing zero days on github isn't ideal vs. getting them fixed; but it gets them fixed faster than if Cellebrite wants to hang on to a bitlocker bypass or Trenchant, and L3Harris Technologies Company, wants to keep selling 'network investigative techniques' that can bypass default windows defender configurations or whatever the situation is.

From the outside it's hard to know whether MS actually mistreated the researcher badly enough to justify their displeasure(the consensus appears to be that MSRC was never the best to deal with and has actively gone downhill; but this person's position seems significantly angrier than average) or whether they are perhaps wound a little tight; but implying that their legal status is the same as people actively running attacks against user systems is blatantly false and totally ignores the class of researchers who do actively run attacks while being treated as respectable.

It's a particularly bad look when at least Facebook got into a public legal fight with the NSO group over their nerd-merc work against their users; not like that actually solved the problem of attacks on cellphones; but it was an all-too-rare case of industry pushing back against the 'respectable' arms dealers; and not one that MS has an analog to.

We'll all pretend that nuclear-tipped VCs will remain cool-headed and cooperative when the AI debts start to go sour.

As I talked about circa 2001 at the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001:
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...

And earlier: https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
And a later version: https://www.oscomak.net/

And Slashdot in 2005 and later:
"We need DOGS as well as CATS!"
https://slashdot.org/comments....
https://science.slashdot.org/c...
        "So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
        So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored ... or a couple other sites I made in that direction: ... My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now. ..."

Earlier companion ideas from 1988:
https://pdfernhout.net/princet...
And circa 1990: https://pdfernhout.net/sunrise...

Anyway, that stuff is all mothballed at this point, but the ideas remain essential. Along with the idea that thinking through how to support human life in space can lead to ideas that better support life on earth.

For example, here is a Slashdot article from today -- sounding almost like this is a new idea to process a rock into all it constituent minerals:
"IT Researchers Develop a Low-Cost Technique To Get Lithium Out of Rocks "
https://science.slashdot.org/s...

But in 1980 a NASA workshop (under Jimmy Carter) includes documentation for an "HF Acid Leach Process" for processing lunar ore into separate components (which did not specifically over Lithium but presumably could be expanded for that).
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions"
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citation...
"TABLE 4.12.-- RESEARCH DIRECTIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW PROCESSING TECHNOLOGIES FOR UTILIZATION OF LUNAR AND SILICATE MINERALS (Criswell, 1979) ...
3. Chemical processing:
* Demonstrate the electrorefining and alloying of metallic "free" iron.
* Demonstrate with simulated lunar soils on the bench-scale level the HF acid leach, ammonium salt fusion, and mixed acid leaching based on adaptations of well-known terrestrial industrial and laboratory procedures for extracting major oxides and elements (0, Si, Al, Mg, Ti, Ca, Fe) from a wide range of bulk lunar soils. Rates of throughput, recycle efficiencies, and separability data should be determined in these demonstration experiments. Implications of reagent composition from native lunar materials should be determined.
* Recycle chemistry: Investigation of alternative methods of salt splitting or recycling acids and fluorides.
Topics: Pyrolysis of NH4 F. Conversion of metal fluorides to compounds more readily pyrolyzed - sulfites, formates, oxalates, etc. Conversion to hydroxides with NH3 . Conversion of NaF (from sodium reduction) to Na, HF, and 0 2 via NaOH and Castner cell, or from fused fluorides using consumable anodes.
* Literature studies of methods to recover minor and trace element fractions obtainable from immiscible liquid extraction of magmas (molten fluids) such as would occur in glass production. ..."

See also the diagram: "Figure 5.41.-- Flowsheet and process equations for the HF acid-leach process."

We could have had such technology decades ago if we had made the investment into sustainable "cradle to cradle" design and manufacturing (motivate din part by space habits but also earthly needs).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Cradle-to-cradle design (also referred to as 2CC2, C2C, cradle 2 cradle, or regenerative design) is a biomimetic approach to the design of products and systems that models human industry on nature's processes, where materials are viewed as nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms. The term itself is a play on the popular corporate phrase "cradle to grave", implying that the C2C model is sustainable and considerate of life and future generations--from the birth, or "cradle", of one generation to the next generation, versus from birth to death, or "grave", within the same generation.
        C2C suggests that industry must protect and enrich ecosystems and nature's biological metabolism while also maintaining a safe, productive technical metabolism for the high-quality use and circulation of organic and technical nutrients. It is a holistic, economic, industrial and social framework that seeks to create systems that are not only efficient but also essentially waste free.[2] Building off the whole systems approach of John T. Lyle's regenerative design, the model in its broadest sense is not limited to industrial design and manufacturing; it can be applied to many aspects of human civilization such as urban environments, buildings, economics and social systems."

This also connects to Bucky Fuller's "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.bfi.org/about-full...

That's all initiative the USA lost by offshoring manufacturing to China and elsewhere. I hope at least engineers in China and elsewhere will see the merit of comprehensive C2C design eventually.

Sadly, I did not go to my 41st Princeton Reunion, so I missed the chance to remind my sometimes Physics lab partner (and then-president of of the local SEDS chapter) about all this. Sad to hear one of his rockets blew up yesterday:
"Blue Origin rocket explodes into huge ball of flame on Florida launch pad"
https://www.bbc.com/news/artic...

Again though, we have long had the rockets -- like the Saturn V from the 1960s -- even though it is true they could be better. What we don't have is knowing in detail what to put in the rocket payloads! Or how to operate the bases or habitats the payloads would produce.

At least games like "The Planet Crafter" and "Satisfactory" and others (including Minecraft and Vintage Story) explore that all a bit. Some others including Moonbase Alpha:
"Games created in collaboration with NASA"
https://steamcommunity.com/gro...

I'm not an expert on rebuilding massively exploded launch infrastructure; but I have a suspicion that a 2026-2029 plan is now going to involve less Blue Origin than previously believed.

Oh, they know; it's more that you can't really put "fuck palantir!" in an encyclical; but you absolutely can choose which perfectly plausible catholic author to quote in your piece on how weaponized AI is bad; and going with Tolkien over the other options seems deliberate.

When "AI-enthused defense contractors with names out of Tolkien" are literally a genre I suspect that he chose that particular citation because he knew it would lead to a few amusing crashouts.

Isn't much of the point here the cultural shove? Sure, there's the line-go-up stuff; but that doesn't explain the companies gutting quite profitable software development operations to shovel money at Nvidia for things that have no demonstrated ROI; if it were nothing personal, just business, the level of enthusiasm for taking on poorly characterized risk would not be as fervent as it is. It's absolutely about resentment of the human resources that has been running at least as long as the demonstration that it would actually take some shoving to get them all to come back to the office, likely significantly longer.

It's the significantly less common case, for some combination of a lot of high-visibility stupidity being lethal and lethal accidents being public in ways that the details of nonlethal accidents aren't; but destruction of gonads under sufficiently foolish circumstances qualifies a living recipient.

They already pretty much are. You have to do at least a little performative fretting about the risks, which spoils the enjoyment of pure cheering at the best crunching sounds; but there's no way we'd justify the level of recreational head trauma something like football produces if we didn't fundamentally regard the players as relevant only the the way racehorses are.

To support your point about a need for broad social&environmental improvements, consider: "The [critical of] RFK Jr. Op-Ed the Los Angeles Times Didn't Want You to Read"
https://www.yahoo.com/news/rfk...
        "... For decades, U.S. public health policy has been dictated by neoliberal principles that prioritize privatization, deregulation, "free" markets, and associated profits over public care systems. ... Illness is framed as a matter of individual behavior and personal failure--poor diet, sedentary lifestyles, or smoking, for example--rather than the result of policies that undermine rights to healthy environments. ... Meanwhile, social problems like poverty, isolation, and trauma are medicalized, treated as individual pathologies requiring individualistic interventions, like often-ineffective pharmaceuticals or psychotherapy that cannot touch root causes, while ignoring the necessity of investing in systemic, collective solutions. This diverts resources from community-based social care and prevention, generating profits for industry while leaving patients with endless bills and disappointments. ... For example, policies like universal childcare, housing-first initiatives, and direct cash transfers improve health outcomes while reducing poverty and economic insecurity. During the pandemic, expanded child tax credits and direct payments helped millions of families and brought dramatic health and safety improvements to communities--proof that public investments can make an enormous difference for public health. ... In this spirit, this approach to public health centrally prioritizes community-based, nonprofessional care services that have been shown to improve both mental and physical health while reducing medical needs and health care costs. ..."

Some satire similar to the logic fossil fuels sometimes uses against renewables:

(begin satire) Smoke alarms are a leading cause of deaths and fires in the home. Every years, lots of people are killed falling off of ladders to change smoke alarm batteries. False alarms from smoke detectors cause numerous kitchen injuries as people using kitchen knives are startled and accidentally cut themselves or stab nearby family members. Smoke detectors wired into home electrical systems can short out and burn down your home. Radiation from smoke detectors causes cancer. Many firefighter deaths are attributed to responding to smoke alarms. Worse, the Dihydrogen Monoxide used by firefighters responding to smoke detectors is itself a dangerous substance responsible for thousands of deaths annually. The answer to all this ongoing carnage is simple -- keep deadly smoke alarms out of your home if you want to stay safe! Brought to you by the American Association Of Cosmetic Undertakers, For-Profit Burn Care Centers, and Companies Rebuilding Homes After Extensive Fire Damage. (end satire)

For a more accurate picture about smoke detectors, consider what the National Fire Protection Association has to say:
https://www.nfpa.org/education...
"Smoke alarms save lives. Smoke alarms that are properly installed and maintained play a vital role in reducing fire deaths and injuries. Fire spreads fast--working smoke alarms give you early warning so you can get outside quickly. ... When working smoke alarms are present in your home, the risk of dying in a home fire is cut by 60 percent, according to the latest NFPA research."

As I wrote about in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Or the YouTube video:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."