I realize that this is either some fancy-looking exercise that goes nowhere as cover for what actually happens; or a shoddy crypto con; but what possible justification would there be for coming up with a new gaza-specific stablecoin, if you thought that stablecoins were the correct answer, rather than one of the other ones that is already in wider circulation?

One day it's "AI Bubble is Going To Burst", the next it's "AI Is Going To Eat The Economy".

That's fair.

Well, no. It's true you can't buy books for the purposes of scanning them *and then making them available online* (Hachette v. Internet Archive). Scanning them for AI training is not settled law in every Federal District, although in at least one that has been ruled transformative and therefore allowable (Bartz v Anthropic, Northern District of California).

Indeed. One of the key areas in which AI research has lots of opportunity to advance is in efficiency. In theory, silicon-based intelligence should be both faster and more energy-efficient than neuronal intelligence because our neurons are actually quite slow and not terribly efficient. But the human brain's architecture obviously makes vastly more effective use of the processing power it has, so there's enormous opportunity for improvement in our current silicon analogs.

It will crack me up if after a few years and a few trillion dollars of investment into massive data centers for AI we make a big architectural efficiency breakthrough that makes the technology 3-4 orders of magnitude more efficient and renders all of those big data centers redundant. Perhaps we'll build out huge renewable energy production capacity to support AI and then suddenly find all of that capacity freed up for other purposes. Enormous green energy surpluses could power the carbon recapture needed to truly fix global warming as well as high-volume desalination and water pumping to fix water shortages... and lots more. That is, if AI doesn't kill us all.

Yeah, by comparing human energy consumption with AI energy consumption, this one seems to be arguing that their tech will replace human labor, and therefore, we won't need to feed the humans anymore.

You can't compare the energy spent training a model to the energy spent training a person, because unless you stop letting people procreate, you're not going to stop training the people. That's a committed cost. Future AI model training isn't.

I'm awaiting clarification on why all their arguments about why scraping is their god-given right don't apply when they are getting scraped.

Anthropic famously bought a lot of copyrighted books and scanned them to ingest into its model training corpus. Arguably they aren't violating copyright because what they are doing is *transformative* -- turning words into a statistical map of word associations.

But what China is doing by inferring the structure of that map doesn't touch on *any* kind of intellectual property of Anthropics. Sure, the map is a trade secret, but they've exposed that trade secret through their public interface. It's not human created so it's not copyrightable. Even if that map were patentable, which it probably isn't, it's not patented.

The worst you can say is that China is violating the service's terms of service, which may have no legal force there.

I think that's an open question. We can look at history and see how capitalism has evolved over the years. Historians can argue about whether it was inevitable for it to evolve the way it did. I'm sure there are good arguments on both sides. But ultimately it's an academic question. Capitalism did evolve in a particular way, and it's very different today from what it was 50 years ago.

He has a great point. Instead of cutting back on AI, we can start killing humans. They're completely interchangeable, after all. With more AI we won't "need" as many humans, so let's just eliminate them. Think of all the resources we'll free up to build more data centers!

There's plenty of room to quibble about how dubious his numbers are; but that's all secondary to the fact that he's not even pretending that the comparison is anything but one between humans and his preferred replacements at this point.

Sam Altman lives in his own hallucination, spouting bullshit.

Of course, we all know that half of global problems (climate change, pollution, too much energy usage, etc.) would disappear if half of the human population would vanish. But without Thanos, it's not like half of us would volunteer, right?

So, we don't have control over how many people there are. We DO have control over how much electricity we feed into AI systems.

As a lifelong cyclist, I agree in principle. The problem is over the last seventy-five years we have rearchitected the very geographic fabric of society to make *solving* our transportation problems with bike and public transit impossible.

Before WW2, Dad would leave the apartment and walk or take a trolley to work (usually in the same city neighborhood) while Ma "kept house" -- managed cooking, clearning, childcare, and the family's community and social engagement. In the 1950s and 60s, instead of an apartment, it'd be a suburban house. Ma would drop Pa off at the kiss and ride.

Today Mom and Dad both have jobs they have to get to, usually in *different* suburban employment areas; they can locate to make the commute easy for one, but they keep changing jobs every couple of years while their long-term wealth is being put into a geographically fixed asset: their house. They are financially anchored to their house as their jobs move around the region.

Car-dependency is baked into the very fabric of society, in a way you can't fix with transportation policy or projects--not without decades of projects. But we have reached the limits of the car-dependency model; we can't fix traffic by adding marginal car capacity as has been repeatedly demonstrated by freeway projects that fail to fix traffic because we're in an equillibrium between commute times and job selection.

Transit and bike infrastructure won't fix this, but they *can* make marginal improvements in the traffic situation by taking cars off the road for the minority of people who can use these alternatives at this particular point in their lives. I think e-bikes are going to be key. I personally wouldn't consider a ten mile commute by bike on roads shared with cars a barrier to commuting by bike, but most people wouldn't attempt it. E-bikes on bike infrastructure can make a ten mile commute practical for *normal* people, and take a significant number of cars off congested roads. Public transit could help, but again in a marginal, opportunistic way. In Europe or the US Northeast where car-dependency was overlaid on existing dense urban fabrics, there's a lot of opportunity for major transit projects. But for American cities in the West which have *no* center of mass to build around, solving car-dependency is likely a Moon-shot level project.

... who read "SMBH" as "Saturday Morning Breakfast Holes"? ;)