When you damage functional DNA, the most common result is death rather than spider powers or hulk.

I think of DNA as instructions on how to do things and if you change the instructions for most things, it just dies.

Heart, lung, intenstines, veins, pancrease, etc. all matter a lot. Not to mention forgetting how to make bones, muscles, tendons, etc.

Yes, there is a 1 in a 100 case where you get a slow, drawn out death. And a 1 in a 1,000 where the change is minor enough to simply weaken you. And of course a 1 in 10,000 chance of a merely cosmetic difference and a 1 in 100,000 chance of minor improvement.

But all the other times, what you get is death.

Evolution is a cruel mistress. She makes the honey badger look empathetic.

My favorite answer is that the "big bang" is not unique. They don't occur often, but they do occur repeatedly. Possibly whenever the amount of matter within a light cone gets too sparse. So there would be *some* old pieces left around.

N.B.: Calling this a speculative model is giving it too much credit. It's just a Wild Ass Guess. But I don't know enough to convince myself that it's wrong.

Yes, I get that it is new(ish) idea, but so what.

Phone numbers are extremely private information that sane people should not be giving to corporations. There are these things called spam calls - often robocalls but sometimes even human telemarketing.

There are reasons why beautiful women do not just give their phone number out - they do not want their time to be wasted on 'losers'.

Giving out your phone number to someone you do not know is incredibly stupid.

Phone numbers are personal, private information that should be protected.

So why in the world is it legal for businesses to download other peoples list of phone numbers?

We should just make it illegal to even ask to upload your list of friends' phone numbers.

What will happen is that this level of quality will become uninteresting to everyone, because its ubiquity will devalue it and it will become associated with "cheap AI slop". So even if a movie company does go to the trouble of making an action movie with intense fight sequences, it won't get a lot of viewership. Why buy a movie ticket for that, when you can see infinite variations of the same thing at home for free? As Syndrome put it, "when everyone is special, no one is".

What will likely become valued instead is good characterization and engaging storytelling... at least until an AI comes out that can replicate and commoditize that too.

This is mildly interesting, but if they removed the VR teleoperation and instead required the robots to include an AI that they have trained to box (and ideally, also trash talk its opponent) it would be a lot more interesting.

Change the pollution laws so that large vehicles have to meet the same standards as small vehicles did in 2025.

The 2025 rules encourage large vehicles that pollute more. This encouraged larger vehicles that cost more money (and polluted more) AND also prevented their sale outside of the US where nobody wanted large, expensive, polluting vehicles.

Trump is trying to just eliminate the rules/raise the limits on pollution. This will not help sales outside the US.

We need to return to the time where Japan, Sweden, Germany bought American cars. Ceeding those markets because we would rather just pollute more and make expensive cars is stupid.

I always thought this quote was self-contradictory.

Disease are just other life forms. The only creatures that dislike them are the creatures they attack. This is not an insult.

Its little different than saying:

"Dogs are a plague upon fire hydrants."

That is not an insult, it is a description of a predatory relationship. If someone were to hunt down and kill all dogs because of what they do to fire hydrants, we would jail him for being psychotic.

It's 2035, and as you're walking down the street, a stranger furtively motions towards you from a doorway. "Hey buddy", he says. "I got here a 10TB thumb drive filled with humanity's 2 million most popular songs. It's yours for $50. Buy this and you can listen to music 24/7 for the next 22 years without ever repeating a song".

In a moment of weakness, you agree to the purchase, and it turns out the stranger was true to his word -- all the promised music is on the drive, pirated and mp3-compressed for your listening pleasure.

Now the question is, how do you go about ordering the playback? Random shuffle? Start at A and work your way to Z? Keyword search? Task an AI to choose a good mix for you? Something else?

It also seems to me that there is prior art. I'm sure I've gotten feedback from spammers pretending to be someone who was actually dead.

They just sell direct
I mean they've got all the data they've got a brazilion computers to store and process that data.
What do they need flock for in the first place?

If you consider only the climate itself, then it probably won't be utter hell -- large portions of the Earth will still be perfectly livable.

But at the same time -- large, currently highly populated portions of the Earth will no longer be livable, and all of those dispossessed people are going to have to go somewhere else, and compete for the remaining resources of the places that remain livable... which means refugee flows, and famine, and xenophobia, and violence, and war. That's where the utter hell is going to come from. Too many mouths chasing not enough grain.

I wouldn't describe the deaths of billions as "win/win". More like "lose/lose/lose/lose/lose/lose/win/lose/lose/lose/lose", maybe.

The thing is, they wanted to be deceived -- that gave them an out. Now they can go to their graves with a clear conscience, because they "know" global warming is a myth and therefore they didn't really doom their grandchildren. That's all they wanted, is some comforting lies that would give them permission to not worry about it.