You know, if it was anything but Twitter, I could at least have an ounce of sympathy. I remember Tumblr getting a bunch of cheap heat over its active community of furry enthusiasts. Valve cracked down on a bunch of lewd games in their Steam Store, largely out of prudishness. Reddit’s been a notorious hub for revenge porn since forever, and its still been considered draconian to blank-ban the whole site.

But pretty much everyone drew the line at CSAM. Hell, 4chan generally drew the line at CSAM. Sites that had virtually no moderation still managed to swing their tiny hammers at CSAM wherever it cropped up.

Twitter seems to have fully embraced this shit with an enthusiasm that can only be described as satanic. Just really, nakedly, unapologetically evil. Maybe Sweeny just doesn’t get that, and he’s reflexively defending another billionaire from the oppressive hand of Big Government Regulation. Maybe the dude’s just a nounce and thinks CSAM is no big deal. Either way, someone needs to rub his nose in it until he gets the picture.

We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least.

I’d hardly call the 1998 average of $12/W affordable. It was possible, but not practical.

I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.

Even in the mid-'10s, solar instillation were something of a luxury and - thanks to the high cost of batteries - only practical for deferring daytime electricity consumption. The root of the Solyndra scandal was Obama pushing a domestic solar manufacturer as an alternative to Chinese solar imports (which were, themselves, far more expensive than they should be thanks to steep US tarriffs imposed in 2014)

I don’t think anyone was questioning solar viability. But we were still talking about break-even prices on a 5-10 year horizon, heavily predicated on electricity costs outpacing inflation. As a hedge against periodic brownouts or price spikes during a heat wave, it was useful. Now the materials are a third the price and the number of installers has surged to accommodate rising demand. It’s just a much better deal.

Schools generally buy anything microsoft offers with the little budget they have.

Far more Pearson than Microsoft. The “teach to the test” regime is all about selling schools test prep material that effectively tells you the answers to the next round of Pearson-written standardized exams. I’m sure Pearson is eagerly integrating with Microsoft AI tools, so they can cut their own internal staffing and roll out more profitable digital variations of their material.

But schools pay top dollar for these resources because state administrators use exam scores as a benchmark for school funding. So the $10M you pay for test prep material may determine the next $50M in funding your school receives, relative to the poorer districts that couldn’t afford to buy answers in advance.

Why did any school higher ups pay to implement these?

Tons of kickbacks to high ranking administrators, double-dealing with teachers being contracted or poached by Pearson for test-writing gigs, state administrators moving between jobs in the school board/legislature and positions within Pearson, people with stock and other debt instruments that profit when Pearson does well…

FFS, the Houston ISD takeover by the State of Texas ended with a Colorado private school management guy sending tens of millions of dollars from the Houston public schools to pay consulting fees to Colorado private school agencies. That’s as corrupt as it comes.

I mean, the bitter truth of all this is the downsizing and resource ratcheting of public schools creating an enormous labor crisis prior to the introduction of AI. Teachers were swamped with prep work for classes, they were expected to juggle multiple subjects of expertise at once, they were simultaneously educator and disciplinarian for class sizes that kept mushrooming with budget cuts. Students are subject to increasingly draconian punishments that keep them out of class longer, resulting in poorer outcomes in schools with harsher discipline. And schools use influxes of young new teachers to keep wages low, at the expense of experience.

These tools take the pressure off people who have been in a cooker since the Bush 43 administration and the original NCLB school privatization campaign. AI in schools as a tool to bulk process busy work is a symptom of a deeper problem. Kids and teachers coordinating cheating campaigns to meet arbitrary creeping metrics set by conservative bureaucrats are symptoms of a deeper problem. The education system as we know it is shifting towards a much more rigid and ideologically doctrinaire institution, and the endless testing + AI schooling are tools utilized by the state to accomplish the transformation.

Simply saying “No AI in Schools” does nothing to address the massive workload foisted on faculty. It does nothing to address how Teach-The-Test has taken over the educational philosophy of public schooling. And it does nothing to shrink class sizes, to maintain professional teachers for the length of their careers (rather than firing older teachers to keep salaries low), or to maximize student attendance rates - the three most empirically proven techniques to maximizing educational quality.

AI is a crutch for a broken system. Kicking the crutch out doesn’t fix the system.

Maturity comes from life experience and plenty of people mature very quickly in periods of adversity, while their peers linger in childhood or adolescence because there’s no stressors propelling them onward.

I should note that “maturity” isn’t some kind of universal good, either. A person regularly subjected to physical violence will learn coping mechanisms to avoid or endure that abuse. They’ll come out with these reflexes and responses that other adults can read as “mature”. But I wouldn’t say they’re better for it.

Similarly, people who endure poverty have to learn mature habits as a method of survival far sooner than their wealthier peers - how to provide food and shelter for yourself, how to navigate social bureaucracies, how to operate motor vehicles safely. But the techniques they adopt - lying, stealing, driving without any formal training - aren’t condusive to a safe neighborhood or a functional social network.

“It’s only sunny during the day” is a line uttered ad nauseum by people who didn’t see lithium batteries falling through the same price drop.

This is a 27 year old joke

I read it. You’re angry at me calling you out on your ignorance and you’re having a tandrum.

Please piss off now.

you techno utopians are funny.

I remember hearing this about solar power ten years ago. And electric cars. And cloud computing, even.

It was never going to be economically viable. Always ten years away from viability. Not competitive with whatever the industry leader was at the time.

Really putting all your chips on “nothing ever changes”

But will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?

Eventually. But, much like traditional fission power, you’ll need a very large and complex piece of infrastructure to deliver it.

You won’t be able to put a fusion plant in your basement like you can put solar on your roof.

Practical power production through nuclear fusion still requires significant developments for it to be realised at scale, though several startups are already planning to deliver it within the next few years.

US-based Helion Energy secured the world’s first purchase agreement for nuclear fusion energy in 2023, promising to provide 50MW of fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.

I mean, time will tell. But that seems a bit sooner than 2100.

tankies pretend to be communists

By advocating for positions that Marx held?

the moment the revolution concludes, they immediately abandon the teachings of Marx

Permanent revolution is the strategy of a revolutionary class pursuing its own interests independently and without compromise or alliance with opposing sections of society. As a term within Marxist theory, it was first coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as early as 1850.

I don’t think you know what you’re talking about

Tankies do it with Marx

The guy who advocated for armed opposition to capitalism?

Christianity went down the shitter the day Constantine got involved

There’s good, actually.

Smaller communities don’t fill up with annoying bots and toxic personalities

Communities driven by bots should die

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U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, posted on X, urging people to keep any protests of the Trump administration peaceful.

“Trump wants to generate riots. Don’t take the bait,” he wrote.

Queue for your execution in an orderly fashion. Otherwise, the Nazis will make you look bad on TV

The global power that hasn’t participated in numerous atrocities does not exist.

Almost as though power is accrued at the expense of the vulnerable.

The difference here is the loss of domestic law and order and its cascading downstream effects for global cooperation and trade

The only countries that the US has alienated are ones it is explicitly sanctioning. Nobody else is actually cutting ties.

China is the obvious beneficiary.

China’s the trade-alternative for countries under US sanctions, precisely because Trump’s done a ham-fisted job of diplomacizing with his counterparts overseas. But a future Pete Buttigieg administration can patch that up if he chooses. There is more to be gained by doing business with the US than with Venezuela or Iran or Cuba. Chinese leaders know that and act accordingly.

But could get a whole lot worse a whole lot faster

Sure. Or it could come to a grinding halt if Trump loses control of Congress and falls into lame duck status three years early. Already, we’re seeing sharp divides even inside the GOP, which already operates on thin margins in the face of a Dem election wave.

Plenty of precedent for an unpopular President to get sidelined by skilled and ambitious legislators. And the US has demonstrated time and time again that it has the manpower and the infrastructure to rebound quickly under strong, competent leadership.

We’re almost certainly going to face a nasty recession going into the next few years. But we’re still a massive, hugely populated, highly technical, heavily industrialized economy. Losing unipolar status isn’t the end of the empire. A bad few years of economic contraction isn’t the end of the world.

Now… the long tail of climate change… that’s another story. If the Colorado River dries up before it reaches Arizona, we’re going to see some shit flying.