Persians absolutely malding right now.

It’s ok to charge money to run a business.

They’re not charging money. They’re just throwing up a big sign demanding my email address.

They’ll just get a check for Infinity Money to keep going, because otherwise something something China Will Win.

Can’t do crimes if you’re rich. It’s in the Constitution

The original author (Jeremy Hsu) is misleading here with the term “screenshot every 500ms”.

“meta tags every 500ms” might be more accurate, but the end result is the same. The device is monitoring what you consume in order to aggregate data on your household.

Absolutely hate this shit.

Still amazing how AI can’t do words good. Computers have been doing word art practically since the first GUI.

All this makes it sound like police are giving you a bunch of time to respond and addressing you politely.

I mean, I agree on the principle. Don’t just hand your phone over to… anyone, really. But the game becomes very different when a guy with a gun is hassling you over it.

More the plunge in O&G prices during the 1980s. Coal, oil, and natural gas got incredibly cheap under Reagan after the US cut sweetheart deals with the Saudis. Nuclear has huge upfront development costs, while oil, gas, and coal are very cheap to start up and run incredibly high margins.

Lobbying and activism had very little impact, as evidenced by the campaigns against coal waste and gas flaring and strip mining that all fell flat.

Jeff Bezos on the cusp of achieving 1950s Soviet Union levels of technology.

Deeply confused, because these are all American companies and America is supposed to be the freest, bestest, most democratic country in the world.

I think that those animals would absolutely do the same thing if they had the physical and mental capabilities

Definitely depends on the animal. Bonobos and Chimpanzees - our two nearest relatives - have dramatically different dispositions and cultural patterns. Go further back in history and you’ll find six or seven other close ancestors to homo sapiens spread across the globe, each of which developed their own distinct behaviors.

Even to say “they’d behave like humans” requires a very broad brush, because human behavioral patterns are also extremely variable. The Columbian explores had a dramatically different social pattern than the West Indies neighbors they initially encountered.

Since there are finite resources, if they’re too successful they start to become victims of their own success.

This goes back to the infinite growth engine of solar energy. If you can capture more sun - either directly or by proxy - you can grow with fewer bounds. Organisms best suited to this task fruitfully multiple. But there are still evolutionary dead-ends - patterns that seem fruitful in the moment but only because of a temporary state of affairs.

The engine of evolutionary development is an erratic oscillation between environmental compromise and conflict, exploration and exploitation, production and consumption. Because the rules are always changing, there’s no permanent winning strategy.

Every mammal on this planet instictively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment

That’s a cute line, but its not true. Animals regularly breed themselves into Malthusian collapse. Nevermind mammals, the earth was nearly rendered inhospitable because of too many trees. In fact, the fossil fuel economy of the modern day is predicated on this explosion in plant life that flooded the planet with excess oxygen.

Mammals follow similar trends, exploding through an ecological niche well past the point of sustainability. Species can - and have - overproduced to the point of collapsing their biomes and causing localized extinctions. Some mammals find an equilibrium, but that’s a result of selection bias. The species that hit an equilibrium point are the ones that stick around long enough to become present in the fossil records and major ecological zones. Plenty more fail and die out.

A virus.

The major distinction between a virus and an organism is that viruses cannot reproduce on their own.

This is particularly ironic given the premise of the Matrix movie. It is not the humans that are the viruses. Even in confinement, they continue to bare fruit and multiple. It is the AIs that exist parasitically which persist only with a steady new supply of human hosts.

Consequently, Agent Smith’s genocidal plot nearly brings down the system that the AIs need to survive.

The real problem is that our concept of Infinite growth fails to describe the growth of use value. We only measure the growth of exchange value.

Strictly speaking, both are possible. But only one is good.

You could do the SMBC web comic joke about two computers that just trade bits of data as a form of economic activity and achieve growth capped only by the maximum processor speed of the transactions. Viola! Infinite growth! But its all exchange growth, no utility.

You could also describe the Cambrian Explosion as an “Infinite Growth” strategy. Rapid proliferation of species, new ecological niches that are filled by species specifically focused on occupying those niches, revolutionary new means of biologically observing and processing information, etc etc etc. Now we’ve got enormous utilitarian growth, but there’s no real exchange process (unless you consider organisms eating one another a market mechanic).

From a biological perspective, the real upper limit on growth is efficient use of solar energy to process planetary materials. And we’re still nowhere near that limit. Plants and planktons and insects and crustaceans have been lapping us on that front even into the modern industrial age.

Our model of economic growth just fixates on the exchange side so heavily that we end up with the Two-Computers-On-An-Island-Trading-Bits proxy for economic success. We’ve abandoned our conceptualization of utility growth in our quest to fully financialize. We don’t recognize volunteer labor as a form of economic growth. We don’t recognize procreation as a form of economic growth or mortality as a form of de-growth. We don’t recognize ecological destruction as a form of economic de-growth or extinction as a massive loss in economic value.

Until we adjust our measures, the infinite growth we’re aiming for is purely a growth in accounting statistics. We’re sacrificing real prosperity for a financial fairy tale.

If more AI companies dedicate to buying vast amounts of electricity, there’s money and jobs in it

Google the history of the Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors in Georgia. I don’t think tech firms have 16 years to invest in new energy plants.

Microsoft is trying to restart Three Mile Island. But that’s a very old facility. I don’t see too much interest in building new ones.

You can get it there, too, but when it’s already mixed with air you’re forced to do the math of how much energy is in the methane versus how much it costs to distill out of the nitrogen and oxygen.

Methane gas isn’t a fossil fuel though

It’s a primary byproduct of Y-Grade gas during fractionation. But it is also less energy dense than your pricier fuels and and lighter. If you’re not using good compression you might as well be venting the fuel as fast as you burn it.

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/11/nx-s1-5088134/elon-musk-ai-xai-supercomputer-memphis-pollution

Methane gas engines

All my misspellings are part of my charm.