FaceDeer

It is also possible for someone who has done something bad to be the victim of something else that is bad.

It’s possible for both of those people to have done something bad.

Or, perhaps a lot of people just didn’t think it was a very good show.

Well, direct your ire at the EU for that, I suppose. I’m just pointing out that calling for massive retribution against Meta isn’t warranted here.

the social media giant will not sign the European Union’s voluntary AI code of practice.

Emphasis added. If the result of not signing a voluntary code of practice is massive fines and IP blocks, was it really “voluntary?”

No, there’s ways to do this without damaging Earth. You could arrange the sphere so that there’s a gap that allows light through specifically to keep Earth lit, or you could use mirrors or straight up artificial light sources to maintain Earth’s sunlight levels.

Or you get over the obsession with maintaining Earth exactly as it always was and carry on without it. Once we’re talking about Dyson spheres a planet like Earth would be a very minor population center. Probably more valuable as a source of additional building material than as a place to live in its own right.

For a power-collecting Dyson sphere you don’t actually need all that much matter. Most of the sphere’s area can be thin metal foil that just acts as a mirror to concentrate light on power converters, for example. You could build it with asteroidal material.

If you really want to get massive, then Mercury is usually the first target people propose for demolition. Lots of heavy elements and already close in to the Sun. And nobody cares much about Mercury.

Sure, what would be the obstacle? You start by building a single solar energy collector. Then build another. Then another. And so forth.

Actually, it might be worth doing this first. Once you’ve got even a partial Dyson swarm you’ve got ample energy to make interstellar travel a lot easier. You could either use beamed propulsion (lightsails or magsails), or manufacture bulk antimatter to fuel high-efficiency rocketry, or a combination of the two.

The risks of blotting out your only livable planet’s biosphere is too great

If our Dyson sphere project has become large enough that this is a risk, then we’ve got ample energy to spare to artificially light Earth. Assuming we still want to keep it around at that point and not dismantle it for additional raw materials.

not to mention stuff like the dark forest theory.

Dark Forest only works in the context of a cheesy sci-fi story. Under real-world physics it fails utterly.

There are a couple of physically feasable versions, yeah. The sci-fi solid shell with an Earthlike environment magically glued to the interior isn’t possible, but that’s not what any serious physicist or futurist was ever talking about to begin with.

A Dyson swarm in particular is quite easy, as it can be assembled piece by piece is immediately useful from day one. Just start manufacturing solar power satellites, and keep doing that until the orbital space around the Sun is full. There’s plenty of raw materials in the solar system to support building that.

I know the pitchforks are sharp and the torches are burning especially hot right now, but just yesterday those implements were being aimed at the payment processors that were once again throwing their weight around to censor the services that used them, in this latest case Steam. A bill like this one would help enable stablecoin alternatives to those payment processors to become more widespread. There may be some pieces of baby in this bathwater.

My main concern after reading about this bill in a bit more detail is that it doesn’t look very friendly for decentralized stablecoins, which I prefer over the centralized ones. But it’s a start. It seems to just ignore the decentralized ones, it doesn’t actually prohibit or hinder them.

Building a thing is very simple, generally speaking. There’s a stream of uniform parts that come into the factory, each exactly what’s needed, and they are put together in a precisely designed routine. It can be trained for quickly and done with minimal skill, by people who live in a low-wage country.

Repair, on the other hand, is very complicated. You need to deal with all the unknowns of figuring out what’s wrong, you need to find the replacement parts from scratch (if they’re even available), and the steps required to replace bits are made up as you go. You might need to desolder connections or remove rivets that were never meant to be removed. Lots more work.

Frankly, I’m not sure it should be encouraged in all cases. Prices really do reflect the value of things in a lot of cases; it may indeed be better to recycle an old broken item and buy a new one to replace it.

They’re the ones who are putting the open-source base models out in the first place. If I write a program myself and release it as open source, I have every right to subsequently release a closed-source version. But I can’t rescind the license on the version I released previously (any open source license with a clause allowing that should be treated with immense suspicion) so anyone else can keep building on that version if they want.

Frankly, whatever insanity it takes to peel MAGA away from Trump is fine by me at this point.

Ask them why God wants to cover up the Epstein files.

Really, you think all existing uses of data centers stopped now that there’s AI in the mix? There may be specific facilities under construction that are intended primarily or solely for AI use, but all the existing demand is still there.

PJM has lost more than 5.6 net gigawatts in the last decade as power plants shut faster than new ones enter service, according to a PJM presentation filed with regulators this year. PJM added about 5 gigawatts of power-generating capacity in 2024, fewer than smaller grids in California and Texas. Meanwhile, data center demand is surging. By 2030, PJM expects 32 gigawatts of increased demand on its system, with all but two of those gigawatts coming from data centers.

So this is a combination of utter mismanagement by the power companies, combined with growth in data center demand. Data centers are not purely AI. And I would expect that if PJM continues to be a basket case with exceptionally high prices those data centers will move elsewhere, or at least not get set up so more in those locations. Data centers generally don’t have to be located in specific places, by their nature. AI-specific ones in particular since the bandwidth required is a lot smaller than their processing power.

Clearly what we need to do is ban plastic straws some more.

I’m not trying to argue for or against this position. As I said all I’m doing is explaining a misrepresentation of the position that people are holding, namely that “a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.”