A worthwhile question is begged: how will industry evolve humans consume the entire world? But this is not explored.

Makes me think of silly Artemis mission going on right now with a tiny woke cadre of space cadets searching for a new home for humanity on the dark side of the moon, vibing the influential 90s corporate self-help book "Who Moved My Cheese?" Like the Artemis mission, this article lifts off into the void makes an orbit, ands comes back to where it started with previous little information such as toilets are still tricky in zero-G.

As to "any sufficiently abc is xyz": this tired tautology must be retired as hyperbolic jargon. Lead any writeup with it at penalty of being ignored.

Couldn't he offer a 1/4 day for a HN revamp?

Use gen-AI to assist composition, under the expectation that it will retrieve code with surprisingly high context sensitivity.

Never expect gen-AI to generally reason. It can't do it.

In pursuit of vast monetary incentives, the designers of gen-AI have overwhelming reasons to align gen-AI to fake reasoning. One very easy way to do this is to make agents appear agreeable. A more pernicious way is observe edge-cases, and mechanically turk additional context sensitivity for those cases (RLHF).

If AGI is anywhere on the horizon this will be surprising given that there is so little understanding of the nature of intelligence. Nevermind the ethical concerns surrounding any pursuit of sentient AI.

Following the lead of Microsoft PC, the device is a trojan horse for unstated, unregulated interests of the app.

The half-life of enshittification of any commons based on this technology should be expected to be an order of magnitude shorter than it was for the web, and malicious application causing an order of magnitude greater damage.

--

Trekkies have already foretold the hazard (withstanding the already totalitarian dimensions of the premise of Star Trek's Federation):

ep. 106 "The Game" -> social-media pleasure/pain pathos and distortion and exploitation of human relationships.

ep. 25 "Conspiracy" -> parasitic infection of command & control structures that pollute autonomy.

-- We're on the cusp of becoming enslaved by the organizations designing this tech.

If that sounds hyperbolic, merely notice that the entire computing industry has pivoted away from the personal towards the corporate under conditions of war, usurping production and deployment of this technology at a planetary scale, within a time-frame of a decade for AI versus a century for pre-AI computing.

The point of any media outlet is thought control, and venture capital knows the vital importance of thought control to returns on investment.

Those little scamps. Oh, they grow up so fast.

"I'm not here to turn Apple around..."

Wonderful to see the iBook in a context of seeming cool when that was such a disgusting era of product design, hamstrung between the 1940s and the next millennium.

Jobs' comment about how you've got to choose clunkier form factors to make products affordable while stipulating that the "the plan" is to increase churn captures a seeming paradox that eventually becomes a long running series of lectures by Cory Doctorow.

Obsolescence has been very planned and very necessary for the industrial revolution.

Begging a question about human generations: do we have to obsolesce ourselves? Given that we're always dying anyway, there's maybe a natural rhythm to industrial change that ought to be respected.

Praise be to Allah that the Bondi Blue iBook is gone the way of the dodo. And marvel at "progress". As Jobs holds up that LCD (and wifi chip) in the iBook, he portends of everything we are going through today: we are making the crossing from a victorian era of geniuses showing off tubes and sparks to being obsolesced by a galactic civilization of robots! -- compared to Jobs, Musk is such a chump. But Jobs is now lost in the circle of life, and soon Musk and we will be lost too.

Where are the old Esalen Institute dorks when we need them?!

Terafab is suddenly making so much sense!

World oil is 6 billion tons per year:

100 million barrels per day times 365 divided by 6 barrels per ton.

The plan wants 20 billion tons per year, so 3x world output.

Ok, I am so wrong! Sounds totally doable!

If rockets were powered solely by kerosene (not) and observing that crude roughly converts to kerosene at 10:1, then the "plan" requires 2 billion tons of kerosene times 10 -> 20 billion tons of crude per year.

Note that the world uses 365 million barrels of crude per year. A barrel weighs 300 lbs -> 6 barrels per ton, so the world uses about 60 million tons of crude per year.

The "plan" wants 333x world crude output per year, or maybe the 2-3x per year the total crude ever consumed by humanity.

(Never mind for how long)

And for what purpose? To access solar energy ??? in space ??? to power chips ??? used by optimus robots ??? "among the stars"

Sounds like "galactic" jerking off. But it's what Musk knows best.

Didn't Musk have a toy digging project on earth that was going to revolutionize Vegas holidays? But he gave up because it was too hard or he got bored before the project did.

It's not simply the pathos of lack of decorum, it's maniacal, inverted decorum.

But in USA we are proud to do everything beyond excess.

In Butler's case, the terms "race", "slavery", "machine" stand out as begged questions.

Butler offers Luddite ranting to assuage his own confusion and fear.

Prefer Herbert's simpler, more self-reflective, nuanced warning to not desecrate the divine mystery of mind.