So of course this didn't change in the 30 years following 1980, right?

No. There is no argument being made regarding "legacy hardware’s power inefficiency isn’t as big of a deal when electricity prices are lower".

That's just complaining that Western Europe has high energy prices compared to China without taking into consideration how different these economies are.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/15216629/24279737/KS... [1] https://wage.is/china/

That's why it's important to find joy in the moment and ways to share that joy and happiness with those around you.

In the end this is about protecting and preserving our own ecosystem without which we will perish.

For all we know the universe could be teeming with life, in whatever shape or form. And since we see the first signs of life about 500 million years after the plant was formed, there's a good argument to be made that life doesn't need much more than a stable energy gradient and some basic building blocks to get started.

Probably a bit too heavy on ideas for most and those who are only used to lighter cost might find it boring. But for me one my all time favorite sci-fi books.

That hasn't changed for the last 300k years.

If - and that if is doing some heavy lifting; given the underlying, fundamental problems of LLMs it doesn't make any sense to assume that we'll get there anytime soon - LLM AIs will be able to dominate economy in such a way that humans cannot compete anymore, that simply means that humans will have tons of free time at their hands. ( There's a reason for the grain dole that the Roman elites handed out to the poor of the city. I assume if you have a whole population that doesn't have anything valuable to contribute to the economy, the economy will still have to find a way to sustain them. Otherwise riots.)

A well developed brain seems to be exactly what I would want in such a case.

Just selecting from a random sampling makes you a curator at best. You know where you want to go, but don't know how to do that. If luck is not in your favor, you will never arrive. And you're wholly dependent on luck to get there.

If just "being involved" in the "creative process" is enough to be called an artist, then by that measure that includes the guys that are simply involved by having the money to patron the process. Maybe it also includes the guy delivering the pizza.

Koons didn't write a two paragraph description of his ideas and then handed it over to a porcelain factory that repeatedly tried to come up with something that fit the spec until Koons cried out "Yes, that's it! That's what I had in mind!"

He drew sketches, built models, shaped prototypes, etc. He was an active participant in the creative process from the very start to the end, not just a client that checked in on what the artists were doing from time to time to give the thumbs up or thumbs down.