No this is a non-sequitur.

Low fertility only means that the affected society grows smaller. This is only equivalent to "slow death" when it persists for centuries until the society is actually dead.

This talks about seven consecutive riffle shuffles ("cut the deck and interleave the piles"): Those are not a "perfect shuffle" (i.e. same probability for every permutation) by themselves, only after doing them several times consecutively (which is kinda suprising by itself).

Very highly automated production lines (cars) have similarly moved along the labor-price gradient in Europe (~east) during the last decades, despite language barriers: You need some engineers, electricians, constructions workers, janitors, etc regardless, and those still scale with general labor costs, even if there's no human hands in the assembly line.

Storage production capacity is still rising much faster than energy consumption in all those nations, and the situation is probably quite similar with other pieces of infrastructure that last for decades; replacing all big electric transformers would similarly need many years of production.

Primary energy considerations are also somewhat iffy if the first step involved is often a ~40% efficient conversion into a form similarly "valuable" to electricity (like gasoline => motion).

This way, you can see how e.g. players of different skill level navigate the "same" run (same seed), without everything diverging completely on the very first (meaninglessly small) combat choice.

Foreign capital is undesirable in the housing market because:

1) It raises demand (when buying a home as a local, you now also have to compete with foreigners "investing", and this raises prices).

2) It often develops housing in a very unhealthy direction: Airbnbs and vacation apartments are toxic for local society and must be kept in check, otherwise you end up with half the houses just being shuttered for the whole off-season, and towns becoming empty husks.

3) Rent is a lot of money, and its obviously beneficial if it stays in the local economy instead of flowing abroad.

Anything selfreplicating kinda needs to be as small as possible (compared to the smallest internal mechanisms required), otherwise the replication time grows out of control: Consider a 3D printer that can fully selfreplicate by depositing individual molecules: If this was the size of a regular printer, the replication time would be hopelessly long (>billion years even if it could deposit billions of atoms/s).

This applies somewhat universally, and is one of the reason why our current industrial tech is so unsuitable for selfreplication: Any "printing" like process (books, metal stamping, lithography) requires internal features that are much smaller than the output it produces.

He explicitly states that the AI training concerns are not about legal GPL violations but about going against his licensing intentions (and those seem very much in line with the "copyleft spirit" from what I can tell).

My take is that the LLM emergence "threatens" the whole copyleft framework in a way similar to cloud services in the past (which led to the AGPL): closed source development can extract a lot of value from copyleft projects without contributing back in any way (to neither upstream nor their own users).

I don't like it, but I understand why we ended up here...

But I can still understand the Kefir author; if you previously defaulted to GPL (over MIT/BSD) mainly because you wanted to foster an open-source software development culture, then the emergence of LLMs might well be a turning point were publishing your project makes no more sense to you; thanks to LLMs, publishing your open-source project might do more for commercial closed source actors (via better trained LLMs used by the developers they employ) than for open-source developers (or open source culture overall).

Instead of potentially creating a valuable GPL project that pushes other users towards GPL/open source, you might end up making your project a sort of "commodity" easily available to all closed-source developers for a moderate cost in tokens...

I feel this is a misrepresentation. GPL rather seems designed to maximize source availability for users.

But mandatory public source availability does make selling software products more difficult ("why would anyone pay if they can just use the source"), which is why most commercial software products still sell and ship binaries when they can.

Personally, I've grown somewhat allergic to "AI-isms", and I'd rather not be (this example is still somewhat acceptable though). I also don't understand how we haven't trained this particular, obnoxious writing style out of them by now...

Complete absence of anything like that is a pretty strong indicator by itself...

Just consider how algorithmic moderation can shape language (=> people using weird constructs like "to unalive", or weird metaphors in chinese), even in contexts where it would technically be unnecessary.

A close US equivalent is the "cant google that, I'll end up on a list" notion. This is all quite undesirable from my point of view.

[[Surveillance cameras normalize/denormalize behavior in a way that is easily biased and undemocratic.]]

It might e.g. direct the full force of law against a drunk urinating on a tree (easy to spot/classify), while tolerating vicious verbal attacks disguised by somewhat subdued body language (missing data/difficult to detect).

Letting automated surveillance systems judge people will inevitably influence our own collective judgement.

We can infer properties and function by looking at genes shared between archea and bacteria that most likely came from such an ancestor; this paints a picture of a DNA-based anaerobic thermophile (think hydrothermal vents) with a membrane and simple anti-virus defenses (CAS).