https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs

On one hand -- phones are evil, and the world is no longer 2004.

On the other hand, I would not be the same person if I didn't get that laptop.

Restricting computers, morally, is like restricting the printing press. Many people look back on the latter with disdain, and today want to censor the Internet.

Such a "speed limit" is an unfathomably bad idea, in every way, and moreover is a violation of fundamental human rights. I deeply oppose it. That is all.

Apologies about the tone -- I meant it as a syllogism, not a snark! I'll try to be clearer next time!

* the more things change the more they stay the same: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-of-m...

Small-n nature says (as best as I can tell) that I must obey conservation of mass and can't go faster than light -- and hence that I probably cannot, in fact, sustain a population of a 100 billion on Earth alone without significantly cutting down individual resource access.

Until very recently big-N Nature said we'd never have heavier-than-air-flight, an automatic translation program (see: plot point in A Fire upon the Deep), or, before the Green Revolution, a population above a few billion -- but just as there's no fundamental physical law forbidding these things (and hence they came to pass) so there really is no fundamental physical law stopping all of current humanity from living a decent life (happy to be proved otherwise).

It may be impossible with current technology, sure, but there's no new physics required to make it possible -- the physics we have now permit it, with sufficient technology.

In fact -- interestingly enough -- before nuclear energy you'd have a far stronger point (though solar energy now means even without nuclear we can probably scrape by enough energy -- but coal does in fact have a Malthusian problem)

And physics lets me get a lot further than "8 billion Americans."

To be able to live well now with much less of that may not have been possible without the sacrifices that came before.

b) it is literally trivial to buy a tiny RISC chip for a dew cents that can handle HTTPS just fine

That's only if both violins are tuned the same way, and one must continually tune them lest they get out of sync.

Similarly, an LLM can be extremely consistent if tuned properly -- indeed, if you fix the weights and settings, they can be made "essentially deterministic" for many prompts!

I don't think LLMs are people in any sense, at least as they're constructed now -- but they very much have what we would call "culture" and "personality" in suitably alien forms.

This is not the same as, e.g., feelings, experience, or humanity, or actual opinions or ideas (versus essentially "distilled vibes") and I feel that AI will more and more force us to confront that (including if new AIs are ever developed that may have the latter, as well!)