XorNot

The eventual utility of the Internet did not stop a lot of people losing a lot of money in the dotcom crash.

It's not like they're going to do it only once though, and some is a lot more then zero.

I mean I'm going to install neither of these because going about my day obsessively focusing on something like this seems weird.

Yes there could be but there aren't, because conservative state governments have had to resort to trying to subsidize coal power plant investment because no one wants to touch it.

Two things can be true: solar can be unable to provide reliable base load power, and it can be far more profitable investment return then building a coal fired power station.

Which is what has happened: and now, with the falling price of batteries, batteries are a far more profitable return then building a coal fired power station.

Coal is expensive: solar, other then some light cleaning costs, is one and done. There's few mechanical parts and no fuel costs and you can build it anywhere there's an electrical grid (which is everywhere).

Batteries are similar: sure they might degrade, but that's over 15 years. At the right time of day, charging them can be between free, and profit generating due to all the solar.

A coal power plant is gigantic. It can't be built anywhere - it needs to be physically proximal to either a port, or an actual coal mine (which the one's near Hunter Valley in NSW are - I've driven next to the train lines for them, for example), and usually a water source too for cooling. It's a large, maintenance intensive structure (the reason the ones we have are shutting down is the maintenance has gotten very expensive because the whole structure is aging out).

And after all that, it also needs fuel - throughout it's lifetime it will need to constantly buy fuel. But it won't constantly be profitable: most renewables have a massive advantage in that they can switch off from the grid nearly instantly. So renewables are far, far better at reacting to negative power pricing conditions then thermal power plants which cannot spin down that quickly: so a coal power plant (really any thermal power plant) will usually have to pay fines when power prices go negative, whereas while solar might not like shutting down, it can do so immediately (and batteries can just hoover up all that power and claim the credits).

Grid stability is a different department, quite literally, to power generating investment which is a commercial enterprise chasing return. And solar was better, and batteries are catching up quick (partly because negative prices mean your solar investment won't be able to bank a solid 6 hours of profitable sunlight without them). The new thing is also batteries for wind - DC couple grid batteries at wind plants, turning them into much more dispatchable generating assets.

Coal isn't cheap. Specifically coal powerplants are not and it's got nothing to do with emissions. One of the pinch points in the Australian power grid has actually been that a bunch of coal plants are aging out and no private enterprise wants to even bother financing their replacement because it's a money loser compared to renewables build out.

Fortunately this is well on it's way to being solved by the massive battery build out which has happened which means evening peak electricity usage has declined enormously[1] - i.e the primary "sun not shining" point of the day is rapidly turning into an energy use low point for the grid (which makes sense: business powers down, people go home and their batteries which have been charging cover cooking - I have an induction cook top and a 10kw inverter covers everything).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/15/austr...

There is a world where scale and experience means it's about the same though, is the thing.

And memory is already expensive. It's downright hard to even get it though - you frequently would prefer not what's cheapest, but whatever is in largest scale production.

Right but if HBM memory is all that people want to produce, then building a CPU which can use it use it would be useful on it's own merits.

But in reality we also already have unified memory architecture systems, integrated graphics etc.

For the better part of two decades I frequented a particular forum, and one of the most common reasons people tended to eventually get banned wasn't because of any particularly egregious political opinion, but because whatever opinion they held they tended to turn every thread they participated in anywhere into either a thread about that or a thread about them.

So you can't even remember or point to any specific example of the problem you claim exists, existing.

When has this happened before? Presumably you have several examples near to hand since it's "a pattern".

I mean yes but that is a case of the slippery slope fallacy: the existence of a future possible decision does not affect whether a current decision is a good one.

If they try to move in that direction, we can protest it then. Denying ourselves a useful capability now doesn't stop it from happening anyway, nor make it more likely.

In Australia it's pretty great: my driver's license can be provided by an app on my phone and legally must be accepted if it is. So between that and NFC payment support, a phone is the only thing I need to remember to operate outside the house.

Keepass2Android without network permissions saving the file to a folder monitored by Syncthing is pretty good though - it keeps responsibilities nicely separated.

This is exactly how I feel about it.

If passkeys were meant to be user friendly then there'd be a secure optical transfer mode to QR code them from device to device with the screen and camera.

Easy to implement (receiver flashes a public key, sender encrypts to that key and flashes the QR code back).

That it doesn't exist for a protocol meant to work with phones tells you exactly where the thinking was headed.

Which is a problem.

It should not be in the protocol. And I don't trust Apple and Google not to lock it away from me.

I want my own open source manager and if that is attempted I want it to lie about it.

No this is what the corporate world does to you.

There's a brief period when you join any company where you really want to improve things, and then about a year in the system has asserted towards the mean.

Nothing to do with schooling, every thing to do with business structures.

Also how many predictions did they make? Everyone always goes looking the economist who predicted the last recession, it's just so weird how it's usually a different person each time!

I spend a lot of time on the Internet and other then sounding vaguely familiar I have no idea who Yudkowsky is and have never read any of their output.

The assumption "spent a lot of time on the Internet" is still through a framing you're assuming is more general even then.

HackerNews straight up has sub demographics who likely barely interact based on article interests.

Wait really ? That's a huge change from last time I looked. How much did this setup cost you?

The Trump admin will be 2 years out of office by the time the Virginia deliveries are slated to start.

If America goes fully fascist by then, then the wisdom of that contract will be the least of our problems (or to put it another way: what's the alternative? Because if you're serious about the threat it's "crash course nuclear weapons and a delivery vehicle" if you want to guarantee our sovereignty).

The problem with deciding you're so powerful you can force everyone to follow you is you actually have to force everyone to follow you and it turns out that's super expensive and costs you a lot of power in terms of committed assets to do it.

Which is exactly the sensible plan.

I want a government which does the cost effective thing, not one which tries to make statements with bold headlines.

I want boring government policy which sensibly hedges against future risk in correct appreciation of our unbelievably fortunate geopolitical luck.

In a Gulf State 300 miles is still within ballistic missile range and any belligerent is going to target both places if at all.

Strictly speaking from a missile defense perspective there's an argument 2 sites are a waste of valuable interceptors.

The food is in the uncanny valley because no human was involved in assembling the output.

We've got millions of years of evolutionary wiring in our heads to try and figure out if something can be eaten - take that out of the process and you can screw up in a bunch of ways which raise alarm bells.

That's not a source. And it also directly contradicts your assertion.

Petroleum products are refined and consumed near the point of use because they're not very shelf stable. Petrol is not shipped internationally in any significant quantity, neither is diesel for these reasons.

Take down any production capacity anywhere and you'll have shortages locally but crude oil supplies will divert to other refining capacity and fall in price.

Conversely take down crude oil supply...

It also wouldn't work. The US has refineries which can only run on various foreign import grades of oil.

The US produces oil which goes to foreign refineries for the same reason.

The effect of "banning exports" is non obvious.

Conversely not starting a war with Iran had some really obvious benefits that every previous administration recognized.

That is still demand destruction: under supply of a resource triggers substitution activity which means the demand for that specific good never returns after.

Russian infrastructure isn't affecting oil prices.

The Russians are losing refineries, not oil fields.

The Russian crude trade to countries like India pushes the price down globally, but limits Russian access to refined fuels and products.

It also limits their ability to fund the war.

No it's definitely folding laundry.

My intimacy with my partner in a short difference marriage would improved it we could eliminate folding washing from the weekly chores.

This is very much why I find most people's AI doom scenarios trite.

Humans are useful, easily manipulated operatives in the medium AIs are conversant in and we already have evidence of agents doing exactly this in arguing for PR requests (likely with prompting by an operator but still).