hollerith

If my main consideration in an interaction with a stranger is to avoid its escalating to violence, I'm going to be polite, but I'm going to be a bit reserved, not enthusiastic or friendly.

In these discussions, non-Americans often describe Americans as always happy, which is another quality I'm going to tend to avoid showing in the hypothetical interaction with the stranger because if he is feeling bitter or resentful, my being happy might set him off.

For memory specifically, the counterparties are mainly "Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, even Apple" like my sibling comment says (plus creditors most of us have never heard of making loans secured by data centers OpenAI and Anthropic plan to rely on).

Going public should make OpenAI and Anthropic a more attractive target for new large loans, again mostly secured by data centers.

If demand for AI services flatlines or if an international agreement stops the labs from training any new models (for safety reasons), then memory prices, GPU prices and inference prices will probably fall drastically, but OpenAI and Anthropic would probably survive that.

Desktop Linux is very bad at that compared to ChromeOS and MacOS, but some distros are much better than others. For a few decades now, Fedora has been one of the better ones.

Fedora at least tries relatively consistently—and has been for decades.

Also, in Chart 1 on page 6, "expenditure share for non-necessities" in the US goes from about 32.5% in 1950 to fully 50% in 2002-2003.

It would be nice if you told us the page from which you got your, "in 1950, food, transport, and housing consumed 70.3% of median working household expenditure." Searching for your text verbatim fails, which is not particularly surprising because PDFs cannot be searched reliably.

Also because 1950 is considered by some to be a particularly prosperous time in the US, some might accused you of cherry picking. For example, in 1918-1919, the "expenditure share for non-necessities" was about 22%.

Most economists emphatically do not admit or maintain that.

Most might believe however that compensation settled slightly lower because the economy's ability to create jobs lagged slightly behind the increase in the supply of workers.

It is not "unhinged propaganda from the right" for people living in those cities to wonder why the rate cannot be under 2.5 per 100,000 like it is in most European cities. Except for a few years in the early 2000s, London's rate has stayed below 2.5 for the last 250 years.

When you noticed you were relying on evidence from fiction, instead of verbally acknowledging that that was what you were doing, you should've stopped relying on the "evidence".

It might make sense every now and them to rely on fiction for evidence in domains where it is very hard to obtain any data at all, but in this particular, there is plenty of hard data of what US workers used to earn, what they earn now, what houses and food used to cost and what they cost now.

(I expect that the hard data will fail to support your belief that things have gotten significantly harder economically for the average person.)

My first comment was an attempt to show the "it's just linear algebra" argument in an absurd light.

That's not an accurate description of my intent—or how my comment landed with most readers AFAICT.

Digital child porn is just ones and zeros. Surely we're not going to pass a law to regulate ones and zeros?

The mandate remained in effect for about nineteen months until President Reagan rescinded it less than a month into his presidency.

I'm hoping for a peace deal.

Please don't assume that.

One reason I know they're different is that the thing I'm pointing at is vastly less influential in some people than other, so much so that it clearly makes sense to call some people "unideological" or if one is being tediously precise "almost completely unideological".

Everyone is strongly influenced by their language, their culture and the family they grew up in. Not everyone has even a weak commitment to an ideology.

I'm willing to switch to a different term for the thing I'm interested in, but I haven't been able to come up with one.

In other words, I sacrificed the quality of the conversation (namely, I introduced not only a tangent, but also a tangent rooted in a confusion) so that I could express some thought that had risen to salience in my solitary mind. My doing that made the conversation worse, and the conversation is what matters, not whether I got to express myself in a way that is quick and easy for me.

But I really do believe that Star Trek, specifically the parts that Roddenberry personally oversaw (namely the original series and the first four seasons of The Next Generation) had a very negative effect on the world.

In addition to making some viewers more committed to socialist ideology[1] Roddenberry's Star Trek made many committed to the ideology of technological progress.

Although it can have a beneficial effect on a person, a commitment to an ideology tends to have a deleterious effect on the world when many share a commitment to the same ideology.

[1] In a (private) debate with me, a committed socialist asserted that a successful transition to socialism would result in a society much like the one depicted in Star Trek. Since it is very unlikely that he engaged in many debates about socialism before his debate with me, the reason he believed that that assertion might make me warm to socialism is probably because it had contributed to his own warming to socialism.

The proper reply to the parent of your comment IMHO is that Star Trek is evil propaganda, not that the vision of society depicted in the propaganda is not socialist.

And some people connect their iPad to a full-size monitor, keyboard and mouse and use it as their main desktop machine.

Great grandparent claimed (or at least strongly implied) that the labs have been saying that their creations might end the human race because the labs expect that saying such things will attract investment in the labs or purchases of their creations. I disputed that claim (using sarcasm).

Do you agree with me or disagree with me? (I honestly cannot tell.)

Would you say that the meme you quoted is sarcasm?

Do you believe that the meme you quoted has attracted investors or buyers?

That anyone ever expected that it would?