A more typical use case for now would be using AI to generate some code, and then testing/fixing the code. Not running the AI every time to solve an instance of the problem.

Side note, I wonder if this paper compared AI performance to human performance. You think people can do towers of hanoi consistently?

In 1994 the msrp of the cheapest Geo Metro was $7800 and median household income was $32,260, or 4.1 x the cost of the metro. If a Versa manual is $17,000, 4.1 of that would be $67,700. Instead the median household income in 2023 was $81,000. So, the Versa now is cheaper than the Metro was then.

On the other hand people have long paid good money for pets, racing horses, or cattle with a prestigious pedigree. You want a pure-bred Samoyed pup? That will set you back $14,000. Nobody ever thought the offspring with be born with the life experience of their parents, they wanted the heritable traits of the parents.

Especially when the first example given is beef cattle. That application makes a lot of sense, but it certainly doesn't involve the cattle living forever.

Here is vmware's answer (for state and local governments), although it's a bit old (2020):
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vmware.com%2Fdocs%2Fvm...

7 Reasons to Choose VMware Hereâ(TM)s why the VMware Cloud Foundation future-ready, full-stack hybrid and multi-cloud solution is ideal for your agency:

• VMware Cloud Foundation is an integrated, software-defined solution with built-in automated lifecycle management that combines virtualized services for compute, storage, networking, security, and cloud management. It delivers consistent infrastructure for private, hybrid, and multi-cloud demands.
• Kubernetes is now delivered as part of VMware Cloud Foundation with VMware Tanzu, delivering full-stack, developer-ready infrastructure with a standard Kubernetes API for programmatic consumption of compute, network, storage, and security services.
• IT operations teamsâ"who have different priorities, skill sets, and preferences than developersâ"can offer developer-ready infrastructure while gaining observability and troubleshooting for Kubernetes workloads.
• VMware solutions included in the full-stack hybrid cloud are now optimized for Kubernetes. As a result, IT can configure an enterprise-grade Kubernetes infrastructure with integrated networking and storage within an hour.3
• With built-in Kubernetes, any environment based on vSphere with Tanzu now natively supports both VM and container workloads as first-class citizens.
• The same VMware Cloud Foundation stack is available as a VMware managed serviceâ" with VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud, in your data center, or with hosted providers.
• VMware powers your multi-cloud strategy with leading public cloud providers offering hybrid-compatible services based on the same VMware Cloud stack, including Google Cloud VMware Engine, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, Microsoft Azure VMware Solution, and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. And over 200 VMware Cloud Provider Program Partners offer VMware Cloud Verified hybrid cloud services on the same VMware Cloud stack.

I don't get the "as a character" aspect. Most things we are familiar with being copyrighted are not characters - songs, books, paintings, also movies, e.g. "Gone in 60 Seconds" as a whole. So why would is a car design not copyrightable even if it's not a "character"?

Can you really dig a house-sized cave for less money, energy, or pollution than you can get some solar panels? Seems dubious.

Apple might also like their odds in court.

A lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of a President arbitrarily slapping individual companies with huge taxes on a whim, and a lot of them are Republicans.

We play UNO at the kitchen table pretty often so I was surprised when we played with another family recently at how many differences there were in what we thought were the rules.

Now you're telling me no stacking +2 ? Huh.

It's a threat. The US President does not have the right to pick out individual companies based on nothing but a whim to set individual 'tax rates' (or protection money, whatever you want to call it). The Constitution doesn't even give the President the power to set Tariffs at all. This is not the rule of law, it is rule by the whim of the head of state.

The national debt keeps skyrocketing and the payments on the debt have become onerous. Not a problem?

It's inconvenient to uncover the facts because so many released statistics fail to distinguish between HEV's which ultimately get all their energy from gasoline vs PHV's which could get anywhere from 0 to almost all of their energy from electricity, depending on owner needs and habits.

They also fielded a very successful formula 1 team in the 80's. For sure, the Honda of that era is gone. Like Sony with the walkman and boom boxes. Or Japan as a whole, really.

Had I been born in the US rather than Australia in the 1980s, I would have been blind if not dead by the age of 10... Thanks to Australia's Medicare system I got the surgery I needed despite being born to an unemployed single mother

I think you would have got it in the US too. Poor children get healthcare through Medicaid. At least, my niece was born with pretty severe deformities and got dozens of surgeries etc despite her parents having no stable income.

Healthcare in the US is already mostly socialized. The government pays for more than half of it, once you include federal, state, VA, and also federal subsidies for reduced-cost private plans (which a lot of sources fail to include).

A lot of people seem to assume that if the US went full single-payer, then all our costs would go down to levels seen in other nations that are already single-payer. I don't think so. It wouldn't magically fix our system of highly-paid physicians with high training costs and high malpractice liability. Nor our deep respect (to put it one way) for the intellectual property rights of drug developers. It wouldn't suddenly create a world in which healthcare is 'free' and therefore anybody can demand whatever treatment they think they need - there still has to be a bad guy somewhere in the system deciding what is medically necessary and cost-justified.

Fostering a community that actively contributes questions and answers is still useful work. I don't know what the answer for Stack Overflow is because I always liked the site, but AI is their extinction-level asteroid.