Maybe. People who bought gold in the 1970s bubble thought the same, but they probably still haven't made their money back in real terms. This time may be different, but gold still looks expensive to me.

Quite possibly. I suspect some forms of AI software will continue regardless because much of it is useful; if nothing else, I've used local AI software to restore ancient VHS home movies into something that looks decent in HD... but it can take days of running the GPU flat out.

The big question is whether big AI models can be financially viable if Moore's Law no longer applies. If the cost per computation doesn't drop substantially then it may never be profitable, particularly as they keep making models bigger and bigger.

I like Banks' books, but the stories only work if you ignore reality and believe everyone can just live happily ever after and the Minds will never decide to eliminate all the humans and fight over controlling the entire resources of the galaxy.

Claude can write some interesting Banks-style prose but I haven't tried asking for an entire story.

You're stuck in the Old Narrative. "Climate Change" is being binned because the AI God demands all available electricity no matter how it's generated.

I saw an article the other day claiming that someone wanted to build AI data centres in northern Canada because it eliminates much of the cooling needs. For all I know it may have been made up by AI but it makes a certain amount of sense if they don't need to rely on solar panels to power it and have reliable power from somewhere like a nuclear reactor.

A couple of years ago I was given a box of 1960s Canadian money and it turns out the coins were worth about 20x as much as their face value at the time because they were around 50% silver. Given silver has been spiking too it's probably closer to 30x today.

So someone literally just had to put their coins in a box in the 1960s and they'd be worth 20-30x as much a few decades later. No need for investment funds, paying fees to bankers, just put it in a box under the bed.

The paper dollars in the same box might be 2-3x just for collector value.

I wouldn't buy gold or silver at current prices, but historically gold and silver in a box under the bed has done better than putting paper money in a bank account. I only buy gold when the Bank of England is selling, because that's a clear sign that the price has bottomed out.

Yes. Where I live we get about 1/4 as much power from solar in the winter as summer if using the year-round optimal alignment for the panels. By biasing it for winter use we can boost the winter power a bit but at the cost of losing summer power. We can also go 3-4 days without decent sunshine so that means sustaining power usage requires 3-4x as many batteries as you might otherwise calculate in order to cover those bad times.

Also don't forget the losses in the system which mean you probably then need to add some more to compensate for those. I don't know how big commercial systems compare but it's at least 20% in my home battery backup between the cables, charger and inverter.

Nuclear fusion is only twenty years away and has been all my life. No amount of taxpayers' money thrown at it appears to make a difference to that timescale.

It will only become commercially viable when some company (NukeX?) needs it to be viable, and will likely be developed in a few years with a crash program and a lot of smart engineers who aren't tied to government funding to keep their pay checks coming in.

Ever read Eisenhower's Farewell Address?

In the part after the one everyone quotes where he warns about the dangers of the Military-Industrial Complex, he warns about the dangers of the Science-Politics Complex where The Science would be largely funded by taxes handed out by self-serving politicians.

And here we are.

Plus many of those great new scientific inventions legitimately turned out to be a bad idea. But yes, much of The Science today is spent telling us that past The Science was a bad idea (e.g. 'climate change' now telling us we shouldn't have figured out how to use oil or uranium as fuel rather than wood and should have continued living in caves).

No-one should be surprised that people see that kind of radical flip and decide to just give up on The Science in general.

The Science is the religion of the Left, even though 50% of peer-reviewed papers can't be reproduced. Every new imposition on personal freedom is justified by The Science, which immediately turns people against it. They also see The Science constantly flipping because so much of that research is a crock of sh*t which can't be reproduced (e.g. one minute coffee is bad for you, then next it will add years to your life, the next it makes you willy shrink or whatever).

In terms of lifespan improvement, much of it was due to reducing infant mortality which is probably why the world is full of so many damaged adults who would otherwise have died off in early childhood. The rest mostly happens when people are old and senile with damaged brains in decaying bodies and it's difficult to see how spending a decade senile before dying is a big improvement.

Consumerism and travel turned out to be a pale substitute for living in a real community.

And yeah, many people I know don't believe we landed on the Moon. Since pretty much everything I was taught as a kid turned out to be a lie I have to wonder about it myself even though I think it probably did happen.

Back on the topic of TFA, as someone who studied Physics at one of the world's top universities many years ago I strongly suspect String Theory is a crock of sh*t but have never really looked that deeply into it. It just seems to be another example of The Science disappearing up its own butthole like particle physics has in recent decades ('OMG our new research showed we have to built an even bigger accelerator to create even bigger particles which will tell us to create an even bigger accelerator to create an even bigger particle. Give me $$$$').

My entire career creating TPS Reports is now obsolete.

> It did prevent the spread of misinformation, but it also suppressed minority viewpoints.

Misinformation was common if not normal in the gatekeeping era. The idea that journalists are super-smart, super-educated people who can decide what information is true and what is false comes from people who've never spent much time around journalists.

Journalism was traditionally a job for those who were too screwed up to hold a real job and liked free drinks on an expense account.

I've been involved in several news stories over the last few decades. In almost every case, the mainstream news coverage has been wrong, often basically just made up by the journalist to suit the narrative they wanted the story to tell. The only exceptions were when the journalist happened to be a legitimate expert in the field they were reporting on and wanted to do a good job.

I don't think there are many people like them in the field any more.

Only if you want to ensure that anything innovative gets filtered out and The Science becomes a circlejerk around The Established Narrative. Which the last fifty years of gatekeeping pretty much have.

Even longer, really, when you consider how long it took to convince surgeons that maybe washing their hands for surgery might be a good idea.

Yeah, there are a lot of nuts around. But there are also a lot of nuts and grifters inside The Science who don't want anyone spoiling their fun.