I doubt it can be done for even ten billion. I mean, sure, you can get a spaceship into orbit and point it out Mars. We've done that enough times now. But putting people in that ship and having them arrive at Mars without them being irradiated corpses, that's where the money will go. And then you've got to get them down and back up out of a non-unsubstantial gravity well, and again, get them back to Earth without them being irradiated corpses.

No way any of that can be done for ten billion. Ten billion is the number the project manager feeds to Congress hoping they'll buy the sunk cost fallacy when you come back five years later with a bill that's three or four times that high.

I think the hard part is surviving on Mars for any extended length of time without suffering severe radiation-induced illnesses. Heck, surviving even getting their and back has the same issue. We've basically never gone further than a week or so's round trip to the Moon, with only part of that outside of Earth's magnetic field. Now you're talking years (at least 2.5 years round trip), and while for no other reason than the sheer awesomeness of humans walking on Mars, there are vast technical and biological challenges. Any kind of shielding is going to add significantly to the spacecraft's mass, and we still build these things on the ground, even if we build them in modules.

None of it is impossible, but the costs, even for a nation like the US, are enormous, and ultimately will require more than just stripping NASA's other resources (which add enormous value on their own). With Trump basically, through intense idiocy, ignorance and malice, fucking the US economy over, those huge expenditures are going to take more than just turning NASA into the Mars guys at the cost of everything else.

Probably a woke lunatic who believes in a spherical earth and heliocentrism. Doubtless the Administration has a Pentecostal pastor who believes in Creationism and the healing power of CO2 to run the agency.

I have definitely produced useful SQL code, and indeed some pretty darned complex queries for transformations and data hygiene, but as I said, it's not a process of "dump spec into LLM model, run SQL on RDBMS", but rather a kind of meta-programming conversation. I imagine specialized LLMs might do a bit better, but I'm generally pretty skeptical of the current generations of AI building sophisticated software. I suspect where LLM's might do well is with interop code, the kind of boiler plate code that takes up a good deal of a programmer's time. That's likely why I have had some success with SQL.

My experience, mainly with generating SQL queries, is that AI inevitably gets it wrong multiple times, so what I have had to do is more of a kind of meta-programming; giving the model cues and corrections. I have created some pretty sophisticated SQL queries, but there's no way in hell I can just pop the first go-around into my code and have it run. Either it's outright faulty code that will fail, or it's just not producing the correct results.

Now SQL is a fairly limited and ring fenced language (excluding stored procedures of course). I've never tried it with a general use language, but I imagine those problems will get more pronounced. That's not to say it might not be useful for translating natural language specs into code, but if my experience with SQL is any indicator, it's going to require a lot of massaging. There's probably still productivity boosts to be found here, which will likely have in effect on the number of programmers out there, but to me, it feels more like a layer of abstraction that will require a different kind of programming, rather than replace programming.

As an example that isn't coding, I have been building models for what I expect is a government procurement next year. This involves taking previous Requests For Qualifications documents, updating them with current knowledge of government expectations, procurement rules, and so forth. Again, building these model RFQs is an iterative process, not simply one of "Take these RFQs from previous procurements, update them with this new information I've uploaded, and give me model RFQs based on these premises I will provide." My test run took about three or four hours of a kind of conversation, where I correct and shape, understanding the cues the LLM needs to produce the desired result, and the better I get at understanding not just the kind of information and cues the LLM requires, but the most effective means of "encoding" that information, the more efficient the LLM is at producing the desired results.

That sure sounds like programming to me, albeit at a much higher level of abstraction. LLM, at least where it stands, is just another platform, a very powerful one, but as with all programming languages, the larger the command set and the more complex the lexical structures, the more room for bugs, and the more subtle some of those bugs can be.

At some point this is going to reach "Open the pod bay door Hal" territory.

So you do deny thermodynamics

Every "solution" the skeptics lay claim to requires obscene amounts of energy. Whether it's desalination or carbon sequestration, they would require incredible amounts of energy to be at all scalable. Which leads us to the great paradox of the quasi-skeptics and their "build more shit to absorb the shit we're emitting" pseudoscience. If you can produce so much energy that you could do large scale desalination, effectively sequester those salts, other minerals and metals so you don't kill off large proportions of marine and land ecospheres, then you've already solve all the important problems that cause the climate change effects, and you don't need to do anything other than mitigate what would be a few centuries of ill-effects of previous emissions.

Every time I see these kinds of claims, it just baffles me. I had one guy tell me that Alberta could keep pumping out bitumen and natural gas, because nuclear, wind and solar would provide enough energy to capture and sequester all the GHGs. He seemed absolutely baffled when I informed him that thermodynamics put such high constraints on the efficiency of any such mechanism that energy requirements would exceed (likely by an order or two of magnitude) any energy extracted directly from the fossil fuels themselves, and further, you wouldn't even need those fossil fuels any more.

Basically the skeptics, quasi-skeptics and the climate nihilists (those that accept we're doing substantial harm, but just don't want to do anything about it), are either completely ignorant of physics, or simple don't give a damn and have effectively become hedonists.

So your basic world view is that there is a big global exception to thermodynamics for planet earth, that CO2 magically doesn't behave the same way it behaves everywhere else in the universe?

Does that sum up your position?

Let's remember here that a significant number of poor people in the US voted for this. Lambs voting to be sent to the slaughterhouse.

Have you actually used Apple Silicon? I have M1 and M3 MacBook Pros, and they are well beyond Android-level ARM chips.

Every person has agency. You're not a brainless slave. You contribute to emissions just like everyone else.

Who the fuck is taxing poor people? And that climate changes doesn't disprove AGW. Unless you're claiming there is magic that inverts thermodynamic processes, raising the thermal equilibrium of the atmosphere inevitably leads to more energy capture. Fuck me, do you know anything about physics?

Climate change is going to harm poor people far far more than wealthy people. In fact, it's likely in many parts of the world to send mortality rates of those near or below the poverty line skyrocketing (I would posit even in parts of the developed world this is already happening). The idea that fighting climate change is somehow hurting poor people is perverse, and simply a form of rhetorical deflection. The people making these arguments generally aren't poor at all, but simply trying to justify doing nothing to pad their own pockets, and couldn't give a damn whether poor people were hurt or not.

I can't tell whether this is deflection or denialism, or just someone with serious mental health issues. Or all three.