At some point they'll have AI-controlled robots going through the waste streams and the landfills and sorting all the useful materials out of them. Once you have robots capable of doing the tedious work, landfill becomes a valuable ore, full of useful materials.
I happened to be aware of the existence of a extension made by someone else that offers domain-level opt-in consent to run script in a particular web browser. I cited the extension's title and author and deliberately left out any URL. I thought that would have been adequate to imply lack of conflict of interest. A user has implied to me that it is not. What means of citing a source would have been adequate?
Result? Overproduction of electricity on sunny days. To the extent that you have to pay to put energy on the grid.
Between Bitcoin and AI, "too much electricity" shouldn't be an insurmountable problem for anyone. Either of things will happily consume as much electricity as you can throw at it, and want more. Of course, if you think those things are a waste of power, you could start using excess power to synthesize fuel to sell.
"Dark matter is a kludge." No, it isn't. It is a marker for "we need to slot something in here to make our gravity models work." Our gravity models are not wrong in the same sense Newon's theory of gravity was not wrong, merely incomplete or underdetermined would be a better term. But then all scientific models are underdetermined because trying to including every damn thing in the Universe tends to be bit hard.
Gee, I wonder why those silly scientists didn't ask you first before constructing the models and then the experiments to conduct to either validate or falsify them. You'd have been able to save them all those billions of dollars. Have you informed them that you have this skill? I am sure they'd listen to you.
Most User-agent strings that don't contain "bot" nor "Mozilla/" were in Anubis's allowlist last I checked.
?) it’s handed a lightweight JavaScript proof-of-work challenge—solve this trivial SHA-256 puzzle before proceeding. [...] There’s no crypto mining, no wallet enrichment
Yet. Because Anubis is free software, and because its hash happens to be the same as the proof of work of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, someone could modify Anubis to tie the SHA-256 puzzle to the Bitcoin block that a mining pool is working on.
no WASM blobs firing up your GPU
Until someone writes a browser extension to offload solving the hashcash to WebGPU.
Most users won’t know their machine is doing extra work unless they’re monitoring CPU spikes or poking around in dev tools.
Laptops tend to have an always-on CPU spike monitor: the exhaust fan. So do phones and tablets: they get warm. So do older, less expensive, or small-form-factor desktop computers: they get stuck on the interstitial for up to a minute.
Anubis is a fantastic tool, but I think we can strengthen it by baking in the principle of informed consent.
This already exists. Use an extension to make script-in-the-browser opt-in per domain, such as the Firefox extension "Javascript Control" by Erwan Ameil.
Apparently no one else thought to use this solution for this problem until Xe Iaso came along.
I seem to remember a service called Coinhive that offered a script to make the viewer's device mine the cryptocurrency Monero in the background. I forget if it had an option to hide the article until a particular amount was mined. (Coinhive shut down when too many intruders started installing its script on other people's websites.)
"Rational actor" has been disproven for a very long time.
My favorite easy experiment (you can run it with a grade school class) is this one:
Two participants. One participant is given one dollar. The other participant is given nothing.
Now, the participant with one dollar must offer some amount of that dollar to the other participant. The other participant can say 'yes,' take that amount, and they both walk away, or 'no,' and both participants get nothing.
The 'rational actor' would accept an offer of 'I'll give you a penny.' After all, walking away with one penny leaves you materially better than walking away with zero pennies.
The average participant, however, will only accept, at minimum, something like 37 cents. Anything less than that is seen as 'insulting' or 'greedy' and worthy of punishment.
As Glyphosate is not toxic (apart from repeatedly swimming in it and guzzling it by the pints daily) to mammals.
The whole reason it's frowned on is because Lawyers got involved, and because scientists couldn't say "Without a doubt, Glyphosate does not cause cancer" it got marked as a carcinogen. There again, scientists will never say "without a doubt", as there is always room for doubt in anything but the most settled of science, after decades or centuries of analysis. The data shows Glyphosate as being safe, and it being "extremely unlikely" that there is any connection between normal exposure to Glyphosate and cancer. It's one of the safest herbicides around, if not the safest for mammals. So it's no surprise that anything that is used instead is more toxic.
At this point, no country is paying much attention to la Presidenta's "threats". Instead, they seem to be working around the U.S. and cutting the U.S. out of their trade negotiations. They have every incentive to do that now since la Presidenta has the attention span of a gnat and no one (outside of the Maggots) believe anything he says or will bank on him not saying the opposite next week in response to something odd in his Froot Loops.
Or at least part of them. I don't think any country with thousands of thermonuclear warheads can be described as "developing." Russia/USSR was a major contributor to climate change through its oil exports and pollution policies.
China's economy can always sell product to Chinese people. There are a lot of them. Not to mention the rest of the world, which is happy to trade with China, if only because China isn't constantly making unreasonable and incoherent demands on everyone.
Pause for storage relocation.
