Google also has a (paid) cloud computing services business so I would think code generation tools would fall under that monetization umbrella.

I'm curious how they arrived at that measurement. It's not like AI generated code has a watermark on it that says it was AI generated (AFAIK). I remain skeptical of this claim.

True but with a house I also have ongoing utility (either a place to live or a source of rental income). Just holding Bitcoin gets me nothing.

But at least if my house drops in value I can still live in it and it still keeps the rain off my head. If you're unable to re-sell your Bitcoin for a higher price than you paid for it then it becomes a literal waste of hard drive space.

They're just saying they're just saying under 18's from Australia aren't permitted so use them.

If I use a VPN to make it look like I'm signing up for the site from Siberia then (presumably) Australia's laws wouldn't apply.

Now how do you prove that the person holding the phone is the person featured on the ID?

As opposed to noted high school graduate Sam Altman (who I'm sure is completely fair and impartial and is in no way incentivized to keep the bubble bubbling)? If you're including a bunch of people who are openly pro-AI then also including a few "generally critical malcontents" to give the opposing viewpoint might not be the worst thing in the world.

We had to go with 10 because everyone knows that any technology that is 20 years away will remain 20 years away indefinitely.

Really? Where do the returns come from Larry? Because I'm not aware of any way that Bitcoin "returns" anything other than by selling it to a Greater Fool for more than you paid for it.

Citation needed.

If the electricity you're using was partially subsidized by the government (which seems to be what the GP was suggesting, I have no idea if that's actually true) then you didn't entirely pay for it. And if you were using a measurable percentage of global energy consumption playing video games not only would that your local power utility probably start asking some pointed questions but I think that you could be rightly criticized for being wasteful.

Remember being criticized is not the same thing as being legally prosecuted. The GP didn't say you couldn't waste the power that you purchased. Just that if you did people might consider you a dick.

I don't disagree. But personally I would contend that it is a least theoretically possible to create a crypto-coin that is not an active fraud. Bitcoin, for example, I would classify as a speculative mania but not a rug pull in the traditional sense (although you could make a case for decentralized ponzi scheme). And as long as there are lots of people that want to trade digital tulip bulbs, I don't think setting up an exchange to enable them to do so is an inherently fraudulent enterprise. Morally dubious perhaps, but not actively illegal (at least until regulators and lawmakers declare otherwise).

Now I do think it is telling that such a huge proportion of the crypto world seems to be made up of of con-artists and grifters. It's almost as if having a completely unregulated market with no central authority is...you know...bad.

I think the problem was that they were embezzling money form their customers. Which digital fun-bucks their customers happened to be trading in is only tangentially relevant.

Actually I think a court appointed bankruptcy trustee sued Sam's parents.

I don't think I entirely agree. Yes people generally do their jobs primarily to earn a living. If not it's generally called a "hobby" not a "job". But people can do something for more than one reason, and I do think that there are some jobs that are meaningless even though they pay well. For example I used to write software for the banking industry. I wrote software that helped a bunch of bankers fill in useless reports that no one ever read that were only being produced because some politician that didn't know what they were talking about passed a useless regulation in order to score political points. I was being paid very well but I couldn't help but feel if the entire business area disappeared tomorrow no one would really notice or care.