That's still a lot more effort, especially since you have to vet each one to figure out if they provide good customer service in the event something goes wrong, and to be confident they won't steal and sell your credit card number (yeah, you aren't liable for the fraud, but getting a new card is a huge PITA). What could make this work well is the existence of a few online shopping aggregators that combine searching across all of the online stores and centralize payment. The problem is that in order to compete with Amazon any such alternatives would have to have enormous scale, which makes it a very difficult space to enter. Google tried with Google Shopping, but regulators immediately jumped in to stop them.

FWIW, my strategy is that for inexpensive stuff I just buy on Amazon, period, spending a little time to look for cheaper/better options than the "Amazon recommended". For pricier stuff, where it's worth spending a few minutes, I search on Amazon and also on Google, and if I find cheaper non-Amazon options I spend some time evaluating the different sites, unless they happen to be sites I've already bought from. For really expensive stuff I use other search engines and recommendation sites... and then almost always end up buying on Amazon because on those products pricing tends to be consistent, and it's a lot of money and if something goes wrong I trust Amazon to make me whole

Yep. So what? All species are evolved to fight for survival, because any that doesn't evolve to fight for survival is likely to cease to exist. I'm human and want my species to survive. Should I instead want my species to be eaten by wolves, or ASIs?

The problem is that there is a portion of our species that is not interested in humanity's survival. Those people are an existential threat to the rest of us. That doesn't mean we need to exterminate them, but it does suggest that we shouldn't help them carry out their plans.

The problem with the "trick" is that we (a) don't know how to set goals or "wants" for the AI systems we build, nor do we (b) know what goals or wants we could or should safely set if we did know how to set them.

The combination of (a) and (b) is what's known in the AI world as the Alignment Problem (i.e. aligning AI interests with human interests), and it's completely unsolved.

I think you also need to prove that humans supplanting other less-intelligent species is good. Maybe the universe would be better off if we hadn't dominated the Earth and killed off so many species.

(Note that I think both arguments are silly. I'm just pointing out that if you're asking for proof that AI is better than humanity, you should also be asking for proof that humanity is better than non-humanity, whether AI or not. My own take is that humanity, like every other species, selfishly fights for its own survival. There's no morality in it, there's no such thing as making the universe better or worse off.)

Seizing land is a counterproductive and foolish solution to that problem. Basically the whole world uses a different solution, which works pretty well: property taxes (though land-value taxes would probably be better). You just keep raising the taxes until leaving land idle becomes a money-losing proposition. The only way that doesn't work is if ownership of farmland is truly monopoly-dominated so there is no competition, in which case you might have to resort to trust-busting.

This is exactly why we have property taxes, to ensure that most property is put to productive use.

Yes, mass starvation is worse than land seizure, but land seizure is just about the worst possible solution to the problem, as evidenced by what has happened to Venezuela's economy since then. Seizure and collective ownership is guaranteed to produce horribly inefficient operations which might prevent outright starvation but will leave the populace on the edge of it. Seizure and redistribution to private ownership is slightly less bad, but will redistribute the land mostly to people who don't know how to use it effectively.

What would have worked much, much better would be actions that served to restore competition among farmers, starting with making sure they were all paying fair property taxes that were high enough to disincentivize leaving farmland fallow.

Why would superintelligent AIs obey the billionaires?

If you think it's because they'd be programmed to to it, you don't understand how we currently design and build AI. We don't program it to do anything. We train it until it responds the way we want it to, but we have no way of knowing if it's just fooling us. We can't actually define goals for the systems and we can't introspect them to tell what actual goals they have derived from their training sets.

Note, BTW, that the above is only one half of the problem called "AI alignment". In order to make sure AI will serve humanity (or a small segment of humanity; it's exactly the same problem either way) you need to be able to do two things. First, you need to be able to set the AI's goals, in a way that sticks. Second, you need to figure out what goal you can set that will achieve the subservience that you want. The difficulty in setting a "safe" goal for a powerful being is well illustrated in that old tales about genies and wishes, but modern philosophers have taken a hard, systematic look at this problem and so far no one has come up with any safe goal, not one, there's always some way it could go horribly wrong.

Okay... those things hardly seem like "participating in Project 2025", though there has been an unfortunate amount of capitulation to the administration. Personally, I think the worst of it was the way they settled Trump's lawsuit.

What are those?

It really doesn't do anything to illuminate the situation. It would if the ISS were built to generate/consume a lot of power, but it's not. Quite the opposite. It's designed to provide a reasonable amount of power to run life support and energy to run some experiments.

It may, of course, be true that orbital gigawatt data centers are a lot more than twenty years away, but the comparison with ISS doesn't tell us anything.

The whole point of AI is that it's supposed to be able to adapt to us, allowing us to give it direction in natural language and expect it to deal correctly with our ambiguities. While it's true that current-generation AI does require a learning curve, it's improving very rapidly, so any thing you learn about how to use it today will be obsolete next year. "Prompt engineering" shouldn't ultimately be a thing at all, and if AI development stalls out at some point so that it actually is a thing people have to do a decade from now, it will not be what it is today.

It makes sense to learn how to work around the idiosyncrasies and limitations of today's AI tools if you can use them to accomplish useful work today, but there's no point in learning those things in order to use the tools of 2035.

Given that the comparison is with a Small Modular Reactor, this isn't really relevant. If we end up with GW data centers then the comparison result may change, since it will be comparing a full-sized reactor against much larger renewable plants. I doubt the results will be much different, but they might be.

From the summary:

it would cost 43 percent less to power a 120 MW data facility with renewables and a small amount of gas-generated energy

Renewables plus a gas plant are just as reliable as a nuclear plant. This analysis appears to have taken reliability as a pre-requisite, then with that addressed they compared costs.

They really aren't. Their drive is for status and a feeling of accomplishment, not money. Money is just the way they keep score. It's relevant and important to understand that the numbers aren't even real money. It's not cash in the bank, it's the value of their share of the company they oversee. The goal is to increase the value of those operations... and it should be noted that because those companies provide value to consumers and jobs for employees, it's really easy for CEOs to convince themselves that making the number go up increases their own status score and makes humanity better off, which isn't entirely true but also isn't entirely false.

Reducing this complex set of motivations to money misses the mark, badly.

Is it really? I think it's more personal than political, though in general it gets really fuzzy when political views take aim at individual identity.

His ammunition had obscure internet meme references that are used more by the alt-right than the left, though it's really hard to tell because Internet extremists apply many layers of irony, making it really hard to tell.

No, his political motivations are not very clear.

Except that Crooks was also tracking events of the Democratic candidates. He wanted to shoot a prominent figure, it didn't matter which side. Ryan Routh was definitely political, but he wasn't any sort of left-winger. He voted for Trump, then supported Bernie, then Tulsi Gabbard, then Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.

I think it's highly likely that Robinson was similarly all over the place, but likely less clear since he was young probably didn't think much about politics.

No, I think he was probably already further to the right, but moved at least some of his views to the left. You do know who Nick Fuentes and the groypers are, right?

This almost earned you a "Foe" tag. I haven't impugned your intelligence or other personal characteristics. Keep it civil, please.

Indeed, left-wing violence is on the rise, but that's coming from a point where right-wing violence utterly dominated the space for decades. Don't go assuming that your side is somehow less violent just because they've been relatively quiet this year. And although I'm actually not on the left, if I were I wouldn't assume that my side is inherently less violent, either, because the opposite was true in the 60s.

The only correct reaction here is to condemn political violence, full stop, and not to care what the motivations of the individuals were (though, obviously, I have a sick fascination with understanding their motivations and spend way too much time digging into whatever we have).

Note that condemning political violence, full stop, is not what Trump and the GOP leadership are doing. They're condemning only violence from the left and ignoring violence from the right. This is very bad for all of us left, right and center.

What makes you think it wasn't?

Like the flat Earth conspiracy theories, the COVID conspiracy theories are really amusing, and for the same reason: The theorists can offer no plausible explanation as to why the alleged conspirators are doing the dastardly thing. During COVID, the best rationale on offer was "To control us!". Okay, but if someone wants to control you, don't they generally use that control to make you do something that benefits them? If I built a mind control machine, would I use it to make people give me money and sex, or would I use it to get them to turn in a circle three times before going to bed?

The best the flat Earthers can come up with is "It's a plot by NASA to get money from the government", which they then "prove" by ginning up some math that shows that the cost of deceiving the world just happens to be about the same amount as NASA's budget. Except that actually disproves their point. If I'm going to create a hoax to extract government funding, I definitely don't want to spend every penny of the funding on running the hoax. That's just working for a living, and if I'm a scammer it's exactly what I don't want to do.