JulianMorrison

They're using it to replace "search on stack overflow, cut and paste, does it work?"

They're tools for different tasks, consolidating them would make a less helpful mishmash

Anyone with heaps of money

He employs rocket scientists.

And also, I hear, a layer of glad-handing management dedicated to keeping him from putting his thumb in the rocket scientist pie, patting him on the head for his cockamamie ideas, and faking up Potemkin demonstrations to keep him happy.

In my experience, if what you've got is a months-ahead plan where management sets the deadlines AND controls the scope via pressuring the line manager, and delivery relies on crunch time and panicky de-scoping and working to the letter and not the spirit of the contract, then what you have is waterfall in a fedora and a Groucho Marx novelty disguise.

If they're studying history, they'll need to learn to read a whole bunch of weird, ancient, dead scripts - everything from cuneiform, to gothic black letters, to cursive. If they need it, they can go learn it.

Most won't.

Dry the algae, press it into bricks, put it down a mine.

Charcoal is another option, including putting that into soil as a supplement for agriculture.

Programmers love "one clever trick".

Reality does not, it's irreducibly complex and as a result that trick quickly becomes an annoyingly overstretched metaphor.

Pascal family languages parse quickly because they won't let you use anything before it's defined.

Reporting the images to law enforcement is good. There should be a human in the loop to separate medical images from exploitative ones.

Perma-deleting his account on an automated accusation is bad. That should hinge on, at minimum, law enforcement's decision to charge a crime. [Edit: unless the criminality of the images is obvious - again, a human needs to be in the loop.]

A big part of the problem is things moving so fast that a lot of stuff doesn't have a long run. Covid and its vaccines being an example. In the end the reason to trust them was a mix of "if not this, then what?" and "it doesn't seem to be killing people".

> To say that a physical system is a computer requires an external observer to map the physical states of that system onto the abstract states of a Turing machine.

No it does not. An unobserved computer still computes.

Not to mention: huge underground tanks of gasoline are a fire and explosion hazard. They are an environmental hazard if they leak or spill. They require building to safety codes. They require trained and skilled operation. They need to be to insured.

Which is another feedback loop, high cost, shrinking demand, shrinking supply, rising cost.

Also oil has high fixed costs. Stations, tanker trucks, refineries. Fewer customers carrying them means they rise as a percentage of purchase price.

It's the oil infrastructure that will affect them, because it's global. If that goes away...