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I bet that happened for no reason at all, just like how the US went into Afghanistan for no reason in 2001.

(Sarcasm aside, there obviously are big problems for how these 2 nations responded to the massive terrorist attacks. But I kind of think it’s questionable to pretend there was no big terrorist attack that triggered the response...)


Yeah, and 9/11 happened for no reason either. Same with October 7th.

We are always downstream of a past violence. Let's stop with the simplistic "they started it, so we are allowed to kill thousands of them", and maybe then we can start building a better world.


> just like how the US went into Afghanistan for no reason in 2001.

We did go there for no reason since they weren't involved in 9/11.


The Taliban hosted al Qaeda and sheltered bin Laden, they were plenty involved.

« the US went into Afghanistan for no reason in 2001 » — Reason was the Taliban had destroyed the poppy fields which had been providing a nice windfall for the CIA and the US economy (through money laundering, see Catherine Austin Fitts), and which is also a means to bring about "social change" provided you control where the drugs are funneled to.

Do you also bet that 9/11 happened for no reason at all?

Neither? Competitive academic researchers are susceptible to exaggeration and self-aggrandizing, and CEOs are that and also mostly psychopaths. I tend to think there isn’t systematic spying on researchers looking for breakthroughs. A lot of people are looking for the same things using similar approaches.

I mean the accusation is that they were using private ChatGPT conversations. Given the extent to of the gold rush and the long history of Silicon Valley stealing ideas, and arguing it’s not immoral, It almost seems like your making the exceptional claim that this is the one time where Silicon Valley didn’t use information that was at their disposal.

Sam Altman might himself be offended you would presume he’s not ambitious enough to cheat.


It seems that in this case OpenAI are suggesting that the researchers whose work they scooped were using OpenAI models with an account setting that allowed OpenAI to train on anonymized prompts.

It seems that Buckmaster and Levant (who is an Anthropic employee) were rather naive in the amount of trust they had in OpenAI, with Buckmaster going so far as to contact OpenAI's Sébastien Bubeck to discuss what they were working on and clarify that contrary to rumor this was a private collab.


> Given the extent to of the gold rush and the long history of Silicon Valley stealing ideas, and arguing it’s not immoral

Not just Silicon Valley but also OpenAI, specifically.


That’s a really difficult problem to solve with the built environment being the way it is. Buses get the closest, but to make it usable at times other than rush hour, they have to run empty or nearly empty, which drives the cost very high (although this is often hidden by subsidies). The way to deal with low density transit is automation.

Depends at the scale you're looking at. How much money is wasted by 30 people driving 30 cars when a bus could take them all? Taking into account car wear, gas, etc.

Low density public transport work very well in places where people simply can't afford personal vehicles, it's not a tech logical or financial problem at all, if anything it's cultural and mostly political


If the bus service is good and available, people will use it eventually including in off hours. Induced demand.

I can not imagine that the cost of busses can ever approach the cost of the equivalent amount of cars (for the same amount of passengers).

It is, at least in a place like LA. Fares are like less than 10% the actual total cost of an average bus ride. https://www.reddit.com/r/LAMetro/comments/1orftnt/should_you...

Now if you’re ONLY serving high density and high passenger volume times, buses are incredible.


Is your point that busses aren't profitable? Why do they need to be?

I am sure if you did the math, having the occasional empty bus does not hold a candle to the amount of dead mass being dragged along in single-occupant cars.

The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses.

So regardless of density and passenger volume, busses are incredible.


It's not that simple, road damage is famously non-linear in axle load: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

> The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses.

That doesn't really math, because axle weight is a large factor in road wear. There's details and it doesn't always apply, but the commonly used rule of thumb is that "road wear increases in proportion to the fourth power of its axle load."

If a transit bus weighs at least 25000 lbs and has two axles [2] and a F-150 has an average weight of 5000 lbs with two axles [3], you get a lot more road wear from putting a bunch of people on a bus compared to all of them driving their f-150s by themselves. The power rule says the wear from one bus is equivalent to 625 F-150s. Although if people rode around in classic Beetles (~ 2000 lbs), there'd be even less road wear, and things would be a lot groovier.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

[2] https://phoenixtransportationsf.com/how-much-does-a-bus-weig...

[3] https://www.fordoffeasterville.com/2025-ford-f-150-weight-gu...


> Is your point that busses aren't profitable? Why do they need to be?

Because late stage capitalism brain rot doesn't allow for nuanced things such as "public services".

They'd rather have everyone spend 50k on a car and Xk per year on insurance and maintenance than $100 of their taxes going to public infrastructure


Things require resources regardless of “capitalism” or some other system.

I believe Tesla’s FSD is already better than such unassisted drivers. Particularly with the current FSD limitations which require monitoring driver attentiveness. If every drunk who attempted to drive was using FSD, deaths due to drunk driving would be virtually eliminated. Heck, even advanced lane keeping and smart cruise control from other manufacturers, while much more crude, would still help tremendously.

I wonder how much of drunk driving crashes are because driver turns into speeding asshole vs dozing off. You wouldn't be able to force them to use FSD, especially in a fun car like Tesla. Maybe if it derated itself if it detects erratic driving. They already released a feature where it avoids crashes even when FSD is disabled (but does require subscription).

I think people are just incredibly bad drivers when drunk, but they do it because they don’t want to hire a cab or leave their car at the bar overnight, etc. Having FSD handle driving would be way safer.

Unions.

I don't see what unions would have against automated emergency stop systems. Workplace safety is a core issue of unions, so if anything, shouldn't they demand those systems?

Obviously it’s impossible to know unless you’re sitting in on union discussions, but there is a perverse incentive at play. If one fears automation taking their job, I could see resistance to allowing any automation “foot in the door” so to speak.

If anyone is downvoting because they think this is wrong (vs just being low content and largely unhelpful) I’m interested in what alternative explanations exist.

This tech has existed for many years in motor vehicles and works reasonably well in far more complex environments than literal rails. It doesn’t seem at all like a challenging technology problem.

The things that come to mind are: failures of politicians to enact requirements, negligent or greedy rail infrastructure and/or train ownership, and unions afraid of lost jobs.


This is an inaccurate simplification

French Guyana is part of the EU, actually, in spite of being in South America. (Colonialism!)

Curious fact: France's longest border is with Brazil.

EU outermost region to be exact.

In Nigeria: Lithium totally irrelevant compared to oil. I think people have this really weird idea that lithium is to electric cars as oil is to regular cars, but it’s literally like a factor of 50 less.

https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/china-africa-and-the-...

China is on track to control around 81% of global spodumene refinery production by 2027.


Datacenters need batteries too, and they're drawing a BUNCH of power these days. 1 rack can now easily use as much power as 100 US homes (120kw), with some rack designs pushing to 200 and 300kw.

I mean, in the real world, people will just vote out politicians who raise their gas prices.


Doesn't seem to have worked this time.


CS Lewis was pretty influential on the YA fiction, Harry Potter type of literature. And his other works also have broad influence beyond fiction.


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