That’s part of the reason a moon base could be viable. The sun outputs a reasonable amount of helium 3, which is great for fusion reactions. Unfortunately it tends to sit at the top of our atmosphere and get blown away again. On the moon, it gets captured by the dust in collectable quantities.

I never said it wasn’t useful, just a very low efficiency reactor. Then again, if it was better, it would burn out faster, which would be bad for life on earth.

Even the core only has an output of 200-300W/m^3.

The amusing thing is that the sun is actually quite a shit fusion reactor. It’s power per unit volume is tiny. It just makes it up in sheer volume. A solar level fusion reactor would be almost completely useless to us. Instead we need to go far beyond the sun’s output to just be viable.

It’s like describing one of the mega mining dumper trucks as an “artificial mule”.

It’s more than just pushing for support. They have made a lot of windows only games just work on Linux.

They’ve changed it from “need to release and support Linux” to “zero effort other than not actively fuck up the compatibility layer”. In user land, it’s the same thing. For developers it’s a vast difference.

IoT can be great. The key is, as you pointed out, to actually have personal control over it.

It also has to account for WAF (wife acceptance factor). If it doesn’t fail gracefully to a dumb version of itself, it’s not to be trusted

It would, but it takes more energy that gets produced total. You’re spending 300wKh to make 220kWh of electricity.

And how do you plan to keep it liquefied, on a large scale, for 100s of years? It’s currently done using pressure vessels amd chillers, that require maintenance etc.

There are 3 use cases I’ve seen.

• Making fossil fuel power stations “clean”.

• CO2 recovery for long term storage.

• CO2 for industrial use.

It’s no good for the first, due to energy consumption. This is the main use I’ve seen it talked up for, as something that can be retrofitted to power plants.

It’s poor for the second, since the result is a gas (hard to store long term). We would want it as a solid or liquid product, which this doesn’t do.

The last has limited requirements. We only need so much CO2.

The only large scale use case I can see for this is as part of a carbon capture system. Capture and then react to solidify the carbon. However, plants are already extremely good at this, and can do it directly from atmospheric air, using sunlight.

Just checked the numbers, for those interested.

A gas power plant produces around. 200-300kWh per tonne of CO2.

Capture costs 300-900kWh per tonne captured.

So this is basically non viable using fossil fuel as the power. If you aren’t, then storage of that power is likely a lot better.

It’s also worth noting that it is still CO2 gas. Long term containment of a gas is far harder than a liquid or solid.

A van can’t deal with even remotely muddy grass. I lost count of how many vans I rescued, back when I had my pickup. They are also a lot less effective at dragging a horse trailer etc. Vans also (generally) don’t have back seats. If you’re also having to trek up and down the motorways, then the comfort of the ranger makes a big difference.

They have there place, but they are in the same boat as vans etc. They are commercial vehicles, to do a job, not city runabouts to stroke egos.

LLMs can’t become AGIs. They have no ability to actually reason. What they can do is use predigested reasoning to fake it. It’s particularly obvious with certain classes of proble., when they fall down. I think the fact it fakes so well tells us more about human intelligence than AI.

That being said, LLMs will likely be a critical part of a future AGI. Right now, they are a lobotomised speech centre. Different groups are already starting to tie them to other forms of AI. If we can crack building a reasoning engine, then a full AGI is possible. An LLM might even form its internal communication method, akin to our internal monologue.

The latter is called deathworlders. It was written as a short story. The author disappeared for a while. When he came back, he started writing a whole web serial on the premise.

I also remember reading the former, though where is another question.