Doesn't UBI come from taxes? I can't reconcile the idea of welfare for everyone resonating very well with any of the libertarians I know. Personal charity, sure, absolutely, but not government controlled payouts to people, even if that includes everyone. They would probably consider it better than the current welfare system with all it's bureaucracy, but that's as positive a response as I can expect.

Most libertarians I know (and I consider myself an on and off libertarian as I learn more about it) want the government to stick to making sure people's rights aren't being trodden upon and otherwise leave us alone.

See Milton Friedman. Or Friedrich Hayek if Friedman isn’t crazy enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advocates_of_universal...

My main objection to UBI: won't landlords, grocery stores, power companies and the like simply raise their prices to suck up that money that everyone is guaranteed to have now until it ultimately doesn't cover basic needs like it was designed to do? Maybe I'm being too pessimistic.

>Maybe (as some research indicates) the models are as good as they are going to get. They're always going to be a cross between a chipper stochastic parrot and that ego inflated junior dev that refuses to admit a mistake. Maybe when the real (non-subsidized) economics present themselves, the benefit isn't there.

I'd put my money on this. From my understanding of LLMs, they are basically mashing words together via markov chains and have added a little bit of subject classification with attention, a little bit of short-term memory, and enough grammar to lay things out correctly. They don't understand anything they are saying, they are not learning facts and trying to build connections between them, they are not learning from their conversations with people. They aren't even running the equivalent of a game loop where they can even think about things. I would expect something we're trying to call an AI to call you up sometimes and ask you questions. Trillions of dollars have got us this far, how far can it actually take us?

I want my actual AI personal assistant that I have to coerce somehow into doing something for me like an emo teen.

I suppose that eventually enough people will have grown up reading mostly ai slop that that way of speaking will eventually become the norm.

This makes me wonder how the system makes any money. Presumably the same people that won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube won't buy things from ads either. So how do the ad companies make any money on them?

I do this when I can get away with it but I worry that by cleaning one small area I'll find out the hard way that something else was relying on that bit of code being incorrect and I'll have exposed some subtle bug that hasn't bitten us yet, but probably will in some unexpected way.

> - Start accepting small individual donations solely for the Firefox team (rather than generalized Mozilla stuff that goes on anything but Firefox). > > - Start crowdfunding for features.

Just these two things would make me happy (assuming the crowdfunding goes to the Firefox team as well).

I don't know any of the Mozilla execs but from the outside it looks an awful lot like some grifters were attracted to the free Google money and took money from the people doing the actual work.

If I'm wrong, my apologies. There just seems to be a lot of high salaries and a lot of developer layoffs.

I don't know, I kind of like the name EctoScript. Although if it were me I'd just rename it WebScript and be done with it.

In my opinion, if we really want a presence off of earth we'd be better off building larger and larger space habitats and bootstrapping a mining industry in space.

Daniel Suarez [1] has written a book where he imagined how this could happen (Delta-v)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Suarez_(author)

P.S. Read a lot of his book, great author

I loved Daemon, and FreedomTM.

> if we really want a presence off of earth we'd be better off building larger and larger space habitats and bootstrapping a mining industry in space

This turns entirely on how human biology works in zero versus low gravity. (Same for spin versus natural, or linear, gravity.)

The experiments we need to be doing is building and launching space stations and planetary bases for mice.

I can't wait for all the studies making the news that end with "in mice in space"

Agreed. Once it becomes commercially viable to start building things in space, it'll take off on its own. There will be constant pressure to build faster, safer, more capable craft. Whether that will lead to something like FTL isn't possible to know, but at the very least it's a step towards a space-faring civilization.

Yep, so long as there are clear, positive incentives or it could become a corrupt, expensive boondoggle depriving ordinary people on Earth. And Mars ain't it except underground.

Nit: "earth" is dirt, but "Earth" is always capitalized when referring to the celestial body we inhabit.

Every browser has to implement it but there's nothing saying they can't let the user disable that functionality, either.