I mean as far as I know no human being is even a billionaire anyway if you only count cash. It's one of the things the "eat the rich" crowd is particularly bad at internalizing, that there's a difference between value and money that can be spent on food or hospitals.

It is much more feasible for Jeff Bezos to sell a billion dollars worth of Amazon tomorrow or Bill Gates to sell a billion dollars worth of MSFT tomorrow than it is for Elon to sell a trillion dollars of SPCX even over a year's time

I get that net worth is more than just cash, and that is not what I meant and it's pretty obvious that isn't what I meant. It may not just be cash on hand but if an asset is completely illiquid at it's purported value, is it actually worth that?

2,000 gold bars were stopped out of iraq. and that is just what was stopped / reported.

Dictators and autocrats may or nay not have cash sitting in a bank account, but there are most likely multiple with $1B in gold.

Somewhat doubtful. (The first part of your statement, anyway. Of course the difference between abstract "value" and hard, spendable "money" is a thing.)

Like Mr. Hanson said in my sibling comment, some rulers are (or were!) bound to have amassed incredible amounts of resources. For historical/non-present-day examples, consider looking into figures like Jakob Fugger or Mansa Musa.

If you can describe the code you want to write, AI can write it exactly the way you would have, but faster than you every time. That is the floor now.

The problem is that people who are bad writers have trouble understanding that AI writes worse than they do

you clearly have never read a 1000 word text written by me (/s, but only partially)

I'm a man, and I've been using Uber since it launched. Most rides are fine, but there are enough weirdos on the platform that 220 incidents per day that are serious enough to report seems reasonable to me, even if you don't consider that they operate internationally.

I once had a driver pick me up in downtown Seattle, and it turned out to be that he was driving for Uber as a tactic for his entrepreneurial venture developing antimicrobial and hydrophobic coating. He claimed to have applied it to the fishing boat from Deadliest Catch. He was specifically circling downtown to try to pick up someone who could get the ear of someone in Amazon's grocery division that he could pitch to (which I was not). At a red light in a nightmarish seven-way intersection, he took out a square of cheesecloth that had apparently had the coating applied, and attempted to demonstrate its effectiveness by pouring water onto it. It worked, and the water got all over his passenger seat and center console instead while the light turned green and cars behind us honked.

A few months later, Uber tried to match me with that same driver, and I cancelled it and walked instead. I have to imagine that if a guy with that level of high-preparation social ineptitude can stick around in their system, that the number of people making offhand inappropriate moves or remarks must be reasonably high.

We're going on 13 years since React launched publicly

17 years for flexbox

Gemini at least will produce small functional inline sample apps without being explicitly told to, particularly if you're trying to learn about something, it'll produce an interactive diagram or similar. I can see a future where these kinds of end users aren't necessarily saying "I can build an app for this", but their AI can just produce one when appropriate.

I attribute a lot of it to the principle of "punching up".

Agreed. Nobody really talks about most other countries, while the US is pretty much top of the list of nearly every topic. So we're constantly a target.

> while the US is pretty much top of the list of nearly every topic

s/is/was

The US is trying really hard to lower its position on these lists. The US has not been near the top of reading/writing/arithmetic in a long time. The US is undoing a lot of federal regulations by eliminating/reducing agencies meant to regulate things like EPA, FDA, Dept of Education.

Yeah and it's actually possible to avoid pork if you need to. If she wanted to actually stand by her beliefs at this point she'd have to go live in the woods.

Seems like she has.

People were plenty productive before AI burst onto the scene. Wanting to not have AI shoved down your throat doesn't suddenly make someone "not productive". What an utterly assinine take. Thank you for being Exhibit A for why everyone hates the AI bros.

I was productive for 25+ years before AI, now I'm more productive because of it. At this point in time, you can do all the software engineering and programming and design yourself, and at worst an agent will be able to literally just type it out faster than you can. I've typed 100 WPM average since I learned how to use a computer, 135+ at a burst, and when I need to type a ton of code that I already understand fully, agents are faster. She doesn't have to outsource her thinking, but this decision will show up on her metrics to her employer whether it's for religious reasons or not.

You wouldn't call a carpenter using electric tools a "Power Tool Bro". I didn't hear of anybody using autocomplete called an "Intellisense Bro". If a someone worked for a shop and refused to use lithium-ion batteries for religious reasons in favor of their hand-crank drill, they would be less productive, and the shop would be better off hiring an equivalently talented carpenter with a modern skillset and fewer arbitrary hangups. That's the level of absurdity on display with this comparison.

She's just using religion as so many ill-intentioned people do - an appeal to authority to justify behavior she intrinsically wanted to act out anyway, and becoming a burden to others in the process.

Can you elaborate? I interpreted the same as the other comment that the blower fan just needed a hand start and kept going after the furnace started up. What you're saying only makes sense to me if the spinning the fan by hand allowed the furnace to start by bypassing the safety at startup, but wouldn't that mean that if the exhaust fan was stopped during normal operation (blockage etc) that the furnace would just keep going, dumping CO into the home?

It wasn't bypassing, I was just helping start because of what I believe to have been a bearing issue.

It’s a pretty normal trick to try while troubleshooting a rotating part.

Helping something start is not likely to ruin your day (unless you get caught in a rotating part)

Gas heat uses two fans - one to blow air to the rooms (often shared with an A/C system), and another smaller one[1] to supply air to the gas burners and the heat exchanger. As part of the safety system, the computer won't open the gas valve and ignite the burners until it knows there is airflow from the small fan.

When GP spun the fan it fooled the computer into thinking it was running and continuing the ignition sequence. It may be that once the burners got everything hot there was enough airflow from the thermals so they didn't have a buildup of CO. Or were just lucky.

[1] The motor is usually generic but has a proprietary bracket, which was a $1500 lesson last year

In the case I described then, what would normally happen if the fan is blocked after ignition? Like if I had a fully functioning system, booted it up, and then blocked the fan from spinning with a stick, the computer is going to keep the gas valve open and fill my house with CO?