David Fickling

Bali has been facing a near breakdown in its transport system as fuel shortages lead to hours of queues at petrol stations. The government’s chaotic policy on support for battery motorbikes, and its economy-breaking subsidies for petrol, are to blame: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Imagine if the CEOs of Accenture or SAP spent all their time musing about building secret moon bases and nuking Earth from space, or whatever.

The whole thread is worth reading and makes much more serious points about cultish aspects of SF AI, but this one made me LOL

Maybe the CPC are naive or insouciant, but I think we should take seriously the possibility that it’s actually the EA/AI/SV rationalist sex cult people who have got out over their skis and are getting distracted by bad sci-fi rather than just regulating the industry they run.

The whole thread is worth reading and makes much more serious points about cultish aspects of SF AI, but this one made me LOL

It should be pause for thought that the Communist Party of China, one of the world’s most paranoid organizations about threats to its power, doesn’t appear to be having a SV-style millennarian/apocalyptic freakout *despite* overseeing lots of frontier AI development.

The whole thread is worth reading and makes much more serious points about cultish aspects of SF AI, but this one made me LOL

It’s darkly funny that data center bros are all installing gigawatts of diesel generators because batteries are girly and foreign, just at the moment the entire global diesel production system is breaking apart.

Above 1% the economics look even grimmer for diesel of course

It’s darkly funny that data center bros are all installing gigawatts of diesel generators because batteries are girly and foreign, just at the moment the entire global diesel production system is breaking apart.

A modern vehicle that supports OTA software updates, what devilry is this? www.yahoo.com/news/politic...

A thing that people need to reckon with when they theorize that AI swarms could brute-force engineer superviruses is that *this is what viruses do anyway*. There have likely been roughly a sextillion — a billion trillion — Covid virions generated since 2019.

Just to underline this point a bit, because “one sextillion” just sounds like “a bit bigger than a billion”: A sextillion is a larger number, by more than an order of magnitude, than the number of grains of sand on our planet. Carbon is already waaaay ahead of silicon on this measure.

A thing that people need to reckon with when they theorize that AI swarms could brute-force engineer superviruses is that *this is what viruses do anyway*. There have likely been roughly a sextillion — a billion trillion — Covid virions generated since 2019.

That is a billion trillion goes at coming up with a recipe to overwhelm our immune systems. And it required no GPUs, server racks, ACs or power grids, just the biochemical machinery of our own cells. And (though it is slightly silly to frame it this way) the virus lost.

I would find a lot of the apocalyptic warnings about AI a lot more convincing if the industry wasn’t steeped in an effective altruism, a movement that repeatedly spawns cultic offshoots

FWIW I absolutely believe that cybersecurity could be fried on a global scale in a few years, with beyond-Covid-scale consequences to payment systems and personal data.

I would find a lot of the apocalyptic warnings about AI a lot more convincing if the industry wasn’t steeped in an effective altruism, a movement that repeatedly spawns cultic offshoots

Casual users of AI like Richard Dawkins and Boy George keep losing their marbles in public because of their engagement with it. Elon Musk is one of its leading figures and has spent years melting down into White Supremacist madness in the most visible way possible.

Remember how we were going to see a boom in coal consumption due to the war in Iran? Global seaborne thermal coal imports fell 4mt in 1H26 vs 1H25, -0.9% y/y, -7.7% vs 1H24. If this is a boom, I’d love to see the bust. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

This is globalisation at its absolute best

Such a rich text

This is globalisation at its absolute best

Anecdotal impression, but IMO the most implacably anti-EV group of people you will ever meet are middle management in legacy carmakers whose C-suite is all-in on the energy transition.

If you think about it, it’s an important and under-discussed dynamic. The people responsible for the nuts and bolts of steering this vital and wrenching change often believe in their bones that it is all nonsense, and want to make it go away. They want to prove their would-be customers wrong!