Were probably? That’s a giant understatement and you know it.

Ai will save billions of lives and improve the living standard for everyone on the planet, it’ll be just like mobile phones where the biggest benefits come to the poorest communities - tech haters often ignore this reality, millions of children in Africa, Asia, etc were only able to get access to education through mobile infrastructure.

The internet has given everyone access to huge amounts of education resources and it’s only increased as they technology matures - current LLMs are amazing for language learners and for people who need things like English articles explained in their own language, I just asked chatgpt to explain the code I’m working on in Tagalog and it did it without hesitation (I can’t speak for the accuracy personally but looks legit) it even translated variable names but not function calls.

And this before we’ve scratched the surface of it’s utility, I’ll tell you one thing if you ever say to your grandkids ‘o I was against ai when it came out’ they’ll look at up like you’d look at someone who said they didn’t think math would catch on or that iron would never be as popular as bronze.

Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.

I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’

People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you

Yeah the amount of good ai can do for the world is staggering, even just giving a speed boost and quality improvement to open source Devs will unlock a lot of new potential.

The problem is people in a certain age bracket often fear change because they feel they’ve put effort into learning how things work and if things change then all that effort will be worthless.

It doesn’t really matter though, gangs of idiots literally smashed the prototype looms when they were demonstrated because despite the cost of cloth being one of the major factors in poverty at the time a handful of people took it on themselves to fight to maintain the status quo – of course we know how it turned out, the same that it always does…

Areas that resisted technological and social growth stagnated and got displaced by those which welcomed it

Sorry, what genocide happened on Reddit?

The rest of the money goes into fighting for software freedom, developing infrastructure tools and other things they’re very open about.

Personally I don’t donate because I prefer to help small open source efforts where a little money makes a big difference, especially protects which I believe could help emerging open source communities grow or inspire more cc content. I’m glad Mozilla exist and that they get so much money from Google and donations

AliExpress bots have probably already read this comment and put together a ‘panic inducer top quality rechargeable usb frequency tweeter for wedding, birthday, sonic warfare, corporate and special event’ which you can buy for five dollars

Mozilla do spend a lot of money on software development, 220 million last year, out of total expenses of 425 million which came from a taking of 593 million of which 81% comes from Google.

Oh there is but it’s sorted through rich people filters, if a hundred show ideas contain important and useful thoughts about our current society and one show Idea boils down to ‘capitalism is good actually’ then we already know which one will get made without any other information

I don’t mind watching a ‘capitalism is good’ show occasionally if it’s risen to the top because it makes important and informative statements but i can’t abide a landscape where other opinions don’t have that same ability.

Yeah but it’s still corporate pandering and drowning your brain in bullshit. ‘did you see the latest show that rich people decided we should be brainwashed with, it contains all the talking points they think will help society to continue to benefit them’

I much prefer stuff that’s free because it’s made by people who want to make it, I’ll even put a few coins in their patreon if I really like it.

I had an arcos jukebox before the first iPod came out, every time they’d release a new version it’s big feature would be something my jukebox had always done. Except it didn’t have an awkward spinning selector wheel or celebrity endorsements.

I could connect it to the cd player and record the whole thing as mp3s, I think it even used to split the tracks automatically but I might be wrong. Plug it into usb and it’s a HDD ready to have anything copied to it without hassle… No need for shitty iTunes, no complaints about wav files and never found an MP3 it couldn’t play.

I remember thinking that surely people will realize over priced and feature limited products are an insult but no, the kids of the future I had so much hope for turned out to be gen z who care more about brand recognition than anyone ever before. I still think the feature rich generics will have their day, maybe generation alpha…

Someone I watch was sponsored by a PCB fabrication company and the way he described their service I realized I could save a lot of time and money doing it that way.

I don’t think advertising always has to be manipulation, it could just be making you aware of the advantages of a product. Though most adverts are nothing but lies and bullshit.

Yeah, personally I enjoy seeing adverts for things I think are dumb because it’s like a shitty game company is paying my favourite creators to amuse me and they’re doing it by collecting money from rubes that’d only be wasting their cash on something worse anyway.

It feels like the sort of thing a chaotic hero would do in a cyberpunk romance.

The first computers cost millions and the one I’m holding in my hand is basically worthlesss. capture and conversion are both fairly simple processes so we will see a lot of reduction in cost once engineering pathways are established especially when tied to excess power generation from renewables - instead of wasting excess capacity divert it to a nearby carbon capture plant.

If a system like this manages to make fuel cheaper than standard fuel types then we’ll see them spring up everywhere, it could be a total game changer. Worse ways there’s an expensive alternative for use cases where electric planes aren’t feasible and we learn a lot about atmospheric carbon in the process.

The air force have been doing studies and they’re really keen on it, fuel security is the main reason but it wouldn’t have got this far if it wasn’t at least somewhat economically viable.

I’m pretty sure one of the A is for aeronautic - it’s kinda what they do, the n is for naughty tho so maybe that’s why?

First point there is carbon neutral jet fuel because NASA have been working of jet fuel chemistry for decades.

Secondly flying isn’t commuting, people don’t need to go to new cities twice a day but being cheap enough to allow people on minimum wage to have a holiday a few times a year would be a great benefit to all.

There are already ways of making jet fuel from captured carbon, as the chemistry continues to evolve we absolutely will see carbon neutral flights becoming more common.

I know doom feels good and I’m very susceptible to it myself but the reality is we’re probably going to make it through this, it kinda sucks really because it means we do need to plan for the future after all.

Also NASA has created endless bits of research that benefit everyone and the economy, the fact I’m typing this from my phone is only really possible because NASA ‘wasted’ money going to space.

So there are very few countries where trains or buses are public transport?

There are technologies already starting to roll out which will make flying the least ecologically damaging means of public transport for long and medium length journeys, I wrote a comment about it already but they’re building a faculty that turns captured carbon into jet fuel it’s really clever stuff.

Good news, they’re building a really cool new facility in washing state which uses carbon captured from the air to create jet fuel, the big idea is when the wind is blowing hard and there’s spare power from turbines they ramp up sequestering carbon from their air and the process of turning it into jet fuel meaning they can make use of power that would otherwise be over capacity by creating carbon neutral jet fuel.

The air force tested it in all their engines and it works great, of course it’ll take time to build the faculty and surrounding infrastructure but it’s a huge development, especially as it’s not a hugely complex tech so we might well see it evolved into being relatively cheap to build - maybe even we’ll see airports making use of their vast amounts of surface area with solar panels and creating carbon neutral jet fuel in site - would be a huge infrastructure saving and create more of a market for carbon which could drive carbon capture projects.

One exciting possibility is an experimental faculty in Cambridgeshire, UK which burns biomas to generate power and uses a fraction of that power to capture carbon from the burnt material - it appears to be a really effective way of pulling carbon from the air so if automated construction and management allow us to get the costs down to a point where it rapidly pays for itself while also making power and collecting carbon then we could well see something like that built at every airport in the world.

This would vastly reduce the carbon footprint of air travel to make it far better than other options for long and medium journeys while also reducing cost by cutting the need for hugely expensive oil mining and refining infrastructure, plus they’d have to remove eco taxes from air trave.

Tl;Dr - they’re already working on that, if we manage to make flying carbon neutral then a faster turn around time on jets is also a good thing ecologically and costwise because we could have less of them in fleets meaning resource costs are lower.