Or "the public asked the government for transparency about sex trafficking, maybe it isn't transparency for the government to excitedly reveal the contents of a sandwich are a nothingburger"

Are these your thoughts when you're having a lunch?

I don't tend to rely on whatever scraps the US govt feeds me for lunch. YMMV.

True, but if you don't have sufficient knowledge of IR to assess the claim that a particular photo cannot be a bird, the tendency of the people making and believing that claim are usually equally confident that jet fuel cannot melt steel beams and that vaccines contain microchips is a compelling argument against it.

Similarly the absence of a conspiracy of freemasons running something does not inhibit the existence of a conspiracy of Taylor Swift fans running it in any possible way. But I think any objective assessment of whether the Swiftie conspiracy is likely to be real or not should probably take into account the possibility people positing Swiftie conspiracies have been influenced more by well established tropes about freemasons and Jews, and if the alternate hypothesis that a common human failure mode involves positing the idea groups they distrust secretly conspire to achieve unrelated outcome they dislike is well supported and the claim of an actual Swiftie conspiracy isn't...

The only thing that cuts against this is that if I was an intelligent extraterrestrial wishing to remain secret at a time of widespread interest in the possibility of extraterrestrials, I'd probably actively select the sort of people that might discredit the existence of UFOs by pattern matching all sorts of rubbish to reveal myself to.

> if I was an intelligent extraterrestrial wishing to remain secret at a time of widespread interest in the possibility of extraterrestrials, I'd probably actively select the sort of people that might discredit the existence of UFOs by pattern matching all sorts of rubbish to reveal myself to.

I've read claims that the Cold War-era US Gov employed exactly this strategy on the people camping out along the fence at sites like Area 51, taking pictures of advanced aircraft under development. I.e., they actually took some people down into the basement and showed them "alien bodies" to confuse the Soviets.

Whilst we're doing random anecdotes that vaguely link to him, my late grandfather remembered David from his Wyggeston days as a good rugby player, which is a funny way to imagine him. Apparently he had the voice even then, but not so much to say about the world.

The gigatonnes of CO2 linked to a small number of fossil fuel producers are also linked to a very large number of people putting it in their ICE vehicles. People not driving ICE vehicles is clearly going to change that quite a lot...

> Y Combinator might be responsible for the spontaneous generation of minor deities in areas experiencing extreme metaphysical gravity.

This particular piece of slop is a serendipitously brilliant description of the cult of founder worship in the metaphysical gravity of Silicon Valley.

Feels like this will eventually cause collisions, although perhaps nothing multiple definitions of Glorbonia and multiple biographies of different Mrs Wiggles (perhaps with Wikipedia style disambiguation) can't solve

Whilst manufacturing has more practical value than much of what's in datacentres[1] it doesn't necessarily follow that it's the more valuable strategic play or route to long term economic growth (bubble or no bubble)

Food is more critical to us than Alibaba crap or even top notch smartphones and would be missed rather more if we had a nuclear exchange, but Chinese entrepreneurs would rather own factories exporting manufactured goods than rice paddies, and for good reason. The Chinese government would like to be self sufficient with food production, but unlike many less technologically developed countries it isn't. Most of those countries stay poor though. Food doesn't change or scale as much as manufacturing, which possibly doesn't change as fast or scale as big as compute. Plus in theory at least, some of the compute is being devoted to automating away dependency on offshore labour for manufacturing, although I suspect China is generally ahead in the manufacturing automation areas of AI anyway...

[1]I'd rather have kitchen appliances than novelty image generation, spamblogs or ad retargeting, but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys...

> but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys

My point is that you can get that with ~1/1000th the compute we spend. The truly useful parts of the internet are a tiny fraction of the tech footprint. There's more net value for us in Wikipedia than there is in ~a trillion dollars of the more vapid tech firms. And it runs on 3m/year in hosting costs.

You are right that China has a food security problem, though. I am, however, assuming that its government isn't blind to it - the country is self-sufficient for high-calorie staples, and wouldn't starve even if all food imports stopped.

Yeah. 1000 words is not a long essay that requires padding, and any competent teacher marks an essay with 1000 words achieved mainly by repetition and bad sentence construction much lower than one discussing the subject matter in a suitable level of detail, and probably lower than a better- written essay which gets marks deducted for only having 985 words.

Since "write an essay" can be anything from three paragraphs to a 50 page paper and the teacher probably doesn't think either is the appropriate response to the task, some sort of numerical guide is a good starting point, even if a fairly wide range is a better guide than just a minimum...

(plus actually there are real world work tasks involving composing text that fits within a certain word range, and since being concise and focused isn't AI text generation's strong suit, I'm not sure those work tasks will disappear...)

We're on a website that generally considers human-originated spam to be a borderline capital offence, so it'd be unfair if HN didn't want the AI turned off for doing the same thing...