“It's creating a strange feedback loop: students use an LLM to write the essay, and teachers use an LLM to grade it. It ends up being just one LLM talking to another, with no human intelligence in the middle.”

This was the plot to a recent South Park episode: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27035146/

Israel’s always been strong at “terraforming”. I wonder what unexpected consequences will be encountered though.

Eighty years they drained the coastal lowland swamps making central Israel broadly livable - prior it was a morass eg Roman generals writing about the difficulty of transporting soldiers through the region, not catching malaria, etc.

Then they figured out it was causing all kinds of environmental problems, so they had to reintroduce swamp like terrain in some cases.

Everything is trade offs I guess.

Sea of Galilee water level fluctuates by few meters between years, depending on amount of rains at any given year. Current pumping adds 0.5cm/month. Literally drop in the sea.

IIRC reswamping is mostly done for rewilding terrain. A lot of migratory birds passing through area.

The only hard problem caused by "terraforming", it's that because of water from Sea of Galilee not allowed fully to flow to Dead Sea, it's level gone down and it created a lot of sink holes.

To mitigate it, there is another long discussed pumping projects that can't lift off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea%E2%80%93Dead_Sea_Water...

Mistakes in terraforming can be fixed with good governance and technology. This is not ancient times when that could cause a civilization to collapse. And terraforming is not something new to modern Israel, the whole Judaean Mountains region is terraces and irrigation systems that are many thousands of years old.

Sounds a bit like the terraforming of Florida. (With similar tales of soldiers during the civil war.)

May we all have this man’s network

This woman.

Her name is Jean Yang.

If/when this gets tossed - does the have grounds to sue (and who would he be suing) on wrongful arrest, or something else?

probably not unless it's against people sending him death threats and he can actually manage to track them down

Agreed. Don’t know how we balance decentralization with the planetary civilization/economy’s complexity, which requires some kinds of centralization.

That’s doubly difficult because the complexity is what lets the system produce so much output, and if you produced less people would experience that as having less and would riot. The only way out would be if the whole society consumes less, including, visibly, the elites. Feeling taken advantage of is a far more powerful force on the non elites compared to, up to a point, their material ups and downs.

Trump’s ability to create a widely accepted narrative focused specifically on elites who are opposed to his power, but also who are doing extra well relative to the non elites, is what let him harness the raw force of wage stagnation et al for political power

And great write up on your part.

It corresponds with the qualitative observation that violent revolutions are usually led by the “middle class”. This itself corresponds with versions quantitative theories like Turchin’s Structural Demographic Theory.

It seems to me the assumption of consensus with disagreement coming from small fringe factions mirrored much of the American experience during the TNG era.

I agree. But it has a similar aspirational quality, to me, as well thought out proposals for eg Moon colonization.

I suppose the question left is overcoming the blocking path dependence - the method of mass action to get there.

Moon colonization requires billions or even trillions of capital all at once, and can only be done by elite experts in a very specialized field, with no practical gain to society toward solving or global warming. It would be an expense almost impossible to justify, and only corporations building the parts would truly benefit.

Solarpunk, on the other hand, is accessible for an incredibly wide swath of people to contribute toward achieving, as a solarpunk life would actually save money while improving quality of life and mitigating global warming.

Solar panels are within the financial reach of most parts of society, bicycles are far more affordable than cars, better zoning laws are only a stroke of a pen, gardening your food or creating a larger communal gardening area creates food resiliency while saving money, and again is within reach of almost all economic situations.

It can be a big government program, but it scales down incredibly well compared to colonizing the moon, and I believe that is key to it being viable.

Great example.

In the theory-land of Solarpunk, pretty much all the more fleshed out example I’ve seen imagined also have a similar issue with reality. In particular I’m thinking of KSR’s (otherwise great) novels.

It’s a shame because I think most people would agree some version of “Star Trek” is desirable and working toward a realistic imagining of it helps work toward a path to getting there.

The most likely version of Star Trek is depicted in Wall-E.

This thread was supposed to maintain some optimism.

If anyone here is a fan of strategy games and found this as totally awesome as I did, check out the game Terra Invicta on Steam.

I’m embarrassed to admit how many hours I dumped into it.