It’s a bit of a stretch calling it a plastic, as it’s not petroleum based from what I’ve read.

It might, possibly, be a viable use case if the LLM produced the summary for an editor, who then confirmed it’s veracity and appropriateness to the article and posted it themselves.

Could you let me know what sort of models you’re using? Everything I’ve tried has basically been so bad it was quicker and more reliable to to the job myself. Most of the models can barely write boilerplate code accurately and securely, let alone anything even moderately complex.

I’ve tried to get them to analyse code too, and that’s hit and miss at best, even with small programs. I’d have no faith at all that they could handle anything larger; the answers they give would be confident and wrong, which is easy to spot with something small, but much harder to catch with a large, multi process system spread over a network. It’s hard enough for humans, who have actual context, understanding and domain knowledge, to do it well, and I’ve, personally, not seen any evidence that an LLM (which is what I’m assuming you’re referring to) could do anywhere near as well. I don’t doubt that they flag some issues, but without a comprehensive, human, review of the system architecture, implementation and code, you can’t be sure what they’ve missed, and if you’re going to do that anyway, you’ve done the job yourself!

Having said that, I’ve no doubt that things will improve, programming languages have well defined syntaxes and so they should be some of the easiest types of text for an LLM to parse and build a context from. If that can be combined with enough domain knowledge, a description of the deployment environment and a model that’s actually trained for and tuned for code analysis and security auditing, it might be possible to get similar results to humans.

I’m unlikely to do a full code audit, unless something about it doesn’t pass the ‘sniff test’. I will often go over the main code flows, the issue tracker, mailing lists and comments, positive or negative, from users on other forums.

I mean, if you’re not doing that, what are you doing, just installing it and using it??!? Where’s the fun in that? (I mean this at least semi seriously, you learn a lot about the software you’re running if you put in some effort to learn about it)

‘AI’ as we currently know it, is terrible at this sort of task. It’s not capable of understanding the flow of the code in any meaningful way, and tends to raise entirely spurious issues (see the problems the curl author has with being overwhealmed for example). It also wont spot actually malicious code that’s been included with any sort of care, nor would it find intentional behaviour that would be harmful or counterproductive in the particular scenario you want to use the program.

No, I don’t have anything of that sort. Feel free to ask here if you’d like, but I’m just using the information I can find on the web.

I’m only going to do this very roughly, only for the transport and using US prices (as they’re easier to find), because the total cost of mining, transporting and dumping that much material is astronomical compared to the $70m budget. Even the transport cost alone are an order of magnitude higher.

Soil has a density of between 1,200 and 1,700 kilograms or 2,645 and 3,747 pounds per cubic metre.

I couldn’t easily find bulk rates for trunking soil, but bulk trucking rates for grain seem to be in the right area from what I can see. A truckload of up to 80,000lb costs somewhat over $6 per mile.

Given the weight limit per truck, and taking a middling estimate of soil density of 3000lb/m^3 (rock would be heavier and so increase the cost), we can transport around 80000/3000=26m^3 per truck, at a cost of at least 615=$90, or $3.46 per m^3. Our budget for the whole operation was 75,000,000/(3,500,000100)=$0.20 per m^3.

From those figures we can see that simply trucking the spoil fron the operation would be more than 15 times the cost of paying the landowners. That ignores all of the other costs. Local rates may be sonewhat cheaper, but probably not enough to make a serious difference, and you’d need to ship over 10 million truckloads of dirt, which would put massive strain on local infrastructure too.

If I read your measurements correctly, you’re talking about digging up over 350 million cubic metres of soil and rock, transporting them 15km and dumping them safely. Comparing that to the cost of paying the land owners gives you a budget of approximately $0.20 per cubic metre. Ignoring the digging costs, you’d have to check what your local rates for trucking bulk soil would be over that distance, but I suspect they’re more than that on their own.

Then you have the rather signicicant issue of what to do with the literal mountain of soil and rock you need to dispose of. Just dumping it is going to cause pretty serious changes to the local environment, not least of which would be a new mountain.

https://archive.ph/Lou5o

Add on the climb of bitcoin and thats pretty much it.

Would it though? Would it really? Couldn’t we just let trump have it as it is and see what happened? It’s bound to be ok, isn’t it?

More. Nukes.

Failing that we use those roboroaches they developed a while back to lead the other roaches to live in the crater. They can have that bit. The inevitable plague of supersized mutant cockroaches we’d suffer in a few generations is a problem for later.

We can try your idea after the whole area is a glowing crater. I’m sure it’ll work out juuuust fine that way. The first rule of scifi nuke vs. parasite club is: you don’t listen to the advisor counselling caution.

I’m sorry, but this really is a ‘nuke the entire site from orbit’ situation. The loss of the southern US and Central America will, of course, be mourned as a terrible loss, but it’ll be worth it to make sure those things are dealt with. Permanently.

I’m pretty sure the supreme court ruling was carefully worded to not require them to bring him back, but ‘fascilitate’ his return, which gave them enough wiggle room to say they wouldn’t stop his return, so they were in conpliance. It was a lower court tgat required his return, the supreme court ruling overrode that.

The trouble is, you have to account for transport costs that way. Either to bring it to them, or them to it. A Redundant Array of Inexpensive Decapitators (or RAID array) gives you higher throughput, better resilience to component failures and can lower your total costs versus building a single entity that is robust enough to be as reliable.

I am, of course joking. Unfortunately, just eliminating billionaires, cathartic though it might be, wouldn’t actually solve any problems as it doesn’t meaningfully redistribute that wealth, or stop someone else accumulating in the same way, only with better personal security. It’s going to take changing the system at a much deeper, more fundamental, level than that. At the point it becomes actively undesirable to the individual to accumulate that much wealth, and I don’t think mere threats to their physical safety will do that, you’ve effectively decapitated capitalism.

I like this plan. The first half made me hate it, which is a pretty good sign it’s hitting the right key points of environmental destruction, profiteering, crypto, bad crypto and buying influence, but then brings it back right at the end.

You’re going to have to be careful not to touch anything at the dinner before shaking hands, you wouldn’t want to give the game away too early.

How can someone write a letter that does not contain the addressee?

It’s easier to bulk send them this way. No need for a mail merge, just spam it out to everyone on your list. Efficiency!

This is not the happy timeline.

Whist I would very much like a news source that just presents the unbiased facts, no such thing can exist as all of what we consume is mediated by humans, from story selection, to information gathering, to how that information is filtered, presented and finally how the reader processes it.

Even choosing to use the word ‘bribe’, the phrase ‘buying goodwill’ or just calling them ‘donations’ would be an editorial decision that would influence the reader. Depending on the reader each of those phrases would inspire different opinions. A reader who is more disposed to being positive about this administration may find ‘buying goodwill’ to be just about tolerable journalism, ‘bribe’ to be outragious slander and ‘donation’ perfectly reasonable and accurate. A more left reader would probably consider ‘donation’ to be unacceptable whitewashing, ‘buying goodwill’ to be euphamistic, and ‘bribe’ to fit their world view best. Therevis no phrasing that would avoid an emotional response, so either this can’t be reported, or the publication chooses to do so in line with their own biases.

There is also a constant tension between presenting just the bare facts of the current matter, and contextualising them for the reader, who may not be fully versed on the matter. How that contextualisation is done is also going to affect the reader’s perception.

There is, however, a very large difference between the presenting the information with some bias, and “a biased news source that tells you what you want to hear whether all the facts are there or not.” I would agree with you that the latter is a “rag”, though I would classify it that way for the willingness to draw a conclusion unsupported by fact, rather than necesarily for having bias. All sources, even your own senses, will give you a biased view of events. The critical thing is to acknowledge that and understand the bias you’re being presented with. Trying to make sure you consume sources with a variety of different biases is a good way to try to balance that, though I personally find it hard to stomach anything further than moderately right of my personal views anymore.

I think your points are well made, but there is another possibility to consider, and that is deliberate language choice for effect. They certainly could have simply called it a bribe, and that would be true enough, but in my opinion lacks ‘punch’. We’re so used to that sort of behaviour that many people would pretty much just go “yup, that’s expected” and move on. By deliberately, and somewhat archly, using understatement, the reader goes “Buying good will?? That’s not buying good will, that’s bribery! Buying good will shouldn’t even be a thing!” thus neatly bypassing the first level of cynasism that a simpler statement would run in to.

I’m not going to say that us definitely what happened here, but looks quite deliberate to me. Language can be weaponised in many different ways, for different causes.