peterashford

The field has been called Artificial Intelligence for what, 60 plus years now. Why is it a problem now?

I'm a New Zealander. Farmers here are disliked by a large percentage of the population

Because its dominated more by businessmen than engineers c.f. early days of IT

"History" is generally used to mean when humans were around writing stuff down. And no, CO2 levels have never been this high during the entire history of human civilization, and likely the entire existence of Homo sapiens

Yeah, but they're not going to expand by taking on coal and fossil fuels. The third world is taking on green energy alternatives at a great rate. Not least because it's cheaper and more convenient. These countries can grow without the damage that marked the Western world through the industrial revolution onwards

They can have Russell Crowe. But you'll take Lamingtons from my cold dead hands!

how do you know?

Wikipedia suggests hundreds of deaths in various regions around the world - more common in the past, which suggests, I think, more wolves = more deaths.

You sound like someone who might be closer to one of those sides than the other

Yeah, me too. Java always seemed to consider design a lot more than C# which seems to have taken more of a kitchen sink approach to language design. That stuff piles up over time (see c++)

The guy who is on track for causing 9 million deaths? That guy is your example of someone who made the world a better place? The guy who supports far right groups, white supremacists, throws nazi salutes, pushes an AI that makes child porn and turned Twitter into a right wing nazi loving cess pool? Yeah, the world is just swell now he's here.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/04/world/lancet-usaid-global...

Its a reference to an Onion article about gun violence in the US

We've had deaths due to climate related storms in NZ now, and we haven't been hit anywhere near as hard as, say, Pakistan who had 1/3 of their country flooded in one go. And it's getting worse. That may not be human extinction but its definitely plausible that mass casualty events are possible

Climate change is the result of aggregate human actions. What we contribute per human is exactly the metric to use.

Java EE is pretty darn retro right now, and it was never core Java

This is exactly me. Been switched for 6 months. Loving it. I find I'm enjoying my computer so much more now that I feel it belongs to me rather than being an advertising surface for MS and their partners

Hey! Thanks for responding to my comment. And welcome to HN!

Even US Intelligence didn't believe they were close to getting a nuke. And given that they were in negotiations about controlling their nuclear program before the US attacked, it's hard to credit US foreign policy on this front

Thanks for the feedback about inverters - I was unaware.

I think that's the point about the lake Onslow project - its MASSIVE. So yes, expensive, but months of backup for the whole country would not be cheap even with batteries

I wasn't saying its fine, I was saying it was a tradeoff. And I wasn't making an argument about Nuclear, either.

Yup. What amuses me is that people think that decimate is to massively degrade something. I assume they're thinking "reduce to 1/10th" rather than "reduce to 9/10th". The effect is markedly different

The literal meaning was removing 1/10

And sun isn't uncommon. I was chatting with a person in Auckland, NZ. He said it was a cloudly day and he was producing much more solar power than he needed. His take: the panels are the cheapest part of the system so they just over-provisioned. We can all do that - it aint hard

Its local environmental damage versus global environmental gains

In NZ we're discussing pumped hydro in Lake Onslow which will provides months of backup for the country

Over-provisioning with renewables is cheaper

I vehemently disagree with this idea. I think you need to understand that all humans are fallible and you should have less vertical power structures and more horizontal structures. Putting all the power into one person's hands is asking for tyrants

There's the theory and there's the real world

Enterprises do that if they choose. Patients can choose as well. And it's their choice, not anyone else's