All a matter of which externalities you're willing to overlook.

80 years ago, the solution to pollution was dilution - nobody gave a flying F if you dumped raw sewage in the ocean so long as you did it far enough offshore that it didn't come back to the beach... That works when you've got a total human population under 2B and most of them aren't burning significant fossil fuels... with 8B of us and rising, and half of us capable of hopping in a jet plane for a round-the-world trip whenever we feel like it, the pollution really does start to matter.

War is one of those side effects of civilization, and I haven't seen the war yet that gives a F about what it does to the environment, beyond maybe - just maybe sometimes - not wanting to kick off global winter.

And almost all US market vehicles are not up to Canadian standards - starting with the Canadian requirement to have driver adjustable headlight elevation trim...

Total impact is the only fair comparison. Pollution from the power plants included, sewage treatment from the houses too.

While it's true that a human brain only uses ~20W of power, it's a really specific kind of organically delivered power with all sorts of environmental requirements that we, being humans, take for granted, but in the bigger picture it's really a rare location in this universe that doesn't kill us nearly instantly - much less provide that 20W of power in a form a brain can use.

That's one way to compare it.

Now, take your privileged writer status human brain and factor in all the other power required to keep it comfy in an air conditioned room, the labor required to put a roof over your head, keep your home plumbing working, make your food, deliver you pen and paper to write with - or are you using an electrically powered appliance to record and later communicate your thoughts? Oh, did you need to go to sleep for a while?

Demand work from home, if you don't get it, keep looking until you do... Favorite part of my work from home day is getting in the shower and having breakfast with my wife after the morning BS meeting.

“unskilled” workers

They quit calling them that years ago, now they are "lower value human capital." https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/standard-chartered-ceo-bill-winters-apologizes-calling-some-workers-lower-value-human-capital-ai-push/

So true, and the things that LLM agents are good at, humans test very poorly by comparison, particularly on speed.

I believe the progress of the last year is largely attributable to the appropriate "grafting on" of these wrappers around the LLM cores.

The void definitely seems preferable to a lot of existences I have seen others enduring.

But, are they only banning Flock (which is a good step), or are they banning all ALPR installs? Can they even ban them on private property? A lot of what I see on deflock.org near me isn't on the streets (though some is), most of them are actually looking at parking lots, many of big box stores like Lowes, random strip malls and shopping centers, a church...

sustained focus and conflict resolution seen in human attention

What humans are these they are comparing with? Any humans born post 1995 have had constant companionship from network connected screens, they have the attention spans of unladen African swallows...

It will be interesting when we have them automated to the point they are self-replicating from raw materials.

lots of simple organisms don’t have emotions.

How do you know? How can you possibly be sure?

deflock.org shows some clusters in local neighborhoods that look like HOA driven installs.

That is one positive aspect of a road trip, particularly a solo road trip - long periods of dull required attention...

What I see in the modern models is that you can often ask them to write a program or script to do a task and they can do that successfully much better than doing the task itself directly - once they have debugged the program it is usually 100% reliable for the specified tasks. Ask them to do those simple tasks directly and you get all kinds of creatively wrong answers.

If it acts afraid, is it really? If it seems unafraid, is it really?

Most modern civilized world humans don't go around fearing death every day, if they did they wouldn't commute in automobiles... I think mostly they fear uncomfortable change... loss of choice in where to live, what to eat, what they can buy... people seem to put up with an awful lot of psychological abuse in exchange for the ability to order a drive-thru window overpriced milk drink with some coffee/sugar flavoring in it.

Hard to know how all that will be playing out, a lot of the recent craziness has been a great excuse for China and other places to ramp up production to address loss-of-supply issues.