“Regulatory capture”? This term means something very specific and doesn’t apply in this case at all.

I agree, it’s just a failure of imagination. Some folks correctly foresee not being able to continue what we’re doing now in the exact same way in some new context and conclude everything is impossible. Life isn’t this fickle, it’s adapted before and will adapt again. This is why great science fiction is so valuable, as some people are better at imagining new ways of being more than others, and can show the rest of us the possibilities.

Well, of course you would say that.

The counterargument is a simple opportunity cost calculation:

There will never, ever, ever[1] be a scenario where if you weighed up the options of "expand into some less habitable area of the Earth" versus "expand to Mars", the latter is the better option either 1) financially, or b) quality of life.

Nobody[2] ever picks the dramatically more expensive and dramatically worse option!

Also, people that are desperate enough to even consider living in the least desirable -- but still just barely habitable -- parts of planet Earth are essentially by definition too poor to afford interplanetary travel.

And no, no amount future sci-fi technology can possibly overcome the simple energy costs of this! If someone can afford the hugely energy intensive interplanetary travel, and the up-front investment required to survive incredibly harsh environments, then by definition they could more productively invest that here on Earth! It's the cheaper and better option in every possible way, and always will be.

This will remain true even if it's standing room only on the entire planetary surface -- it'll be cheaper to build levels upwards while digging downwards.

Maybe our atmosphere will become horrifically polluted? Sure, okay, air filters are faaar cheaper than a full vacuum-capable space suit!

Etc, etc, etc...

[1] Okay, fine, maybe in a million years. Whatever ends up preferring Mars at that point will no longer be "human" by any sane classification.

[2] For some values of nobody. There are morons that buy overpriced branded handbags made of literal trash. I doubt idiots like that will make for a successful, self-sustaining colony.

I wish this kind of economic and biologic sanity was more common in discussions of colonizing outer space. We've watched too much Star Trek.

Building a city in Antarctica will be economically viable long before building a city on Mars is.

Most of modern civilization has been built over the last century. 1000 years is a very long time brotha. We only got into space 60-70 years ago.

And, rarely, have economic considerations been the only driver for those great societal leaps.

Everyone should have a smartphone, just not necessarily a closed down and enshittified one.

We MADE the energy expensive.

I think you’re missing the point of Dune. They had their Butlerian Jihad and won - the machines were banned. And what did it get them? Feudalism, cartels, stagnation. Does anyone seriously want to live in the Dune universe?

The problem isn’t in the thinking machines, it’s in who owns them and gets our rent. We need open source models running on dirt cheap hardware.

The point of Dune is that the worst danger are people who obey authority without questioning it.

Then wouldn't open source models running on commodity hardware be the best way to get around that? I think one of the greatest wins of the 21st century is that almost every human today has more computing power than the entire US government in the 1950s. More computer power has democratized access and ability to disperse information. There are tons of downsides to that which we're dealing with but on the net, I think it's positive.

Does it also means the US government has x1000000 more power than the one in 1950 ?

speaking strictly from an energy standpoint (power grid, megatons of warheads, etc).. it's probably close to that number.

It isn't a way around, you still obey. Only now, the authority you obey is a machine.

That's not the point of Dune. Who blindly obeyed who?

The Fremen followed a messianic figure into a galaxy-wide holy war because the Bene Gesserit seeded their culture with manufactured prophecy as a failsafe.

“Followed”

Just woke up after 80 years of abuse by Landsraad/CHOAM, possibly centuries of persecution before that, at least decades of religious conditioning by Bene Gesserit, and decided to “follow” messianic figure.

Totally same point as humans using LLMs to smoothen their brain.

... which overthrowing the machines didn't stop. People just found another authority to mindlessly obey.

Yocto? Nobody is expecting Yocto for deeply embedded systems likely to be built on this OS. It’s closer to FreeRTOS, Zephyr, Embassy, but with this additional hardware-level safety guarantees.

My Yocto point might be colored by my experience of having seen multiple teams stick with Yocto beyond (IMHO) the point of pain and reason due to familiarity and industry inertia.

An unfortunate name that triggers everybody who’s ever worked at Meta :)

it’s actually true and they’re trying to develop GLP-1 resistant foods by using other sensory channels: https://archive.is/N0whF

This should be viewed like attempts to put the cocaine back in coca-cola. The industry may be able to get away with "our food is naturally delicious", but engineering it for superior addictiveness should be banned. Not going to get there under the current FDA, though.

> Not going to get there under the current FDA, though.

Not going to get there under any FDA. The FDA never cared about food engineering and never will.

Capitalism creates these monstrous corpo-organisms, and while we have found one way to strangle "Big Processed Food" this article shows that BPF has a will to survive.

People are free to knock themselves out with Bazel if they’re into that kind of masochism, but having it as the ONLY way to build your OSS project is a big no.

Yeah I'm never touching Bazel again. I value my sanity.

well, bazel is by far the most reliable one so I'm not sure why you're complaining

It wouldn’t be HN without an EU bashing comment for no reason. Seems like it’s living in people’s heads rent free.