Musk got a huge leg up through the government, whether it be tax credits, incentives, side-stepping regulations, etc.

Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors.

Most (or all?) of the recent titans seem like each has his own company town. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town )

While their activities certainly fall in the realm of capitalism, and are just blips at longer time scales, it certainly feels like capitalism has been a bit under the weather for the past couple decades.

Regarding the money invested in AI, it all gives me "irrational exuberance" vibes.

> Musk got a huge leg up through the government, whether it be tax credits, incentives, side-stepping regulations, etc.

Nope. (Any government incentives were available to all the other car companies.)

> Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors.

Where do you think he got the money to sustain those losses? Investors! Including me. That is not a "transfer" of wealth, as in exchange the investors received an ownership share of the company.

> Regarding the money invested in AI, it all gives me "irrational exuberance" vibes.

It still is the opposite of short term thinking.

I was not making an argument that the economy is zero-sum, or that Musk or Bezos did not build wealth. I merely pointed out methods they used to build their empires. For example, Musk did take advantage of government incentives, sidestepped regulations, etc.

Again, I never claimed there was any sort of zero-sum transfer of wealth. I'm simply pointing out there are varied ways to build up wealth; people have various opinions about those ways. It's right to call out misconceptions or outright falsehoods, but it's also good to understand what leads people to form or accept those misconceptions in the first place.

Government incentives were available to all the car companies. There were no government incentives for SpaceX or Twitter or Starlink.

As for "sidestepped regulations", you'll need to be more specific. He did have some court battles with regulators, and won them.

And don't forget:

"hi" and "hello" are not the same.

Sam explains the situation on Mike Peace's channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyrFgOMfsmM

(Mike is another wood turner.)

Can fully AI‑generated code be copyrightable? Is there evidence that the leaked code was AI-generated?

"Top engineers at Anthropic, OpenAI say AI now writes 100% of their code"

https://fortune.com/2026/01/29/100-percent-of-code-at-anthro...

> Right now for most products at Anthropic it's effectively 100% just Claude writing

- Mike Krieger, chief product officer of Anthropic

I would argue that no app/website should be selling itself to kids. No corporation should be trying to tether its ARR to children's attention.

When my kids were young, we canceled our Disney Channel / etc cable subscription and showed them more PBS and similar.

It was really annoying turning on a show for 30 minutes then for the next week hearing about that new toy they just have to get. It was exhausting.

> For me, AI tools act like supercharged ... search and auto complete.

I think that is a fairly good definition of what an LLM is. I'd say the third leg of the definition is adjustable randomness.

Just like in "I, Robot?"

I tend to see humans as just another animal species, subject to pressures similar to those of other mammals. Whenever disease comes up it seems like vaccinations are the only factor discussed.

Can anyone here speak to other factors (at a macro scale) that influence human health over large spans of time?

The main factor (at a macro scale) that influences human health over large spans of time is, in fact, large spans of time.

Specifically, no human has yet, or ever will, live long enough to qualify as a large span of time.

Well, Palantir was taken.

As an official greybeard who has written much in C, C++, Perl, Python, and now Rust, I can say Rust is a wonderful systems programming language. Nothing at all like Perl, and as others have mentioned, a great relief from C++ while providing all the power and low-level bits and bobs important for systems programming.