America: if you owe the bank 100 trillion dollars it is the bank that has a problem.

I have to assume that the bank had been prepared for the situation somewhere around the first trillion and doesn’t have “a problem”.

The Muslim empires stopped supporting science and intellectual curiosity just as the European powers slipped into the renaissance.

War against science never ends well.

Why do you think this is an accurate characterization of how the Islamic Caliphates of the medieval world worked? How much of what we label "science funding" was happening anywhere at all then, why was this more important to the European Renaissance than traditional explanations like "an influx of Byzantine Greeks with ancient texts fleeing the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453"? (And how much of what we characterize as the European Renaissance involved" science" or "institutional science funding" as we understand it today?)

I think you're taking an extremely basic, high-level narrative of history - something like "During what westerners call the middle ages, European powers were backwards and the Islamic powers at the same time were flourishing and did a lot of scientific discovery" - and then immediately using your basic understanding of that narrative to argue for a policy position today, without thinking at all about any deeper historical complexity of what was happening across an entire civilizational sphere centuries before our time when the entire world was different - what would an ancient Islamic caliph have actually understood about the value of basic scientific research funding by the state, for instance.

And this bugs me mostly because it's such an unscientific worldview.

I was saying intellectual curiosity. As in one morning waking up and realising everything your ancestors believed in was a bunch of bullshit. That attitude became heavily discouraged in the Islamic world.

Is it actually consistent with intellectual curiosity to wake up one morning and realize that everything your ancestors believed in was a bunch of bullshit? It seems wildly implausible that every single belief held by your ancestors was wrong, and probably some beliefs were correct and others were incorrect and it's not necessarily trivial to distinguish which ones were which; or even to know from many generations removed which beliefs your ancestors actually held.

You can do months of testing which obviously costs money AND delays your game. Or you can ship it and patch later. Make your customers be the beta testers.

Now I personally wait at least 6 months because I can't fucking STAND broken games. However the market has spoken: gamers at large don't give a shit.

Unless you are so enraptured by the idea of the game that you cannot live without it, or if you are a streamer who will make money from playing the game on day 1, waiting 6 months for patches is the play.

You will typically save money on the game, other people will review it, flaws will be fixed, and you'll have a better time of it.

It's funny to me as a Dutch citizen that all of our cultural heritage comes from abroad. Even cheese was apparently invented on the Asian steppes.

Grenfell was iirc social housing.

A contractor is less likely to fuck around with people who can afford very good lawyers.

Who watches the watchers?

Flock

Yep companies are cheap bastards. Sure you can make environmentally sound data centers. Those are not the ones they want to build.

Trump has been neutering the EPA for a reason.

I don't know if HN is really naive or just pretending.

The question is not about the cost the question is who pays that cost.

Tech companies clearly want to coast on the infrastructure built out by the government. Microsoft doesn't really want to pay 10 billion euro to upgrade the Dutch power supply.

What happens is that they will go to countries that let them pollute- a tale as old as the industrial revolution.

That's a different issue than OP's superlative claims and is something we as a society need to be working on.

But it's not AI related, it's true every time the eich and powerful privatize benefits while making the costs and risks to society.

It's a more global and important problem.

Picture a town of 50k people with crumbling infrastructure and suddenly a tech bro wants to build his data center megasite there.

And these tech bros don't REALLY want to build out the infrastructure. All they want is tax cuts, cheap land and free power/water.

The locals ofcourse are supposed to prostrate themselves before the Emperor for this wonderful opportunity.

Except the people living next to them but they don't count because reasons.

No they aren't.