CanadaPlus

That's more like demons, though.

Well that's very interesting. I'm guessing this is a proprietary scent that got added to the standard by whoever from the industry.

If I was designing it, it would definitely be fire-y. It would be a bad smell if I was being realistic, full of lizard bile sort of smells mixed in with partial combustion products, but nobody wants to be immersed in that. So, I guess the question is what sort of fire is dragon's breath?

It's supposed to be pretty hot, so maybe it's a metal sort of fire, but then again you don't really see that in the natural world. Acetylene and friends could do the same, although I'm not sure what that smells like exactly. Maybe I would split the difference between organic and metallic and go with a burning beeswax/hot metal combo, which shouldn't be too gross.

They know the answer already, and are probably both trying it.

In US terminology, since that's the language I know, they try for "competition" rather than "conflict". The difference being whether they respect each other's sovereignty for the most part while trying to bury the other, and don't take straight-up military actions.

To achieve this, you provide a long series of "offramps" - opportunities to pause and de-escalate - on the path between peace and MAD, and ensure there is no benefit to either party to do any specific escalation. Mistakes will happen, both deliberate and accidental, but they're very unlikely to all happen at the same time, so even if things get tense there's offramps left, and game-theoretically they will take one because nobody wants a full-scale nuclear conflict.

Hmm, let me try this.

Edit: Nice! For anyone else, just copy the link from the source of the comment.

Call me when defining it a second time makes it guaranteed false again.

We're basically being bailed out by luck. Renewable electricity has gotten cheap; it didn't have to. If that hadn't of happened we'd probably be doing business as usual and accelerating into catastrophe.

Until it buys up a bunch of companies, and executes a complicated buyback scheme that leaves it as the only significant shareholder of them all, and then subcontracts out management to one of them where it will run a copy of itself on self-owned hardware.

It would do this because it clearly understands competition is a barrier to profits, and may well notice that intervention by human management is a large source of losses. And then you just have a rogue AI.

An ironic thing to say given the story.

Oh god. The financial sector is the easiest place by far for a paperclip optimiser to start (it connects to literally everything flexibly by design), and it tried to happen a bit here.

Terrified to hear that people are, indeed, putting LLMs behind the wheel already.

Yeah, I'm not going to get rid of any. I was doing everything on thumb drives at the time, though, so it would be a bitch to actually try and find the exact one I used.

Of course, the value of the things will go to 0 whenever Q-day happens, and hopefully sooner when people realise it's a badly designed cryptocurrency. Maybe I should dig the old wallet up just to move things to an alt coin.

I mean, "consistently save in a diversified portfolio" would be a pretty boring answer, but it would be an answer I guess. I'm not sure what the equivalent for the poor would be; stay away from substances, maybe?

"They did the math". Thanks!

I'd be a bit more conservative with some of those numbers. I don't actually know how much they let the logs dry; it could be they're usually shipped green to avoid damage to them at the site of felling. Furthermore, 1,000km might be a more typical distance for wood to be shipped in Canada, since most of the forest is way up north, far from population centers. We've still got comfortably an order of magnitude, though.

Cutting the logs down to size probably takes negligible energy by comparison, and is going to be electricity-based at this point anyway. I'd also have used carbon mass rather than energy, but that's actually going to work in our favour, because petroleum gets a lot of it's energy from the hydrogen within it as well, while wood is effectively carbon+water for plant biology reasons.