Also consider:

Warehouses of small, high-value items that are fungible and untraceable.

That will create multiple huge targets for a big heist. And they'd best have good eyes on their security people too.

Sounds like something big enough for organized crime to target.

The printing is the easy part.

The extensive testing and validation that it will actually work as intended and in your situation is the hard part.

Skip that hard part, especially for anything that flies, and you are risking lives, both those in the air and on the ground.

Seriously, just because the specs on the label say X and other docs say the running temperature is Y, does NOT mean it will work. Take the measurements in your situation, test the thing extensively on the ground.

Then, maybe, it'll be worth flying. Or, you'll be there after some hours of testing saying: "good thing I didn't try to fly with this", and still have a usable aircraft.

Edit: missing words, clarity.

This is some kind of fundamentally different era for the tech industry, but ...

And even more outrageous is the power grid upgrades they are demanding.

If they need the power grid upgraded to handle the load for their data centers, they should pay 100% of the cost for EVERY part of every upgrade needed for the whole grid, just as a new building typically pays to upgrade the town road accessing it.

Making ordinary ratepayers pay even a cent for their upgrades is outrageous. I do not know why the regulators even allow it (yeah, we all do, but it is wrong).

Sometimes that materializes.

Here the narrative is almost the opposite: pay for our expensive infrastructure and we’ll take all your jobs.

It’s a bit mind boggling. One wonders how many friends our SV AI barons will have at the end of the day.

I'm kicking myself for not buying the mini PC that I was looking at over the summer. The cost nearly doubled from what it was then.

My state keeps trying to add Data Centers in residential areas, but the public seems to be very against it. It will succeed somewhere and I'm sure that there will be a fee on my electric bill for "modernization" or some other bullshit.

The SEC enforcement of Insider Trading laws is also simultaneously both ineffective and created high-profile wrong cases which get people with influence to further weaken it.

Seems to me the best solution to all of the above is to simply require ALL trades to be open and transparent with the ultimate beneficial owner and the trade available in real-time. Pharma scientists & execs start buying/selling their stock unusually? Easy to setup trackers so we know it in the same second and can also take advantage of their knowledge that their new drug trial succeeded/failed, and it will eliminate much of the insider-trading edge. A congressperson buys/sells a bundle of shares of a company in his state? Again, we see they're likely getting/losing contracts soon, and again, much of the margin disappears.

Traders would rapidly setup hedge funds and ETFs to ensure this happens in milliseconds, and much of the advantage and problems of insider trading being unfair disappear, along with a lot of enforcement cost.

Obviously just a concept, what are the holes?

>> Do the same thing. If a sensor at the edge of the LIDAR's scan misses a scan, kill the beam.

Sounds like a great plan, but I question the "about a second" timing; the GP post calculates that "about a second" is between 4X and 10X the time required to cause damage. So, how fast do these things scan/cycle across their field of view? Could this be solved by speeding up the cycle, or would that overly compromise the image? Change the scan pattern, or insert more check-points in the pattern?

Definitely an opportunity there.

But what makes the difference in whether or not we hear about it is pure luck and survivor bias.

If their luck was just right that with all that push in the right time the deal came through or the product sold, then we hear about what a great success it was, and how important was their grit.

And many smart determined people with all the courage, tenacity, and risk-taking in the world have also taken the big risk, but dice did not roll their way, or the hill was just so steep it didn't work, so we hear nothing of them. And their number likely vastly exceeds the few for whom it did work.

>>the spending implies expectation of dramatically increased capabilities, soon.

Even more than that, the spending is a death-race in expectation of:

1) a team reaching runaway superintelligence,

2) that it will be winner-take-all for the first team to get there, and

3) fear that somebody else will get there first.

So, everyone is spending as much as they can beg, borrow, or steal because in their view, there is only first place or being part of the underclass ruled by the other team that gets there first.

This is not about just making useful products/services that can increase productivity for their customers.

[0] a far more accurate way to describe those who hoard wealth without helping the people or society who got them there, vs the usual praise as the "richest"

Maybe that's the American Way? (/s but not really).