Don't worry, you're not an idiot. This is not gonna pan out.

Just like when I discounted cryptocurrency in 2012, yet again I may be overthinking things.

That is the lesson that I would like to share on this platform: If you have an idea, any idea, just do it. Do it now. Build now.

It turns out that there are a lot of morons. Role the dice, you are likely not one of the bag holders, as one of the readers of this comment. I wish I had been younger when I had realized this circle of life.

Very cool, I love electric conversions. I will confess though, that removing the belt drive makes me nervous - they're often important to protect either the machine, or people, when the blade meets an obstacle.

The Ryobi walk behind mowers are direct drive and everything is underneath the deck so there isn’t much that can go wrong that you wouldn’t contend with if you were standing with your toes next to it except you are actually riding it. The wheels still do have a short belt and a tensioner but not the really long belt with the clutch pulley. The only safety thing I could have added is the electronic brake on the deck motors but for my use I am not super concerned about letting things slow down unassisted. As soon as I leave the seat everything shuts off and the light blades don’t actually have a ton of momentum without power.

Gotcha - thanks for taking the time to help allay my fears.

"is the idea in the post actually the writer's or was it entirely done by AI"

Look. If you don't want your readers to worry that your hard-written article is AI slop - just don't run it through the slopifier. Or at the very least, spend 5 minutes tweaking the output.

If you can't be assed to do that, then it's very likely that you don't have valuable insights to share.

AI-written article, as a heads up.

I feel this comment can apply to 80% of the content that gets posted anymore.

We need a plugin to automatically detect AI posts as I'm basically skipping reading or clicking most links now due to a lot of it being generated word soup.

> When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted?

They are weighted - the House is allocated by population, and the Senate by state.

They are weighted in how they are elected. They aren’t weighted in how the members vote.

So, most of the power that Starlink satellites use go into the comms, right? Blasting out electromagnetic radiation to receiver stations on earth, and also the laser(?) backhaul between satellites.

Modulo some efficiency losses, most of the electricity it generates is leaving the satellite. Contrast with a datacenter, where most of the energy is spent heating up the chips, and the rest is spent moving the heat away from those chips.

Unfortunately, these guys are only excited about building the Torment Nexus.

From the classic sci-fi novel "Do Not Create The Torment Nexus".

"It's only Torment™ if you aren't a double-digit shareholder!"

It's definitely LLM-written, or at least LLM-edited.

> What protections are there against this?

Nothing that will work. This thing relies on having access to all three parts of the "lethal trifecta" - access to your data, access to untrusted text, and the ability to communicate on the network. What's more, it's set up for unattended usage, so you don't even get a chance to review what it's doing before the damage is done.

Too much enthusiasm to convince folks not to enable the self sustaining exploit chain unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your exfiltration target outcome).

“Exploit vulnerabilities while the sun is shining.” As long as generative AI is hot, attack surface will remain enormous and full of opportunities.

Nothing, save for advertising that you can. And Musk obviously can't, or he would have by now.