> The government pays Raytheon for missiles, the money cascades down the economy through factories, aluminium smelters, mines, transport companies, all staffed by AIs buying and selling from each other.
This seems too simplistic of a description of how money would work in such a world. Money is just a way to distribute your power to influence people. You never pay for machines or software. Think about buying anything, say a pen. You do not really pay for the metal in the pen. You pay the cost associated with extracting and processing the metal by humans along the production chain. If there were no humans along the chain, the cost could go down to zero.
The "focus" on planets doesn't work quite correctly. I love that you included true size, but it would be great if the focus worked, and one could zoom between the planets (until the planet shows up).
I also think Saturn's rings don't wobble that fast.
If Apple could give away a macbook neo to students, locked to the one individual student somehow, for free! they would still make money on it in the long run through the subsequent purchases over the person’s lifetime.
The environment around the language can put in limits (on time, number of operations, etc.)
Convex does this well, replacing SQL (somewhat yaml-like sucky old declarative language) with JS/TS but in a well-locked-down environment with limits to ensure one mutation or query doesn’t take down the whole DB.
Why do ppl think building something through yaml is ever a good idea??
(I know why: for a platform it’s simpler to parse a yaml than to run code, but it’s almost never a good idea for anything that needs to scale in complexity)
This is the “ad tax” reasoning, but ultimately I think the answer is greater efficiency. So there is a real value, even if all competitors use the tools.
It’s like saying clothing manufacturers are paying the “loom tax” tax when they could have been weaving by hand…