The phrase made me chuckle, but I'm curious what exactly "rear ending the singularity" means.

I think here it means accelerating towards singularity. Rear ending means accelerating your car so much that it bumps into the rear end of the car before you.

> This is a reason why the US is trillions in debt.

Trump's OBBBA will be another reason, expected to add several trillion in the next few years. So yeah, real cuts are probably needed, but the DOGE people aren't achieving that in net.

To clarify, Elon himself opposed OBBBA because of the deficit. My point is that anyone cheering on DOGE for cuts but staying silent on the administration's generally bad record on spending, has an ideological bias that is not purely about fiscal responsibility.

I heard "belt and suspenders" at least 20 years ago (meaning multiple solutions to a problem with backup in case one fails), and maybe would be longer if I were older. You could blame Claude for overusing it or importing it to other cultures maybe, but it's not in the category of invented phrases or ones that only barely mean something in the specific context Claude used them.

Yeah I've definitely heard belt-and-suspenders since way before LLMs were a thing. Probably even used it once or twice myself.

> the annual water consumption of all US datacenters

How many hamburgers will it be if all the proposed/pending datacenters are completed and running?

I would expect within the same order of magnitude. Worst-case, skipping a burger once a month instead of once a year is hardly some insurmountable sacrifice (and I say that as a fatass who loves himself a good burger).

> Perhaps we could try to destroy those power structures without having a giant war

The power structure is what is putting out the satellites and datacenters that you hope will bring the Star Trek utopia. Not sure you can both destroy it and reap its fruit, or that the fruit is not poisoned by the immorality and antisociality of the current power structure anyway.

Also, in Starlink's case, if utopic United Earth becomes real, it will probably be cheaper to lay fiber and cell towers, so it's maybe just a bootstrap and not a final end state.

The data center hosting this website is already built, unlike the ones people are fighting against.

I'll grant the general public may not understand enough that they already rely on "datacenters", but there are reasonable arguments against gigawatt buildouts for AI, while still using technologies that run in datacenters in general.

The lockin is that you buy a new computer, and when you turn it on Windows is there. Like 1% of people have any concept that they could change that or how they would go about it. It doesn't suck enough yet for them to try changing it.

If you want to talk about why not macOS or Chrome, there are different reasons, but of the people buying PCs, that's why they're on Windows.

Modern 64-bit Windows doesn't execute .com files, unless the user installs an emulator or something.

It does execute PE files with .com extension.

Are the future benefits locked in by law or bureaucracy? Or some other reason the agency don't just decrease them?

In the United States they tend to be locked in by law. I believe in California lowering them requires a (state) constitutional amendment.

Lead was the basis for an awful lot of useful gasoline. Doesn't mean it was the only solution or the best one.