i think you've got it backwards. the very same people (and their money) who were deep into crypto went on to new buzzword, which turns out to be AI now. this includes altman and zucc for starters, but there's more

taking a couple steps back and looking at bigger picture, something that you might have never done in your entire life guessing by tone of your post, people want to automate things that they don't want to do. nobody wants to make elaborate spam that will evade detection, but if you can automate it somebody will use it this way. this is why spam, ads, certain kinds of propaganda and deepfakes are one of big actual use cases of genai that likely won't go away (isn't future bright?)

this is tied to another point. if a thing requires some level of skill to make, then naturally there are some restraints. in pre-slopnami times, making a deepfake useful in black propaganda would require co-conspirator that has both ability to do that and correct political slant, and will shut up about it, and will have good enough opsec to not leak it unintentionally. maybe more than one. now, making sorta-convincing deepfakes requires involving less people. this also includes things like nonconsensual porn, for which there are less barriers now due to genai

then, again people automate things they don't want to do. there are people that do like coding. then also there are Idea Men butchering codebases trying to vibecode, while they don't want to and have no inclination for or understanding of coding and what it takes, and what should result look like. it might be not a coincidence that llms mostly charmed managerial class, which resulted in them pushing chatbots to automate away things they don't like or understand and likely have to pay people money for, all while chatbot will never say such sacrilegious things like "no" or "your idea is physically impossible" or "there is no reason for any of this". people who don't like coding, vibecode. people who don't like painting, generate images. people who don't like understanding things, cram text through chatbots to summarize them. maybe you don't see a problem with this, but it's entirely a you problem

this leads to three further points. chatbots allow for low low price of selling your thoughts to saltman &co offloading all your "thinking" to them. this makes cheating in some cases exceedingly easy, something that schools have to adjust to, while destroying any ability to learn for students that use them this way. another thing is that in production chatbots are virtual dumbasses that never learn, and seniors are forced to babysit them and fix their mistakes. intern at least learns something and won't repeat that mistake again, chatbot will fall in the same trap right when you run out of context window. this hits all major causes of burnout at once, and maybe senior will leave. then what? there's no junior to promote in their place, because junior was replaced by a chatbot.

this all comes before noticing little things like multibillion dollar stock bubble tied to openai, or their mid-sized-euro-country sized power demands, or whatever monstrosities palantir is cooking, and a couple of others that i'm surely forgetting right now

and also

Is the backlash due to media narratives about AI replacing software engineers?

it's you getting swept in outsized ad campaign for most bloated startup in history, not "backlash in media". what you see as "backlash" is everyone else that's not parroting openai marketing brochure

While I don’t defend them,

are you suure

e: and also, lots of these chatbots are used as accountability sinks. sorry nothing good will ever happen to you because Computer Says No (pay no attention to the oligarch behind the curtain)

e2: also this is partially side effect of silicon valley running out of ideas after crypto crashed and burned, then metaverse crashed and burned, and also after all this all of these people (the same people who ran crypto before, including altman himself) and money went to pump next bubble, because they can't imagine anything else that will bring them that promised infinite growth, and they having money is result of ZIRP that might be coming to end and there will be fear and loathing because vcs somehow unlearned how to make money

congratulations on offloading your critical thinking skills to a chatbot that you most likely don't own. what are you gonna do when the bubble is over, or when dc with it burns down

But but, now idea man can vibecode. this shit destroys separation between management and codebase making it perfect antiproductivity tool

wait, i missed that, but then idk why it got called "semi-governmental"

time travel (backwards) would break physics as we know it, what are you talking about lol

You absolutely can make a nuke out of thorium-derived material (first in Teapot MET, 1955, then possibly later by India). It's not widely used because plutonium is similar and in some important ways superior material

The tradeoff in using salt as fuel/coolant is that now almost all the fission products are in soluble form, instead of nice ceramic chemically inert pellets, which makes any spill much worse, and i wouldn't say it's safer for this reason - it's different, and it's a tradeoff few thought it is worth making. We have figured out how to make PWRs not explode so it's not that big of a problem. This goes both for uranium or thorium as a fuel

The reason Yucca Mountain is needed is that nuclear waste exists, if US reversed their policy on reprocessing maybe it wouldn't fill up so quickly. It's a matter of political will

At least now, the chemical engineering for reprocessing fuel when reactor is on is not there. Maybe it'll get developed in this project, but this didn't happen yet. It all has to be weighed against existing alternatives, and it's possible to breed 233U in normal water-based reactors, so maybe there's a little reason to make MSRs in the first place. India has some thorium energy projects as well, but they're slowed down by lack of fissile material to bootstrap it (you can't fuel reactor using thorium only, it needs some fissile material)

There were small reactors that ran on thorium. Scaling up all the necessary molten salt processing will be pretty hard thing to do, if this thing can even run continously that is

this is toy sized reactor, not even entire technology demonstrator, there are medical isotope/research reactors with power 20MWt and more

it's not if you pay up https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

ed paid, and that's what he got. this all comes with caveat that this count doesn't include deepseek chinese customers, but that's barely relevant to sv bubble