aetherson

If Waymo can drop its price by 50%, it could steal a lot of demand from normal cars and transit, but that doesn't seem like it's even on the conversation right now.

I mean, clearly not all centarians in Japan are actually dead. But I think it's fairly straightforward that the numbers of super-elderly are inflated.

You discovered that there are certain amounts of judgment calls and subjectivity in the legal system, and then you seemed to get really excited, stop thinking, and start patting yourself on the back for your incredible insight. This whole, "Boom, sometimes people use human judgment legal cases, bet you NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT you STUPID TECH PERSON" is the world's most banal insight and the fact that you seem to think it's the entire analysis of the situation suggests that you're a stupid person.

Go find a lawyer (ie, not a tech person), and try this out on them.

Of course there is an element of subjectivity in every law and every case. But there is also a serious and deliberate attempt by the entire apparatus of the legal system to in fact systematize the way that the legal code is applied to human behavior. Yes, there are limits both to how far that systematization can go based on the complexity of real life and how far people want to let it go. But it's a matter of degree, and your whole line about how judges and juries just think that they can and should punish any behavior they think is "bad" without reference to a systemic law is stupid and incorrect.

Sometimes of course laws are written to be extremely vague and judgment based. Those laws have objectively bad outcomes, and are usually either quietly dustbinned, reformed, or the legal system attempts to systematize them, creating judicial doctrines that apply actual rules to how they work. (And, because again it seems like I'm talking to a very naive person, I'll caveat that of course such systems do not remove all ambiguity -- they merely manage it). And this is because the lawyers and judges that you want to imagine as agreeing with you recognize that a system in which you go in front of a judge and he just decides if you're "bad" is a terrible system.

And now I predict that you're going to answer this with some kind of big "nuh-uh, you're dumb." Here's what I suggest instead: I'm done with this thread. If you actually want to improve your understanding of the world instead of trying to shore up your ego, go and find someone in the legal world and ask them what they think of your takes here.

I understand how if you wave away all concepts of fallibility or enforceability, you can say to people, "It's cool that all this data exists, just don't be creepy," but you can't wave those concepts away.

> The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is a statistical measure of wealth distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini index is used to gauge economic inequality by measuring income distribution, also called wealth distribution.

It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing!

There are a few notable cases of European countries having very high wealth inequality despite lower income inequality (my take which may not be shared by many: having low income inequality makes it hard for people who aren't generationally wealthy to overcome old money). Notably, Sweden has a higher wealth inequality than the United States.

However, I don't think it's true that Europe in general has higher wealth inequality than the United States. Here's the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...

What the bank is probably mainly trying to do is not "extract a higher margin" from you, but rather to "maintain your business." While Alex might not have recognized that a startup that took in a bunch of financing and plopped it into a cash account and then didn't do much with it is a customer who might disappear at any time, on some institutional level the bank is aware of it. They want you to regard them not as an interchangeable place that money sits, but as a valued partner who helps you do things with your money, and as a result you feel like it would both be a risk and a bother to extract all your money and go to some other bank.

So instead the government gets involved and demands a change to built environment instead of a speculative bet on the idea of a new technology.

I assume it will eventually become unmaintainable if I add a bunch to it.

There are a lot of sites on the web that let you make a hex map. A lot of them are even free. Many of them have features that my little webapp doesn't have.

But mine works the way I want it. I wanted rivers and forest to be modifiers on top of the base terrain of the tile. I wanted to have a few different settlement icons. I wanted to have more variations of hills and mountains than most of the other sites do.

And if I'm ever missing a feature on this thing, I can just add it, rather than just sort of saying, "Oh well."

Because it's an app that's just for me, I don't need to worry about scale or security or monetization or anything.

It took me about an hour to two hours of my attention (spread out over two calendar days) to have the AI code it.

This is clearly a valuable game! It is worth in expectation $20B. But it also has a 50% chance of being worthless to you.

Someone offers to buy it from you for $20B. You agree, giving up some upside for some downside protection.

But then someone else says that's not allowed. So you play the game and you roll a six and get $60B.

Does that prove the person who made you play it rather than sell it was "right," ex ante?

Here's an example article from the era: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/02/14/y...

1. Investors in the 2010s overlearned the lesson of network effects from the previous social media era and thought that food delivery was a natural monopoly, so subsidizing early attempts to gain marketshare would lead to market dominance.

2. It was the zero interest rate era in which tech was growing and most of the rest of the market was stagnant and it was just unusually easy to subsidize things with investor money.

3. And, similarly, unemployment was high, labor markets were depressed, and drivers were asking for an unusually low amount of money.

4. Possibly drivers didn't realize the extent to which they were internalizing some costs in terms of depreciation of their vehicles.

5. Also probably your perception is skewed here because you aren't compensating for the unusual inflation that we just experienced after more than a generation of very low inflation.

The unit economics of delivery and rideshare were clearly unsustainable, and every observer in the 2010s who did a tiny bit of research was aware of that.

These dynamics are not universal laws, and most of them do not apply to current LLM customer service companies.

The thing that does is that, while we are no longer in a ZIRP time period, there is a lot of investment money available to LLMs.

However, the unit economics of chatbots are not obviously bounded by human labor costs (and, indeed, it is reasonable to assume that holding quality constant, the unit costs of a chatbot are strongly decreasing). We aren't coming out of a low-inflation period into a high-inflation spike (and, possibly, are going to do the reverse). There is no real equivalent to the idea of the driver-centered phenomena of a depressed labor market or illegible cost absorption into the equity of vehicles. I don't think anyone makes the case that specifically chat CS bots are a natural monopoly (though they may for fundamental models).

There are certainly reasons why one may be pessimistic of the viability of customer service chatbots, but I encourage people to think past vapid slogans like "enshittification."

That's kinda wild, because it seems like holy shit if you're taking a drug that lets you drop 10-20% of your body weight from obese down to normal why would you stop taking it, but people do.

But also: if general intelligence were computable, but it was not possible to learn how to make the computer that can compute it, then you've disproved evolution.

If you aren't arguing for a non-materialist position, then the distinction between "artificial" and human intelligence isn't meaningful. A powerful enough computer could simulate the material processes in your brain. If as the OP claims it is mathematically impossible for a computer to generate intelligence, no matter how powerful that computer, then it is impossible for your brain to do so (via material processes).