16,159 karma · joined September 15, 2010
And the worst case downward spiral will involve not only a surge in supply but a drastic drop in demand to go along with it.
All of those previous "knowledge workers" scurrying for the trades not only become more labor supply, but without their cushy jobs they will no longer be able to afford to hire trades people to prop up the demand side.
Double whammy.
> I hope I don't have to explain how differently you and I are treated when we lose a job?
About the same once you run out of money. At least here in the US, ymmv in countries that have sane social safety net policy.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/justices-uphold-laws-targ...
Yeah, and not just individual destinations but entire destination cities.
See, for example, the radical reshaping of Las Vegas.
Data-driven optimization in general, and not just when it comes to things like "online content".
Like, it certainly benefits us to a certain point, but after a while it starts to create fragile systems and we're getting deep into the fragile systems phase.
See: the complete breakdown of the supply chains of just about everything, algorithmic price discovery contributing to out of control inflation, etc. This is beginning to impact nearly every aspect of our lives and IMO rarely in a good way.
I fundamentally don't understand LLM "brand loyalty".
All of the models are constantly leapfrogging each other and always have been.
Google had a long lag between releases (and still hasn't released Argon), but why wouldn't they be able to compete? It isn't like any of this stuff requires secret knowledge, the Bitter Lesson has proved true again and again, and Google can certainly scale computation, it is like the one single thing they've always done well in spite of all their other foibles.
Depends on how you define "regular folk".
40% of American adults don't have any retirement savings account at all. And entirely unsurprisingly whether they do or not correlates extremely strongly with income/wealth.
So one could easily claim that the further from actual "regular folk" you are the more likely you are to benefit.
Parallelism is fantastic when it actually speeds up the entire pipeline, but in my experience most people's jobs (at least the ones for which AI is currently relevant) involve a lot of overlapping "hurry up and wait" branches that drastically blunt the real benefits of that sort of parallelism.
There may be specific situations where it makes sense to do it, but just immediately going full gastown on anything AI related seems like such a giant waste to me, of both money and finite world resources.
Not sure I'd hold my breath on that until the Democratic party itself is reshaped.
OpenAI's new northeast lead for government outreach and policy is Chuck Schumer's daughter.
His other daughter works a similar job at Meta.
The Democrats are better than the Republicans (who basically do nothing unless Trump blesses it, and he's Mr "Superintelligence-SI" now) on this issue, but there are reasons to believe they might not end up being that much better in practice without big leadership shakeups.
More scary than funny, IMO.
The US military almost took an action that could very plausibly have escalated into a hot war with China because people are already relying too heavily on these systems.
Despite the reporting, nobody in power seems sufficiently freaked out about this.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false...
I actually don't even know if the person you replied to was making this joke, or if they were being sincere, I'm speculating... but...
> Is there a clip?
It was kind of a running joke on the show. Couldn't find a clip that encapsulates the whole thing, but the first clip here shows Stannis reflexively making the correction at various times as if it were like a tic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0zNWswcqMg
And then later in the series you see it rub off on the person he was with in the previous instances (in the 2nd scene in this clip):
When people correct less/fewer I always assume they are just making a Game of Thrones/Stannis Baratheon joke.
Which I will always support, even if the TV series drove off a cliff at the end.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/1wljyvf/al...
Uncharitably... because eventually they hope to produce a phone that isn't running iOS or Android?
More charitably because the title is actually an important question right now in the abstract for almost everything, not just operating systems.
But the forces that shape the question are so large and hard to get a handle on when we are living through the moment that you have to start thinking about it somewhere, why not OSes?
IMO even this AI phone is doomed in the slightly longer run.
One more step into the weirdness and people will just be working with AI to build their own bespoke phone with the specs sent over to a manufacturer that is "like PCBWay, but spits out whole devices".
I have no idea what this does to society, the economy, etc when we reach a point where nobody really "needs" any kind of middleman for almost anything (well, except for things they actually really need, like food and shelter), but it looks like I'll see it happen for a bit before I die.
Well, that and non-enforcement of antitrust which is a big part of many of our current economic problems.
Massive corporate landlords like Greystar and Morgan Properties own so much of the market they can do a lot of pricing damage even without colluding with others (but of course they do that too).
I don't think many people are saying all AI demand is fake.
People are saying that there isn't as much demand for AI as is claimed by the frontier labs, which is pretty reasonable when you consider Anthropic has been floating the idea that their TAM is $30 trillion, approximately the entire US GDP.
The post you are replying to doesn't claim they did...?
They did change the branding in late 2021/early 2022.
Prior to that the product was called the Oculus Quest, after that it was the Meta Quest.
And Meta did start heavily enshittifying the product alongside the rebrand.
It was, at least in the US, and not even all that long ago.
But now we live in the late-stage capitalism grift economy and just about anything goes if you're "making that bag", doesn't matter who you exploit... as long as they are poorer than you. If they are richer than you you'll get SBF'd.
Don't worry, the already stretched taxpayer will be on the hook for everything just like in 2008!
This time the relief mechanism is already baked into the system (capital does learn from its past mistakes, even if it may not be the lessons you'd hope for!)
https://prospect.org/2026/08/03/ai-bailout-could-be-baked-in...
Being ripped off by large corporations at every transaction is what "owning the libs" looks like for your life in practice, but hey at least you can say slurs on twitter now!
Ok.
But in the reply you are responding to I specifically carved out an exception for emergency situations:
> I can only surmise these people haven't been to a non-emergency doctor since prior to 2020.
Your mom's situation was certainly an emergency.
I'm glad she was seen promptly, but her situation is very different than someone who needs to see a specialist for something that is not immediately life threatening (even if waiting could have serious long term health consequences).
As someone who is myself 'old af' by tech standards (I'll be 53 very soon) the main problem is that the policymakers are all 70+ years old.
Their concept of what China even is is forever stuck in pre-2004 thinking from back when they still had significant neuroplasticity.
Vote these fucking fossils out, kids, before it is entirely too late.
(And, yeah, before someone inevitably brings it up, some exceptions-that-prove-the-rule older policymakers/politicians do avoid this trap of getting stuck in the past, but most don't)
It boggles my mind when I still occasionally hear people speaking out against all forms of single payer healthcare in the US saying they don't want to have to wait weeks/months to see a doctor like they do in Canada/UK/wherever.
If I give them the benefit of the doubt of not being paid lobbyists for the medical insurance industry, I can only surmise these people haven't been to a non-emergency doctor since prior to 2020.
Because even here in the US if you aren't fabulously wealthy with concierge medical you'll be waiting weeks/months to see a 'doctor'. And you'll almost certainly never actually see a doctor, you're going to see an overworked NP (no shade on NPs here, most of whom are great, just establishing how our medical system actually works in 2026).
I'd expand that to any type of business that has effectively inelastic demand through the ability to hold people emotionally hostage.
So, for example, in addition to hospitals also include veterinarians, funeral services, family planning, etc.
Soulless PE vultures should be barred from all of this.
Thanks, stranger.
I'm old enough that I have experienced significant grief a few times in my life.
Given our mortality, we should welcome some degree of situational grief, as grief is the absence of a previous love that we were lucky enough to experience in the first place.
Of course, there are also profoundly unfair versions of grief (like the loss of a child) that I wish nobody (or no whale, for that matter) would ever have to experience.
Just as much as any human that isn't me, as far as I can tell from all available evidence.
So, yes, I absolutely believe they grieve, just like I believe humans who aren't me grieve.
When harnessed, yes. They still suck at it, but they are getting significantly better over a relatively short time.
And you don't have to look very far in any direction economically or politically to wonder if humans in 2026 are really as good at planning as we like to think and/or if we may be regressing in this area. Because a lot of things we are responsible for aren't going very well for the majority.
They can pretend to, of course, and use the language of grief, but if you can't feel the cold bottomless pit that has bored through your gut then you aren't really grieving.
Sure, we've got them beat on language and planning, but we're currently in the process of being passed up on both those fronts by multi-dimensional arrays of floating point numbers sitting inside of sand. So, like, how special is that then, really?