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They arguably have more free speech rights than the average person with citizens united..

Duncan Elliott taught my graduate (IIRC) computer architecture course while writing that thesis - we all talked about C-RAM for a while.. And I think it was a rehash of an even older paper / discussion about that idea.

What is a "normally skilled" job? Working at Home Depot?

We also had strong unions and income tax rates as high as 95% on the highest income brackets.

True, it does smell a bit fishy..

Yes, agreed. I came on a fiance visa, then work authorization, then green card, then naturalization. Spouse (the OG US citizen) thought we just needed to get married in the US..

Confused as well - spousal visa gives them a green card, does it not? What is there to wait for? Are they postponing green card renewal as well?

OS/2 Warp's browser did that - it kept a tree of parent and child nodes (indented) as a history type of thing..

Libre Office has that too..

If it wasn't for Google (and ads), my bank might not have even considered selling my data.. They only sold the credit bureaus in the past, AFAIK. Now it's considered a "must have"..

Thanks for this. As a 30+ years software developer, I empathize with your pain, understand your points, etc.

I also am old-school and would expect reasonable support / fixes from $200+ software packages back in the day. These days, for apps? I use like 3 on my phone, so I'm not the target consumer..

That depends. My employer sells to enterprise / Fortune 500 companies. We have very responsive support staff. We've been around 15+ years.

The question was asked: would we ever consider a scaled-down version of our product for the consumer market? The answer was: we don't know how to give bad support, so we can't play in the consumer market.

So I'll agree for the CONSUMER space. For the B2B space, companies with good/great support do exist. Now, maybe our level of support is similar to other companies in the same space (no idea), but if you escalate, you will have someone respond within a given amount of time, we take our SLAs seriously, etc, etc.

Anecdote: AMD RMAing my Ryzen 1700 due to the hardware issues the early chips had and shipping me a new one, no questions asked definitely improved my feelings towards AMD compared to say, Intel's response to FDIV (yes, I am that old - I remember that playing out in real-time on usenet).

Especially in 2026 with the majority of traffic being bots..

UBI can also be a backstop against deflation, can't it? If no one has income, it doesn't matter if bread costs $1 per loaf instead of $3-5 now - no one will be able to afford even $1 eventually, after they've sold their house at a loss, sold their car, sold their laptop, iphone, etc.

Sam Altman doesn't BELIEVE in UBI - but he knows it's the only way to SELL his product, therefore he pretends he believes in it. None of these guys want one cent going to anyone but themselves.

What about RTX 3080? Too little VRAM?

Then they can get a license for that class of vehicle and add "towing up to NNNN lbs" option.. Anything over 500 or 1000 lbs towed, for example, IMHO, should require a license.

Obviously not for a hitch-based bicycle carrier - I think most people can manage to use those reasonably safely.

I think it depends if you have: a) picture, legal name or b) picture, legal name, dob, all addresses/phone numbers/email addresses they have ever had, SSN, employers past and present, same info for spouse, kids, which schools they attended, who their friends / associates are, criminal history, etc, etc..

I can see that first one is "public information", more or less.

And people loved "free next day delivery" from Amazon, when it started. It's not quite the same level of service anymore, and membership has gone up in price.

Would these businesses pay 2x? 5x? 10x? What is their breaking point? I'm sure xAI/OpenAI/whoever will find it and charge 0.9x that (eventually). Just look at telecoms / internet access and their rubbish "network congestion" claims to keep raising prices.

How can it end well, when it's mostly owned / controlled by narcistic billionaires who would love to eradicate anyone who so much as looks at them sideways? And who view "mass population reduction" and "I'll get to be a king in my castle, served by peons who depend on my favor to live" as the most desirable outcome of AGI?!?

If even one of these had pledge that all profit goes to end world hunger, cancer research, etc, I could possibly see it - but they haven't. They're all after finding a way to be the biggest, richest asshole possible with the ability to crush anyone in their way..

Sure, they brought in artillery and a small freelance militia to shoot at the unionized workers, but the point is, the survivors are back working the mines...

Creative is still around? They always had great hardware, but their software was never what one would consider "great".

If you feed the same prompt to the same AI with the same random seed, you'll get the same answer every time.

If a hundred people see the same event, will they all respond the same?

Chiang has, in fact, written on this topic before - see "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", and has speculated about sentience in AI, etc. This is not a "one-off", "I need money" type of article. I dare say he has thought about this much more than most people here.

From Wikipedia: In 2023, Chiang was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in AI.

It can't even natively understand how many letters there are in words - how will it understand the meaning?

I would maybe agree with you if the entire realm of human existence was limited to words. There are many human experiences that transcend text, and indeed can hardly be adequately described using text.

Sure, it's the best we have online, but that does not make "the internet" the sum of all human experience. To reduce all of humanity down to the text on the internet is reducing us to the level of machines to fit the requirement of what a machine can process / simulate.

AFAICT, Star Trek has ALWAYS been a vessel for political messaging.

username checks out!

Yes. I'm currently not convinced it can ever be so. So until I hear something convincing to the contrary, I believe no machine can be conscious / sentient unless mimicking human behavior. And if it mimics human behavior intentionally, I have to ask why - and the answer is probably to get me to trust / use it more.

I was bright-eyed and excited about tech once. Like back in 1982 when I got my first home computer and thought CPUs were part magic. Now I know how machines work from the transistor level up to neural nets. There's nothing magical about it. And no consciousness.

Having seen the mockery that the finance-bros have made of "pure tech" (i.e. Jobs instead of Woz, Ellison instead of Joy, etc) and all the enshittification just for pure $$$, I'm leery of ANYTHING ANY tech company tells me anymore.

Now, do I believe that possibly "consciousness" is some kind of state of a super-circuit (our brains)? Sure. Can we emulate that on a computer? We can't even emulate a pebble on a computer (not simulate, emulate). We can SIMULATE what we THINK brains are, but we can't emulate a real one. Not even close, not for many decades.

Infinitely reproducible at 0 cost means people will be treated as disposable by the rich.