So I have now seen it . It did not pop up, I had to go into apps and find the spider man app and click on it.

Pretty stupid waste of time, but not on startup or anything.

Though it could create intelligence. “Computer, make an opponent that can be better than data”. Ok, guess it’s time to make a sentient hologram then.

On the occasion a search result forces me to reddit, I delete the “upsell” div (that’s what the code of the site calls it) and remove the block scroll class from the body.

Yes, but they aren’t standing up in city council meetings praising it. They are either the interested businesses that will privately meet with the council members, pay for advertising that keeps their specific names out of the ad, or rant in the media about how unfair it is that people don’t want the datacenters that would further enrich the tech bro.

This along with the changes to de-emphasize things like watch lists or even “continue watching” is basically the providers seeing how much they can influence users to watch what the provider wants instead of trying to cater to the users. If they find that people rarely navigate away from whatever ‘top 10’ or ‘for you’ suggestions, well, that means they have a great deal of freedom to only provide what is convenient for them and still get most of their revenue.

I’m saying broadly, like that other council meeting where the simple question of ‘are you bound by NDA with the company’ was only answered by two of the council members and the rest refused to answer. Every municipality is a bit different, and the one where I grew up pretty blatantly held a meeting, everyone said no, the council said they were rolling with it anyway. Why in the world would a city council go against unanimous expressed public opinion? Because private opinion spoke loader, probably with dollars.

I’m simply stating that none of the public expressions are in support of the datacenters, so there’s no way to compare.

Sure, but based on experience, when the scalp is just sporadically putting hair out there, it’s pretty much always better to go all-in and shave it. Trying to make the most of remaining bits of hair is a lost cause. If you have some reasonable parts of your scalp still putting out volume, then the hair can look ok as long as it doesn’t grow out too much.

The pro-datacenter people won’t be making public comment, they are smoozing privately with the decision makers and making them sign NDAs.

A good lesson for people that seek to assert absolute authoritarianism over folks. Corner folks too hard and given no viable alternative, desperation drives unexpected outcomes.

Well, there’s livelihood and work, and so far no one has exactly inspired confidence that the current labor class will receive a livelihood. We’ve let systems solidify that basically demand that the labor class have some semblance of leverage to participate in the benefits. So far the practical result has been that the hypothetical scenario erases that leverage, while avoiding any concessions that may win over the people that would be screwed over. It’s nice to hand wave and say “some new system”, but without more concrete things to look at, there is the risk of “well, let’s remove the labor leverage and just assume that the utopian outcome results instead of the dystopian”.

One thing that concerns me is that a common short story held up as an example of awesome utopia brought on by post-scarity due to AI is “Manna”. The plight of the dystopian half is very plausible, but the “utopian” half has a lot of problems in mechanism of how it happened and issues when “realized”. If even in fiction we can’t make a convincing narrative that lands in an unambiguous utopia, then my hopes for reality is pretty low.

So I guess in short, I agree with your sentiment, but too pessimistic to see the upside being realized and afraid that the optimisim around the upside results in rationalizing the downsides.

The toxic aspect generally comes from the consequences of pursuing ambition by undermining others in a competitive context. If, hypothetically, the competitive pressure is off, then “ambition” is not nearly as likely to have negative consequences.

Here the person was saying we really need to actually put our minds to use, and that’s not really likely to be the ‘toxic ambition’ you fear.

Also to some extent, impossible to train. If a person needs to feel the situation or it demands the full dexterity of the hand, then that is not going to be captured in training data. It’s why the robots are being tele-operated, yes in part to demonstrate the mechanical bits work, but the tele-operation is the only way they can get training data. If you couldn’t use a VR controller to do a task successfully, then they can’t even capture the training data needed.

The challenge is that the current approaches that are very novel broadly have proven relatively less useful for things like robotic manual labor.

The crux of the current AI craze is machine learning, which needs all the sensory information the human perceives that is relevant to the task and all of the things the human does in response in every detail. You can’t tell a model to “just feel out how that screwdriver is going and make sure you don’t strip the head or cross-thread it by mistake”, it has no abstraction, it can only derive the most likely inputs from training data based on the sensory information.

This works reasonably well for vehicle operation, where the human generally only has sight and hearing, and generally only operates a few relatively simple controls, wheels, pedals, knobs. Even with that advantage, it needs a mountain of sample data. Millions of miles of drive data to work with and the result is still a bit janky, kind of like a human with about 3000 miles of total lifetime driving experience.

Once you want to extend this approach to anything involving a more comprehensive use of hand dexterity and everything you can feel, then it becomes a problem. If you can imagine yourself tele-operating a robot with VR headset and controllers to do a task, then they have a path to get training data. That’s how a lot of these ‘chore-bot’ ambitions are trying to be realized, workers tele-operating for demos and training data, in hopes of getting enough training data to do things competently one day. But imagine trying to use a manual screw driver in that tele-operation scenario, making sure it’s lined up, doesn’t cross thread, and you don’t strip the head. I couldn’t imagine doing something even that simple in the real world without just being able to feel the screwdriver in my hand, to feel how the screw is going in or not going in, if the resistance feels right and consistent. If it’s a situation that makes sense to use a driver, then probably could tele-operate it, but in cases where we need the finesse of a manual tool, those are going to be super challenging to address. Even using a driver, I always manually start it, either with my fingers or a screwdriver, and the driver comes in when alignment is well assured.

Now the long standing approaches are of course already a big factor in automating construction. The new approaches can also make it easier to take a task that was almost within the reach of robotic choreogrpahy but foiled by something like unexpected weight and wind, so the relatively newer AI approaches help make it easy to correct for deviations to provide a steady environment to execute the programmed movements. But the versalitility of a person with full use of their hands and feelings is going to be a tough road unless some breakthrough happens.

Indeed, someone with a deep fanaticism for Musk posted exactly that scenario as inevitable. This was to stand by his man when Musk asserted that SpaceX should be worth more than everything else on earth combined (he was pissed that spcx had fallen).

The dude claimed that by 2038 the 20 biggest companies would all be entirely space based exclusively, and that globally SpaceX would be the sole provider of space technology and the other 19 companies would be tenants of SpaceX. It all made sense to him because space is bigger than earth, right?

I can’t find it, but among the usual suspects (space mining, space datacenters, terra forming), I was especially amused that his hypothetical “space banking company”, because for some reason the financials of space companies needed to be managed by a company that could get stuff launched into space?

To an extent, they weren’t betting on the business, they were betting on the masses eating up the stock.

And they were at least initially right, and cashing out 2-4 days after the IPO certainly worked for and of them. Stock going down required some significant portion of them to take their winnings.

They were betting on the stupidity of the retail investor, not the fundamentals of the business.

Note that it stipulates passport or birth certificate and perhaps marriage certificate, and gives them leeway to waive these requirements. It’s rationalized by “voter identity”, but a birth certificate doesn’t prove your identity, even if you can validate it (mine is a rotting old piece of paper with an embossed stamp, seems easy enough to fake), it would only mean a person was born with the name that you claim to have.

For many people, the specifically requested documents are lost or they never had them.

Now if this was a “need to establish a fair voter id system and issue cards to all voters with a reasonable timeline to actually pull this off”, then the argument could be made. But it is a last minute “better have you birth certificate right now, no time to get replacements from the government, don’t vote instead, unless we decide you are ok, then you can vote anyway”.

Particularly the leeway to not require the document is similar to another voter suppression method of the past. “Pass a literacy test to vote”, which might sound like an …ok… idea, except the tests were designed to be impossible to pass, with bad wording, multiple plausibly correct options, etc. But at least it was unfair to everyone, right? Oh, if your grandfather could vote, you are exempted. So a lot of black people were conveniently blocked from exemption on a test that claimed to support educated voting but was just designed to ti fail everyone that would be required to take it.

Also, Elon rolled most of that ‘future AI empire’ stuff into SPCX instead. Meaning that even if investors wanted to believe it that, they know that Elon can play shell games and put the prize wherever he wants and the investors are not able to control that.

Yeah, while there are some folks that are die-hard must have gas cars, lots of other folks experience instant torque, smoothest and quietest drive imaginable, and replenishing range without having to go out of your way to a station. Wondering when the next maintenance needs to come and there’s no oil, no wearing belts, no super hot engine bay, just some things like wiper blades and a bit more rough on tires owing to generally higher weight.

There are downsides and awkward fits for some people. My apartment dwelling colleague would be screwed since his place has no available residential charging. Road trips can be more inconvient (though viable and perhaps worth it if you are taking a road trip every few months but spare yourself a weekly trip to the gas station). But certainly there’s a market for which EVs provide more value than combustion vehicles.

I want you to be right, but I’m more skeptical. I see all over the place companies explicitly targeting a profitable subset: the biggest suckers of the available suckers. Higher margin, fewer whiny customers. Bonus points if it creates a cult-like fanbase (a lot of big brands manage to cultivate this).

Saw a story where a company explicitly had a strategy of “increase prices by 10x, and it may scare off 90% of customers, but the 10% left will be a wonderful gold mine”. Particularly shortages in the tech industry swayed a lot of folks that advocated for high-volume, low-margin to low-volume, high-margin.

So if 20% are ride-or-die for Tesla and Musk, then it might be a decent enough move to double down on those 20%.

Not defending, just an explanation, and one that if anything would enrage Elon more.

He’s still an absurdly over-wealthed taint stain, but the specific numbers over that threshold were just not quite as substantial as other (also somewhat imaginary) numbers.

Point in fact, he was a trillionaire, and now he is not, but he didn’t lose anything real. He still has every bit the amount of real wealth and control over all that stuff you listed that he had before, just the number shifted by billions of dollars while preserving every last thing of import that was wrong with his wealth. He is no longer a trillionaire but that means absolutely nothing about the problems his wealth pose in real terms.

At some point, the numbers cease being a thing for meeting their needs, their comforts, and at some point even their every whim and preference they could possibly imagine. It just becomes a score and they peg their egos to the score. This is a level no one should ever be at.