HEmanZ

I really agree with you here. I would never buy one (vw buzz is more my style) but I loved it in a weird “thank god something new and unique” way. Like my love for good brutalist office buildings even if I’d never want to live in a brutalist home.

The amount of hate it gets has been yet another clear indication to me just how annoyingly tribal people are. It shows you’re in the in-group and definitely-a-righteous-good-guy if you hate on the cybertruck. Not hating on the cybertruck is basically admitting you’re a fascist (I’ve had a friend literally tell me this non-jokingly). I think that’s really what 80% of the hate comes down to.

Your framing is fundamentally illiberal. Refraining from engaging using “well deep in your heart” excuses means you can self-righteously ignore any position you disagree with and never have to face real argument. And it is wonderfully non-falsifiable, so you can always use it!

I appreciate you called out the more fundamental disagreement here: "... the progressive / conservative disagreement between how a system is designed vs. the impacts of a system determines its fairness and justness."

I think a lot of people miss this or pretend that the conservative position is just old-school racism (although it definitely is sometimes). But there are really hard philosophical, ethical, and political questions at the base of a lot our political problems. I think it helps keep people from arguing past each other if they can find out where the really "hard" part of their political disagreement actually is.

I mean, if intelligence capabilities don’t get meaningfully better than today, sure.

Every discussion I see here is working under “when they are another order or two of magnitude better than today.”

No one is saying masters are getting replaced today. But “you pay the x to look at the problem and know the y and know z” is literally just intelligence over complicated tasks. It gets replaced if these things get smarter. And there is not really a good reason to think they won’t besides “I don’t want them to” or “my identity is tied to them not getting smarter”.

I don’t know what “real” horseshoe theory is.

What people I see are usually referring to is that the far right and far left end up being fundamentally anti-liberal, and in their anti-liberal beliefs they more closely resemble each other (meet back up on the horse shoe) than they do the mainstream liberal left/right.

That would be right wing political violence.

Did you assume I’d think otherwise?

I’m using left broadly here. I myself am well “on the left” in the USA.

Idk about what the actual objective comparison is, but around me (Capitol Hill, Seattle) many left anarchist types definitely threaten violence. I’m not sure they’d actually follow through and a lot of it is communist revolution larping, but there is probably something to it. Or at the very least they’d do things like hide violent fugitives.

Someone left-aligned (and acting alone, not an official terrorist group) assassinated Charlie Kirk in the US.

A group of left aligned people got in over their heads on a protest action and one shot a police officer.

My too-online left friends worship Luigi IRL, one even recently got a tattoo meant to reference him.

Right wing attacks used to be more common than left aligned ones in the US, but that trend has recently flipped: https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-wing-terrorism-and-politi...

I’m not convinced there are any real terrorist groups operating the way e.g the Weathermen were back in the 70s. But there is some kind of violent left tendency rising, and we could easily be headed that way.

If there are no humans looking at the excel anymore, why is it needed? My guess is all of this office software gets replaced by stuff that looks a lot more low level and controlled by agents, and just converted to a nice view when a human wants to look for some reason.

No but what if those 2 hand out bread and circuses, use the super-intelligence they can afford (using super intelligence smarter than anyone alive) to keep the masses controlled, and are protected by all of the wonderful new machines of war (like ai controlled autonomous drones).

Also what if it’s not 2 vs 98, but something more like 10 vs 90, or 30 vs 70? Or 50 vs 50? And this kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight. It happens over a generation, or at least a few decades.

Anyway, the point isn’t this will happen, the point is that really bad outcomes that are almost impossible to walk back from are completely within the realm of possibility. And we have no real way to predict where we’re headed. So people are rightly very afraid.

You are packing so many assumptions into here about how the world works that are just wrong, I have no way to really respond.

Your strongest point is “will people stand for a world with no jobs, where only a percentage of the population owns most things?” And the answer is who knows, people stand for a massive amount of inequality right now, and technology for suppressing the masses is getting much better every year. It’s a big unknown imo, and probably contingent on too many things to predict at all.

Does no one own the companies?

We’ve had them for like 3 years. It feels a lot like saying “internet won’t do much” in 1996

Why would no one have underlying resources if there were very few jobs?

There are many millions of people in the USA who don’t work but own things. Some don’t work and own a lot of things

Why would no jobs mean no money?

The fear isn’t about now, it’s about trajectory. Everyone’s existential dread would evaporate if this is where it stops.

The dread is: where does this stop? Right now, with ai I can fly. But when does ai no longer need me? Just as an extreme example: a this pace, how far are we from “AI agent, here’s our assets, make money”? If every year 50% of the job disappears, how long until there is no human-ai team, just ai.

Idk, this conversation is endlessly frustrating, because people seem to have so much certainty one way or another about the future. Fear comes from not knowing more than anything.

You’re right, I shouldn’t expect laws and enforcement. Let me also hire a personal army while I’m at.

What a load of bullshit victim blaming.

“You either deal with it or move” do you think installing flock cameras isn’t an attempt to deal with it? If you go to council meetings and demand action, installing a bunch of flock cameras and increasing surveillance is a response.

I say this as someone who agrees, cameras don’t work much. But my point is that people had better support some alternative then, instead of blocking every other attempt to improve the situation.

I still am opposed to anything capable of mass surveillance because of how easily it is abused. But living in Seattle, my car has been broken into 4 times this summer alone (with nothing taken, because we leave nothing there), thiefs dug up the side of my house to steel copper wires, on my block someone dumped gasoline all over a tree and lit it on fire just because, people went around the neighborhood smashing front flower pots, many of the local businesses have had their windows smashed by robbers twice this year. Last year someone broke into my garage using a lock pick and stole a bunch of tools and my car license plate (and the cops actually caught him because he was driving in the hov lane with my reported-stolen license plate on lol).

My wife is at the point where she would probably like a flock camera on our street. I’m at the point where I wouldn’t mind a patrol car circling the area, like a damn police state. What else would you suggest people support when they are harassed by crime this much?

(Edit to expand): instead of just complaining I’ll meta-point. People will vote for things like flock cameras when society is unsafe, or they feel unsafe. Right now, in the USA, lots of places are visibly unsafe and people deal with actual threats from bad actors much more often than they deal with police overreach. If you want people to vote against mass surveillance then you need to support policy that makes mass surveillance unnecessary, and you need to do it now instead of “in a future communist utopia there will be no crime” kind of policy (I use this because it’s what I see a lot of in Seattle). Weak on crime is anti-urban, weak on crime is pro police state.

That’s great! You’re an outlier in the US still.

Any tips for how you planned your landscape to work this way? I’m slowly trying to convert mine but have already gotten burned by not matching plants to the right soil or sun exposure level and it’s taking longer to get right than I expected.

Do humans without lawns consume that much water? Have you worked on something where this problem came up in some unexpected way? Yes pipes need to be updated if a lot of tall complexes are built, but is total water that much at all?

I asked Claude to do the math, and it claimed reducing alfalfa use (not all use, just alfalfa) by the Colorado river by 1% per 1 million people who move from a place not already supplied by it.

I think when it comes to water a really important mental model everyone needs to have is that a human without a lawn or pool uses really tiny amounts of water at scale directly.

Why do they even need to do that? It could be all open and you still can’t compete. The models could be all completely open weight forever and you still can’t compete with capital.

How are you going to pay for the models or the electricity or the hardware? How are you going to compete against a swarm of ai agents that were spun up 6 months before you with 100x the capital whatever small amount of capital you scraped together doing one of the last few human jobs? Not with your human intelligence, which is now useless compared to machine intelligence. Maybe with luck, but at that point we’re all just at the casino.

I'm feeling the same way, and when I brought it up to some friends in tech it turned out in our group of 8 I was the least depressed.

The wife of another friend of mine confided in me that AI replacing his work in such a short time has made him depressed to the point she's getting scared he'll hurt himself.

I think we need a support group or something. But I'm too busy burning the candle at both ends trying to "catch the lifeboat" before its too late. So are most other engineers I know.

I'm sorry you're going through this but know not only are you not alone, but you're in the majority of software developers at this point (I think, anecdotally).

If you’re talking about a world democracy like the USA, the consumption gap between rich and poor effectively doesn’t matter from a climate change perspective. You could vanish the top 75% of Americans and still we’d have a climate change problem (albeit less of one for sure).

People get confused by some of the research because it often publishes emissions by who owns the asset emitting and not who consumes it (eg Starr et al paper breaks down both, and consumption vs ownership is wildly different, and you can tell what bent people have by which number they pick to report on…)

Another way I’d put it: if you’re not ready for gas to be $40/gallon and beef to be $100/lb ground, then you’re not really ready to fight climate change. And no one is, so it’s not going to happen unless we get a technology miracle.

Lots of things are wealth gap problems. Climate change is not, it’s an everyone problem.

In my family, about 5 out of 100 people believe climate change is even real. So ya, I think the average at this point is "I'm ambivalent, climate change may not even be real. But mostly I don't care"

If you live in a western democracy your politicians are held very accountable to the opinion and will of the people who vote. They are not kings or inherited aristocracy, they do what the people want (roughly) or get voted out.

The people who vote by-and-large don't believe climate change is real, don't believe it is serious, or are not willing to tolerate the level of discomfort necessary to solve the problem.

At least in my country, politician's hands are completely utterly tied from fighting climate change, because if they do something serious enough to actually matter they will immediately be voted out of office and whatever they did rolled back.

If I had to guess at anything it would be bribery, market manipulation, and crypto related business. The others I just don’t see even making it through, there is way too much room for interpretation of powers.

“Pulling punches now will only ensure that it comes back 10x worse later” and using punches will what, subdue? This is half the political power of America you’re talking about punching. Republicans will what, roll over? You think democrats win handily enough to end it?

It escalates the blood feud. The way out of a blood feud is de-escalation, amnesty, forgiveness, working together. Not demanding more blood, even if you think it is perfectly justified.

My point isn’t “president should be above law”. My point is that, if Trump and admin go to prison on charges that are not so strong that it sways a large portion of the public and republicans, we’re fucked. Regardless of the underlying truth of the case, regardless of what I think is just or unjust, we’re fucked. Because unless it’s convincing enough that republicans also agree, then it’s death spiral.

So I’m hoping the justice department either doesn’t have enough of a case to convict, or has enough of a case that the whole country falls in line. The in between, it’s time to get out. Because shit will go downhill very fast.

You have to be insane to think it is that black and white.

No sorry I’ll be more nuanced.

Unless Trump does something egregious enough in the coming years that the case against him is rock solid, black and white, and heavy, any move to jail him and those around him is impossible to distinguish from political targeting. I have not seen evidence of something out of line enough, no matter what Reddit hive mind thinks.

So with the knowledge I have, I’d say any serious push to jail him and his team would be terrifying. If we get crystal evidence of bribery that holds up in court and is clear enough to sway a large swath of Republicans, then that’s great. Still a worse outcome than there not being something black and white to nail him with, but I think that case democracy survives. But not “trumped up” charges.