panta

To expand on this, a company’s purpose should go beyond simply generating profit for its owners, imho; among other things, it should also include a duty of care toward its employees. Society instills a strong work ethic in us from childhood, teaching us that contributing to the greater good is our individual duty. Before the plague of neoliberalism, there was an expectation that companies would have a positive impact on society, too. Nothing, except greed, forbids to return to those values.

> If I have a team of 20, making a lot of money, but I think I can do the exact same job with 15 because of AI productivity gains, should I keep the other 5 employed for the vibes?

yes, because, (a) you would be an amoral company otherwise and (b) the productivity and work quality of those remaining 15 will plummet if you don't and AI won't save you in the end: you'll build faster and cheaper, but the quality of your products will enter a downward spiral it will be hard or impossible to exit from.

the trust could in theory be built back if they would manage to dethrone him and his cronies, hold a Nuremberg-style trial leaving out no accomplice and reform their system and constitution in order to setup real guardrails that would reliably avoid this from happening ever again. This would require, among other things, to severely limit presidential powers, or better yet, switch to a parliamentary system with a "first minister", and abandon the two-party system in favor of a more democratic proportional multi-party one. Sadly I don't think these changes will ever happen.

No need to do that, they can also choose to continue to be spied by the US. Is it better to be spied by the US or by China?

We're "solving" manual labour too. Those people could find themselves liberated from physical work in the next few years, unless some corrective force/action intervene.

That they can afford only while the cost is subsidized. Then the well-in-a-bottle bubble will explode because everyone will realize that the business has never been sustainable, nobody really believed in it after all. But the well now has been damaged beyond repair.

Since we are using analogies, a parent is responsible for the actions of a child, if minor. If the child is left unsupervised with access to guns and munitions, and kills someone, the responsibility is entirely on the irresponsible parents.

What if there are already (possibly hidden) loops somewhere, maybe even ultra-slow ones at the inter-generation level? What if some AIs could do that not with so explicit and dramatic actions, but much more subtly, through undetected manipulation at a vast scale level? What if (when) they reached ASI and through billions of micro-decisions manipulated people to do apparently minor choices that appeared innocent in isolation but whose collective outcomes lead to an earlier extinction of the human being (if at some point was determined to be an obstacle)? How could we (as a species) not be outsmarted by an ASI?

Neoliberism is not the only possible system, it is very well possible to change the boundaries of what enterprises can do. Technology-will-save-us is a quasi-religious belief, not supported by evidence. Also if it was true that we can't convince politicians and enterprises to change their course now, why should they do later when costs will be much higher?

Relying mostly on technology that doesn't yet exist seems absurd to me. We have an incredibly hard problem to solve and maybe a narrow window of action, we should use all the tools we have at our disposal: rapid deployment of available solutions, sustained research into better ones, adoption of more frugal lifestyles, development of alternative sociological, political and economical frameworks.

The problem is money, but at a different level. When you deal with the homeless it's too late. That money must be spent before someone becomes homeless, on welfare: unemployment benefits, accessible healthcare and housing. A minor cut taken care of immediately is nothing, but let it turn into gangrene and you won't be able to fix it at all.

Then the question becomes why US has such a huge problem with mental health and drugs that most other countries don't have with this scale. Maybe it's easier to develop mental health and/or drug issues when there are no societal safety nets, like accessible healthcare, decent affordable housing, unemployment benefits, ...

Why is your job to make the reverse engineer harder? When the user buys a product, it should be theirs to do whatever they want, even brick it. Your job should be creating the product the user wants to use, not building obstacles, otherwise you are creating something actively user-hostile. What if your company goes out of business and the user ends up with a device that can't be updated, that depends on cloud services that don't exist anymore, or worse with security vulnerabilities?

I guess the question could be: "how much Meta did by directly or indirectly damaging people mental health in New Mexico?". Note that the damage could be more or less subtle: someone could have been affected in great measure and become, for instance, depressed, while someone else could have been only mildly affected and just become a doom scroller. Is there a level of reasonable damage that could be tolerated? In my personal view, no, there isn't, and in theory all the earnings deriving from that person should be confiscated (and only after that you can apply the sanction). Unfortunately this won't be practical, and the only remaining option would be to heavily regulate or ban platforms that are engineered on people psychological weaknesses, and when tolerated they should be taxed to the sky (like tobacco and alcohol, or even more)

I'd gladly pay for the OS if this guaranteed abstaining from unnecessary changes and/or from removing useful features (eg 2d Spaces in Leopard and Snow Leopard, replaced by the inferior abomination that is Mission Control)

Those living the longest are those born 75-85 years ago. Later generations will have to wait to assess how it ended for them.

I think that to sum things up, we will have to wait until we can evaluate the cost of the mistakes. You could be lucky but you could also end up with a very negative output value in the longer time frame.

I've been a paying customer since their early days. Their value, at least in my view, lies precisely in that they are just a file storage SaaS. They are focused on doing one thing and doing it well. The day this will change they'll lose me as a customer.

no, they should not, since we already know that the contract won't stop them from using that data for other purposes and other governments. A government should act in the interest of its own citizens, first and foremost, and not pretending to believe a pinky swear by a notoriously bad actor.

Maybe it's borderline because it's coming from the other direction. Corruption presumes some kind of "covertness", when you break all the rules without even trying to be discreet can you still talk of corruption?

> Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic

if we consider AIs as "force multipliers" as we do with coding agents, it's easy to see how any AI company can harm the republic if the government they are serving is unethical and amoral.

Not everyone shares this view. Some have a different definition of winners and losers.

StanLLM-generated hammer: "Dear valued customer, our automated systems have flagged activity on your StanLLM account that appears to be non-compliant with our Acceptable Use Policy. As a precautionary measure your account has been suspended. If you believe this suspension is in error, feel free to contact our customer support at /dev/null^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsupport@..."

It is actively working to make the world a worse place and to degrade the fabric of society that makes them an enemy.

that's true only for as long as we allow that to be true. Users can live without Spotify (to cite just one representative of the mentioned categories), but Spotify can't live without users. We could (and should) stop behaving as powerless victims.

Of course. According to Andreessen if you are not optimistic and worry about the environment are an "enemy" for the bright future ahead (while at the same time he puts Nick Land in the list of the "Saints"). These people are deranged psychopaths, why are we leaving them at the wheel?

I think some forms of entertainment can have also redeeming qualities. A novel can be seen (also) as a form of entertainment but it can also be a vehicle for a message. The difference with social media sized alternatives is that with the latter the "consumer" is much more passive, at most it's expected to react emotionally without thinking. On the other hand with the former there is an interaction between the work and the reader/viewer. Some books have the ability to make you re-evaluate your beliefs and your values, without being manipulative. Art is not necessarily entertaining.

Those things happened under different historical contexts. In those times the means to control the serfs thoughts didn't exist.

At some point we'll have to admit that worse is actually worse.

There have been electoral fraud and a massive disinformation campaign operated by a foreign country. This is not democracy.

There seems to be a link between migraines and Mithocondrial Disease. If frequency/intensity of migraines diminishes with Vitamin B and Q10, it may be worth investigating. Especially if you have muscular fatigue or exhaustion.