IMO the airpods vs the rest of the industry is kinda like the iphone vs blackberry.

You think things like "is the accordion a better user experience than the side tabs" instead of "why the f is the third accordion pane empty?"

Sure, the curiosity of figuring out where you made the mistake is gone, but that was never very valuable. It's just a detour that forces you to be curious about something else.

Wonder why that is, and if we'll grow out of it peacefully.

UBI is basically the same as saying "everyone should earn above average".

It's your scenario, you said you had no batteries and had to drill holes by hand, I'm saying that's fine for drilling holes but if you have no batteries (or solar panels, those could charge your power tools as well so they're not in the scenario!) you can't alter computer code by hand.

Leaving computers aside, we can take a piano player - can play a piano but he might not know how to build one. A doctor can interpret X-rays but he can't build an X-ray machine.

And so on. We are living in the reality where many, many people are using tools they don't understand how to make already, and have done so for 100+ years.

>Some .. are you advocating the answer should be none, in your future?

I'm not advocating anything, I'm just saying that this is the reality already, it's not new with AI.

Ideally we'd forever keep a chain of key people who know how to make everything from atoms, but realistically that's a chain that will break. It's happened before, medieval dark ages for example.

It depends on the task though. If you are in a similar scenario as with your fence posts and want to edit computer programs, you can't. (Not even with xkcd's magnetic needle and a steady hand). ;-)

As technology marches on it seems inevitable that we will get increasingly large and frequent knowledge gaps. Otherwise progress would stop - we need the giant shoulders to stand on.

How many people in the world can recreate a ASML lithography machine vs how many people are surviving by doing something that requires that machine to exist?

It is also easy to understand that the nuclear plant costs money even as you are buying cheap solar, because you can't just shut them down. This is a problem already, and we already have solar plants that generate energy 24/7.

They are small, sure but many, and the number is increasing very fast.

There is also tech in the pipeline that will accelerate this. Very cheap batteries among them.

Technology is already being deployed that will have electricity trend towards being free or almost free, 24/7. Pretty soon value will not be generated by selling electricity, instead you will have to generate value from consuming almost free electricity.

When does a nuclear plant generate profits then? They will inevitably have to close, and unfortunately for France, nuclear plants cost money even after they have closed.

No, it's correct, the total costs of the 2022 bailout was almost 10bn, and that was to get control over a company that had over 50bn in debt.

Furthermore it was discovered that the plants had neglected maintenance that had to be undertaken rightaway, that had nothing to do with the TRV.

Of course, the TRV didn't help, it caused a loss of 18bn in 2022 on top of everything else, but things were bad already.

So even if the mentioned 5 bn export now was pure profit - which is isn't - it would take 15-20 years to cover the bailout that has already taken place. The 100 billion of investments until 2035 is in addition to that.

And they will have to sell their power on markets that will increasingly often have free electricity from solar and wind. How do you pay 1000 educated plant operators when electricity prices are negative?

Unfortunately nuclear power isn't the kind of thing you can try and then walk away from when it turns out to be a bad idea. Which is likely the main reason it's still around.

That seems high to me. (sorry) ;-)

Seriously though, by the time I was 15 several of my classmates were drunk most weekends and smoked cigarettes regularly, but even decades later I have still never seen or heard of anyone I know smoking weed. That's why it sticks out so much to me.

If 1/6 is true it would be interesting to see how it has changed over the past say 20 years or so.

I think cigarettes and alcohol were established vices when media became a thing so media can be semi-excused from those. It would be interesting to know if the same is true for weed. Has it just gotten so common that media has to show it to be realistic, or did it get more common after media started to show it?

Cigarette smoking is an interesting counterexample, it has been extremely de-glamorized since the heydays and sales of cigarettes have halved since 2000.

That may be but I see no reason to encourage it either, which is what I feel is happening.

Wonder what is behind it, from my perspective it's quite remarkable.

Before hearing-tuned EQ became a thing, trying headphones was like trying food. No matter what someone else said it was no guarantee you'd like the sound. Conversely, you might find a cheap pair that sounded spectacular to you. The APM will sound very good to just about anyone, with the hearing test EQ applied.

I think every headphone maker (or better yet, DAC maker) should have this feature. Audiophiles are often old, a hearing test EQ can make them hear music like they're 20 again, and they'll pay for it.

I'm still learning how to make the most of it but my current state is one of total amazement. I can't believe how well this works now.

One game-changer has been custom agents and agent orchestration, where you let agents kick off other agents and each one is customized and keeps a memory log. This lets me make several 1000 loc features in large existing codebases without reaching context limits, and with documentation that lets me review the work with some confidence.

I have delivered several features in large legacy codebases that were implemented while I attended meetings. Agents have created greenfield dashboards, admin consoles and such from scratch that would have taken me days to do myself, during daily standups. If it turned out bad, I tweaked the request and made another attempt over lunch. Several useful tools have been made that save me hours per week but I never took the time to make myself.

For now, I love it. I do feel a bit of "mourning the craft" but love seeing things be realized in hours instead of days or weeks.

They don’t possess a universal, objectively valuable beauty that motivates the desire. If they did, fakes would be equally desireable and they are not.

My attempt to talk you out of it:

If nobody has a job then nobody can pay to make the robot and AI companies rich.

I think the magic happens at different levels of abstraction as time goes by, and it's easy to get stuck.

Us kids could fiddle with autoexec and config to get DOOM going, today's kids can fiddle with a yaml and have a MMORPG that handles 10 000 users from all over the world going.

It's not the same but I can easily imagine it feeling at least equally magical for a kid today.

Right, and at this point in the argument it’s also worth asking ”pay taxes with what?” which also quickly makes the idea of taxing valuations obviously absurd.

It would force any value creator to sell his creation, which basically destroys the mechanism from which all welfare for anyone in our societies currently originates.