> Sounds like total bullshit.

You're right. It more like an avg of 118 years (median 73), not 200, depending on what you mean by "greatest" ofc. The Ancient Romans, US, and Dutch pulling that average up and 1/3 of historically modern continuing democracies having a short lifespan being founded around WW2, pulling it down.

The Roman Empire was not stable for an uninterrupted period of time. It's conceptually called a single state for simplicity, because such a large period of time and area of land naturally had instability (less than current Europe, granted). The Roman Empire democratic government lasted about 487 years before falling into autocratic rule.

> There does not exist a set of rules that make a completely safe and useful robot.

That was not demonstrated. We have safe and useful robots, for some values of 'safe' and 'useful', today. Again, most of the robots in the stories are not thrown (or planned to be thrown) in the metaphorical trash heap.

Don't always work in all scenarios, was the takeaway.

There's a metric ton of salt to be taken with the mental concepts and possible interpretations of such "laws".

Largely, they do work in the stories, despite the inherent ambiguity.

Humans have cognitive limits. Humans hold a specific slice of all knowledge at a time and necessarily limits what correlations can be leveraged. This is similar to "context windows" in modern AI. Human minds are wildly variable in efficiency. AI is has constant inefficiency, largely controlled by the speed of light, physical RAM, and processing power, with superior (no cost) "thought" context switching. The AI also has superior accuracy without the need for "concentration" because the AI is processing on a Turing machine with the limited operations that it's superior at in terms of time and energy - eg find an element in a list of 1 million elements.

9 out of 10 I ask say it's about reliable delivery (not necessarily next day). Most people order things because they need them and have read the reviews, not because they are speculating at something they may need or are ok with getting something else. Clothing being a notable exception, unpredictably sized and variable quality, which nobody is happy about.

ie Blizzard's CWA - it's scary to think about for many workers, so most people didn't bother to look up the details.

> There was one year I received 3 promotions at Travelocity and nearly doubled my compensation. I was hired as a web designer and after 3 months was involuntarily reassigned to a developer role and told to “figure it out”.

This is obviously an aberration where you are doing exactly what you claimed the gp did.

Moving jobs is the single best way to get a raise and has been for decades. Leveraging the experience at a company (which is relatively static) for a higher wage at another where that new and different experience has more value.

Notably, how company leadership changes are less likely to be from internal candidates than a transplant from another company.

This is the paragraph in the entirety. While previous sections referred to “the Elons and Sams of the world”, this section that was specifically called out:

> The connection made to climate change in the latter part of the article is new to me, and would be interesting if true. However, I wish the author would cite supporting evidence for their conclusions.

Does not refer to them explicitly (many of the very same), although it could be believed that the second clause of the first sentence refers to Sam, et al. Elon doesn't fit as he has no fiduciary duty nor has he called for slowdown, nor are there "many" in this demographic, which is a sign that this is more stream of thought. I believe the narrative only fits if you consider this to be a tangent about political sociopaths that was muddled by a very human leading thought intruding (from previous paragraphs), on an otherwise straightforward observation.

It makes no sense in the context of billionaires, as they were not generally driving "us" toward climate destruction prior to the AI boom.

He is not usually associated with MAGA. The reference was not directed at the heads of the most well know tech companies, despite the quote about "Elons and Sams". This wouldn't make sense in context. It was a reference to the ruling political regime.

> [Your train] never comes on time. Fuel is more expensive. The roads are still congested with traffic. Your kids are (probably) doing worse at school. Food costs more. Houses cost more. Rent is higher. Buying a computer or a PS5 is more expensive. Politics is still full of mentally unstable people. The environment is getting worse. You will still die of heart disease or cancer. Food quality is worse. Your kids can't find work. Wealth inequality is accelerating.

None of this has to do with AI.

> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using), and AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)

Plain wrong on both counts.

> Imagine what a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" will be able to do Apparently...nothing.

Nonsequitor, probably based on a personal beef. Datacenters, at best, are understood to be for hosting more AI - not for people to somehow live in as an arcology of discovery.

> interesting if true.

Not sure what you mean by this. This is obviously about MAGA and other allied political forces in the US, at the very least. I wouldn't call it interesting to document the recent observed behavior. It's been evident through journalistic analysis of public statements, policy, and investment for most of the year.

It is. This is a misunderstanding of how justice works. People (judges, juries, et al) determine the impact of situations, not machines following abstract rules.

I'm not sure this makes sense, since there is no getting away from "nonsense work", which is shorthand for low value return on time and cognitive overhead.

I understood the post to mean something different...with my own added context.

The digital age has increased the complexity of life and various processes by orders of magnitude. Programming is at the forefront, having had to deal with implementation for decades. The complexity necessarily grows every day, as the easiest problems are solved first, before tackling more nuanced or difficult ones (very different). Understanding how to identify these, track the tradeoffs, and choose specialized approaches, grows in every vertical. There are many subjects that a person can study for their entire life and not fully comprehend the totality. We have been living in a time where specialists must be increasingly specialized, for decades, due to the breadth of human knowledge and social progress.

One of the best ways to deal with this complexity, has been to be smarter. Have a better memory. Have high cognitive function. This leaves an ever-growing amount of the population in uncertainty. Families all have (or had) a "smart" resource they tapped to answer the tough questions and find paths through seemingly-intractable legalities, kafka-esque bureaucracy, medical emergency, financial advice, et al. AI has given many of the less-gifted (the majority of the population) a "wise" resource that seems to be informed enough to provide solutions and even offer opinions that can be reasoned, for some value of "reason". AI has also granted easily accessible automation. This will make the situation worse. A form of specialized logical processor would have been necessary at some point (mentat or AI). It came earlier than many expected, but this is the form and it's here now.

This feels like a disingenuous question. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that claiming X isn't toxic, when you know that it is dangerous. Public health, frequency, scale of impact (more often, who is impacted that has resources to compete in court) et al are all considerations.

Humans act in their own self interest. Relying purely on individual self interest is a degenerate approach in public health issues. One of the many purposes of government, is to act in the collective interest. eg Typhoid Mary

I also keep coming across videos of people talking about quitting Warhammer 40k. This doesn't mean there's a crisis, as much as a self-reinforcing pattern of interest.

My employer retains thousands of devs. I have a handful of software developer friends outside of work. These people are all happy (not to the same degree or the same usage patterns ofc) with the improvements to quality and process that AI has actively sourced or helped produce.

I don't understand where all these AI burnouts are coming from, but it's a minority. It's likely less than ~30% efficiency haircut for the industry - so there's likely to be no additional impact if you're unhappy.

This is far from the implication that all Software Developers are not okay.

American Exceptionalism.

Failure of enforcement, is not a signal that US politics are broken, as much as a niche inconsistency. There's plenty of enforcement that is not occurring today, due to pure corruption. The US electorate has failed to hold politicians accountable for over 150 years. Again, this is largely because of a 2 party system that only selects for oligarch-directed interests. Most of it (like how immigration law is enforced) is performative. This administration has laid it bare.

I'm not willing to play word games to indulge in a niche demographic's incessant miscategorization of a profession.