The point is people on HN missed the potential of Dropbox because for them it was a problem they already had a half solution for. For regular people who don’t know what an rsync is, Dropbox seemed like magic.

The moral of the story is that if a solution is only available to a technicaly savvy minority, the market opportunity is still wide open.

In general just taxing the winners (wealthy) period is well tolerated politcally, but it also requires a goverment that's somewhat fiscally responsible and not spending $800B a year on their military instead of social programs. The US hasn't had a fiscally responsible government since Clinton, and the pigeons are currently coming home to roost in the form of inflation and loss of confidence in the US dollar as the reserve currency.

In Northern Europe it’s handled quite well. In the U.S. it’s handled with a “callous lack of empathy” as you phrased it.

My point is disruption is the engine of progress, but it also causes temporary pain (that might not be temporary on the scale of human lifetimes.) It’s the wrong reaction to want to stop or slow progress. You can actually prove that through the lens of game theory and the fact that we have multiple human societies. The right thing to do is ensure your society doesn’t leave the losers of that process behind.

It’s still a good thing for society - the alternative is halting or slowing progress.

A valid question is are there inventions for which this would not be true? I think yes for general AI, but also yes for people who are unable to migrate between a job lost and any of the new jobs created due to lack of education or willingness to reinvent themselves or relocate to where the new jobs are. Innovation can definitely create winners and losers. That’s bad for the losers, but not necessarily for society as a whole. Unless so many losers are created that they rise up and overthrow the system. That’s a real long tail risk if the pace of change sufficiently outpaces our ability to adapt to it.

IQ is a proxy for intelligence. People often use them interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Your statement is more valid for intelligence than IQ.

Something like https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck but with some intelligence instead of hard-coded rules.

That's somewhat problematic if you have secrets in there, but you could just not use it if you know you have sensitive things in your shell history. You still need to be aware of that without ChatGPT since most systems save your shell history to the file system where it could remain accessible for much longer than you'd think. IIRC they don't use things from the API for training, but I wouldn't depend on that being safe.

Same problem when coding shell scripts. It’s like they tried to invent the hardest to remember language. I often use python instead of bash just because I can remember it and read it.

Still, when you look at the statistics, any urban area in the U.S. is more dangerous than Australian wildlife. Both the roads and the people.

Edit: downvoter doesn’t grok math

You are not only more likely to be attacked by a human in New York than the wildlife in Australia, you’re more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker than a critter in Oz.

Until you hit all the quantum weirdness and then it’s all wave functions and probabilities. That maybe comes out of something simple as well.

I’m honestly baffled by your comment.

Here's the results of the first large randomized clinical trial - the gold standard in medicine. The study involved over 80,000 participants in Nordic countries.

"colonoscopy reduced cancer incidence but not death"

https://www.statnews.com/2022/10/09/in-gold-standard-trial-c...