Then don‘t. My boss didn’t require me to put a minimum of 15 pieces of flair in my status, and personally I just put blur on my background... scrap that, I didn’t turn on my camera at all and just used my standard avatar (which I consider fun in fact).

Because it turns out, the type who don’t want fun little differences are exactly the types who will gladly go on a business trip to Phoenix Arizona and stay at a Marriott hotel.

I know many democracies around the world are in critical failure modes at the moment (particularly in the USA). But there is still hope. With enough pressure democracy can be reformed.

What will happen with this taxation is that if everybody makes the same income, then everybody pays 50% in tax. If some rich dude is making a lot more money then everybody else, they will lower the tax for everybody else while paying a lot more them selves. At some point (say 3 standard deviations above the mean) you end up getting less after taxes then had your income been lower (say 2 SD above), in other words, the limit is 100% tax for extremely high incomes (and 0% for extremely low incomes). That is, I favor a system that has maximum income, and you are actively punished for making more.

Because it is undemocratic, ripe for corruption and abuse, will never work in practice (as the rich will inevitably find ways to game the system). What you are describing is basically just aristocracy, where the rich get to decide what is best for the rest of us.

Personally I wager society would be better if the excess wealth of billionaires was simply deleted, or burned. It would be better yet if that wealth was used in our shared funds to build common infrastructure and services. Leaving such wealth in such few hands is really the worst you could possibly do for society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...

More good works from the last 10 years includes .at(), nullish chaining, BigInt etc.

But most of what you mentioned is closing in on 10 years in the standard (Async/Await is from 2017) meaning the bulk of the work done is from over 10 years ago.

The failure of AbortSignal is exactly the kind of failure TC39 has been doing in bulk lately. I have been following the proposal to add Observables to the language, which is a stage 1 proposal (and has been for over 10 years!!!). There were talks 5 years ago (!) to align the API with AbortSignal[1] which I think really exemplifies the inability for TC39 to reach a workable decision (at least as it operates now).

Another example I like to bring up are the failure of the pipeline operator[2], which was advanced to stage-2 four years ago and has been in hiatus ever since with very little work to show for it. After years of deliberation very controversal version of the operator with a massive community backlash. Before they advanced it it was one of the more popular proposals, now, not so much, and personally I sense any enthusiasm for this feature has pretty much vanished. In other words I think they took half a decade to make the obviously wrong decision, and have since given up.

From the failure of the pipeline operator followed a bunch of half-measures such as array grouping, and iterator helpers etc. which could have easily been implemented in userland libraries if the more functional version of the pipeline operator would have advanced.

1: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-observable/issues/209

2: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline-operator

The discussion on HN simply reflects the rhetoric which comes from NASA.

For example I can imagine a young Malthus debating with the elderly Adam Smith, and Smith saying something like: “When societies open up their markets, those big bulk carrying cargo ships will be able to ship the required food to the food scarce areas. And when they do, they will enrich them selves as well as the farmers whom they buy the crops from, as the price of the grain will be much higher in these over-populated regions”.

The young Malthus, however, is not convinced and will reply: „Then the population will still grow, both in that ‘new market’ (as you call it), and among the farmers whom acquire that new wealth; and eventually those farmers will make wars or famine with the neighbors and those merchants over the scars resources. Societal collapse is inevitable.“

The difference is in the authorship. Actual work and skill goes into CGI, and people generally notice bad CGI, and it generally affects how you judge the art. Sometimes CGI is actually part of the art and you are supposed to notice it, and it is still good (think how Cher use Autotune in Do You Believe). There is no such equivalence with AI.

To further elaborate. Bad CGI is often (but not always) used as a cost-cutting means. Directors (or producers encourage directors to) use it when they want to save money on practical effects or even cover up mistakes that happened during shooting and want to avoid an expensive re-shoot. This can work OK if used sparingly and carefully, however if this is done a lot and without the needed care, you will notice it, and you will judge the work from it. AI content is kind of like that, except that is kind of all what AI is. The other couldn’t be bothered to do the work and just prompted an AI to do it for them.

To summarize: AI is not like CGI in general, it is much closer to a strict subset of CGI which only includes bad CGI.

I kind of like the story of how Malthus had his theory of societal collapse because he couldn’t imagine a better system then mercantilism. That societies would rather collapse then to end their colonial monopolies.

I see a similar theory today with around depopulation, that as society gets older and relatively fewer working age people there are, that society would rather collapse then we find a better system then Capitalism.