Not to mention that stock holders are hardly guaranteed to be made whole if the company crashes hard enough to need a bailout.

The earlier web era felt like this unimaginable realm of freedom and exploration to me. I stumbled on countless novel sites that were interesting, helpful, and/or entertaining. That content has decreased by orders of magnitude since then. These days most searches return a full page of SEO slop that all summarize (badly) the same source from years before. There's usually zero new information, personal touches, or community attached.

Same for software for that matter. GenAI has killed my interest in releasing web apps outside of work. Before I used to find value in putting stuff on the web for others to find and enjoy, and it sparked some interesting interaction with other people. Now anything I publish will mostly be consumed by bots and thrown into an AI blender that completely divorces it from the creator.

My own general thoughts are that AI is extremely useful in discrete cases, will cause an immense amount of cultural and societal harm overall, and there's no clear political path to a healthier development trajectory. I don't think that's an uncommon stance, but people espousing something like that get a lot of hate in a lot of discussions.

I can easily imagine an arms control style series of agreements between the handful of leading AI companies and countries which are imperfect but still quite effective at mitigating the harms without stifling the upsides, but it seems clear that the current leading actors in this space have zero interest in that.

Similar to how cops getting a warrant and tapping a single person's phone is different from the government spying on all citizens at all times.

Long term, the goal for this buildout is to drive millions of people out of their livelihood. But maybe a rogue AI will go nuts before then and become even more catastrophic.

So people are looking around, seeing their physical space being worsened in order to make their digital lives worse, with the possibility of much more misery to come. No kidding they aren't a fan.

It's interesting that the companies building these haven't even tried to smooth over the public relations until recently. I get it, this is all terribly exciting for VCs and a subset of techies, but their inability to even comprehend the objections shows what an extreme bubble they are in. The rest of the country gets a vote, and snidely dismissing everyone else as a knee jerk NIMBY, or Chinese shill, or illogical moron isn't going to convince anyone.

I've seen Walmart and similar companies criticized countless times for driving local shops out of business. It has been a common attack for decades, IME.

This doesn't mean the big corporate option is always inherently bad, but it's weird to me that their defenders often attack the very notion that there could be tradeoffs and downsides.

This is simply wrong in a lot of cases. Tech companies absolutely use their immense wealth and influence to alter public policy and spending. Regulation and budget decisions happen all the time to benefit a specific company or industry, at the expense of the overall public. Tech is hardly alone in this, but that industry has more money and mind share than most, and correspondingly more ability to change policies to their benefit.

The more money and hype a Disability Dongle company gets, the more interest and ability it will have to degrade less shiny but more effective alternatives.

The answer is that their eggs are extremely lightweight, so much so that wind can carry them long distances. Their entire life cycle is extremely accelerated. Once water soaks the eggs the critters can hatch, develop, and lay new eggs in a matter of days. The newly laid eggs have a tiny chance of reaching a new seasonal pool area.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49086448

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Previous job performance isn't that reliable since countless CEOs have been great at one company in terms of raising stock price/revenue/profit/whatever, and then flamed out at a future company. How does one know in advance that one CEO will increase revenue by a few percent more than another, and justify such an expensive compensation package?

It will take some time to figure out the most effective methods and there will be some slow boiling of the frog so the users/products don't get too annoyed about it, but this is where things are inevitably heading.

The reality is that demand is always going to far outstrip supply in certain areas. You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso, even if you raze the city to the ground and replace it with some yimby paradise that houses 25% more people. The extra supply might lower costs to some degree in the short term but the induced demand will ensure they stay above what someone on an average salary can afford. Everyone seems to understand this when the topic is freeway expansion, but not with housing.

The actual solution for housing costs is a lot more complicated and multi-pronged, but that doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker. There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at, so it gets dismissed; and suggesting someone move there is practically treated as a human rights abuse.

Dramatically increasing housing density does have adverse affects for existing residents. It's fine to say the tradeoffs are worth it, I'm not saying it's never the answer, but even acknowledging that it's a tradeoff usually gets met with dismissive insults from the yimby crowd.