I don’t think they were suggesting that the therapist was reinforcing any of this, just that the therapist was horrified by what they went through.

I’m directing my criticism specifically on the technological advancement which is devoid of communal spirit, not on all technological advancement categorically.

Crediting human achievement to technological advancement is a mistake in my opinion. Technological advancement is not inherently good or bad. Communal spirit is what determines whether technology yields positive or negative outcomes. That’s the real ingredient behind everything humans have achieved throughout history.

Sadly techno-optimism has become a prevailing mindset in today’s world where people and institutions don’t want to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions because of belief that as-yet-unknown technological advancement will bail us out in the future, even when there’s no evidence that it will even be physically possible.

But what I said is that your view is a sad one, not an incorrect one. The truth is, technological advancement may truly end up being the defining characteristic of humanity. After all, when we think about extinct species, we tend to associate them most strongly with what made them extinct. Just as we associate the dinosaurs most strongly with a meteor, maybe an outside observer will some day associate humanity most strongly with the technology that sent us out in a blaze of glory.

What a sad view of humanity to think that our one defining characteristic should be pursuit of technology rather than the ability to intelligently collaborate and thereby form communities with a shared purpose.

I can assure you that the success of human survival throughout the history of our species has had far more to do with community and resourcefulness than with technological advancement. In fact it should be clear by now technological advancement devoid of communal spirit will be the very thing that brings an untimely end to our entire species. Our technology is destroying the climate we depend on and depleting the soil that we need for growing food, to say nothing of the nuclear bombs that could wipe us out with the wrong individuals in positions of power.

If they ever go public then yes, enshittification is guaranteed. As long as they remain a privately held company, there’s a chance they can hold the enshittification at bay.

I’m not trying to shill for Google but I really think it would be a mistake to break up Google without breaking up Microsoft simultaneously if not first. If they actually manage to crack open Google’s search and browser monopoly, who do they really think is going to start filling in that void? Local mom and pop search engines…? No it’s primarily going to be Microsoft with Bing and Edge, and I’m absolutely certain that whatever people don’t like about Google having its monopolies is going to be orders of magnitude worse if Microsoft gains ground there.

I’m not convinced he really believes that OpenAI is going to roll out AGI in the next ten years, but I’m completely sure he’s determined that it’s a good marketing strategy to make people believe that he believes it.

Calculus was invented in the late 1600s, almost 2000 years after the Roman aqueducts were built. The Roman engineer would know some geometry, but certainly not calculus.

Google is an enormous company which operates flatter than you’d expect for an organization of its size. It’s entirely possible that someone from Google was involved in organizing this (i.e. booking the venue) without having buy-in from leadership. Once leadership became aware after being asked about it, they may have shut the whole thing down because they knew the optics would be bad.

Speaking as an annoying Rust user, you’re being bigoted. I’m annoying, but the vast majority of Rust users are normal people who you wouldn’t even know are using Rust.

Don’t lump all the others in with me, they don’t deserve that.

How exactly is an individual supposed to determine which cops will be good and which will abuse their power?

Just as we can’t make a general statement that all cops are definitely bad, you can’t make a general statement that all cops in any particular country or town will be good.

From a basic risk management viewpoint, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to accept the risk that any given cop won’t abuse their position, even if we were willing to accept that very few would actually do so.

Cops have an extremely privileged status in society and the amount of damage that a bad one can do to an individual - on purpose or even by accident - is incalculable, including setting up an innocent person for capital punishment as we’re seeing unfold in Missouri right now.

You’d be amazed at how resistant most people are to anything that feels unfamiliar, even if it’s good for them. Coal and oil jobs are familiar, green jobs are not.

It should be as simple as you’re suggesting, but sadly it isn’t.

Valid questions. Do we have firm answers to any of them? And absent firm answers, what kind of risks to the safety of the general public are we willing to accept in service of ideological values?

Yeah… I’m all for compassion and understanding, but if someone is missing the voice in their head that says “Hey, we shouldn’t be killing people” then their circuitry is broken, no matter what age they are or what their circumstances are. And that broken circuitry poses a real and present danger to everyone in that person’s orbit.

I don’t support punitive incarceration, but the general public has the right to exist with a reasonable degree of certainty that they’re not likely to encounter a cold blooded murderer on any given day, and part of ensuring that is to incarcerate people who are known to kill others, at least until such a time that we can have a high degree of confidence that they won’t be doing that again.

The person being a child doesn’t really change that part of the social contract. I promise you won’t be any less upset if someone you love is murdered by a child than by an adult.

One thing I’ve noticed among friends and family, who lean quite left compared to the general public and would be generally supportive of progressive policies, is that there’s a belief that progressive policies are unpopular outside of our circle and therefore in the primary they must vote for a candidate who triangulates in order appeal to the majority in the general election. Because a centrist from the Democratic Party is better than anything we can hope for from the Republican Party.

I try to show them statistics that progressive policies are broadly popular across both parties as long as they are not presented with labels of “socialism” or “progressivism” but the reality that we all need to contend with is that we cannot easily escape the unfair baggage that these labels carry in our society where the big media cartel controls the narrative.

I think if we got rid of FPTP and got rid of primaries we’d see an enormous swing in favor progressive candidates. In my mind that electoral reform is the key thing to pursue. Well that and literally anything related to mitigating the climate crisis because that one really can’t wait.

I assume he thinks this will win over more Gen Z than it will lose him Boomers, and no one will ever hold him to this promise anyway.

Countries ranked in descending order by number of school shootings from 2009-2018:

• United States: 288
• Mexico: 8
• South Africa: 6
• Afghanistan: 3
• Brazil, Canada, France: 2
• Azerbaijan, China, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Kenya, Russia, Turkey: 1

One of these is not like the others. This isn’t exactly a fact of life in other parts of the world.

Source

People just don’t want to believe that China can win at capitalism because it undermines all their internal narratives around the innovation power of liberalism. I say this as someone who does not personally like China and its authoritarianism.

The fact of the matter is with a population of nearly 1.5 billion people, you’re statistically guaranteed to have enormous pools of talent to draw on. Even a relatively modest per capita investment in education, focused on key objectives and funneled into the portion of the talent pool that they’ve managed to identify, will be able to yield massive innovation.

A lot of people will suffer under this authoritarianism. The people from these talent pools will be exploited and burnt out at a young age. This is already happening in China. But as a nation, it will be able to position itself extremely well technologically and economically, and this is a reality the rest of the world needs to be prepared to deal with.

Same energy

Which is exactly the position that the Rust for Linux devs have understood and accepted for themselves, and yet they still get yelled at (literally, in public, on recordings) by C Linux devs for existing.

Oh and they get snidely told that introducing the Rust language must be a mistake because suggestions to introduce other languages to the kernel turned out to be mistakes and obviously Rust is the same as all those other languages according to C developers who, by their own admission, have never used or learned anything about Rust beyond a superficial glance at some of its syntax (again this was recorded from a public event).

This is very insulting, Dr. Doom is an intelligent and effective ruler, please do not draw such an unfair comparison between him and Musk. Fictional character feelings matter.