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I don't know about that. Canada also tracked the UK more closely than the US and it was not involved in Brexit[1]. The US just did really well during this time.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2024...


If you "know a guy" you can even pass a driving test without ever getting behind the wheel of a car. Road licensing is in complete shambles in the last 10 years. A lot of "workarounds" and corruption.

> undeniable, massive productivity gains

How are they undeniable? They're very deniable. One example is the (seemingly) increasing maintenance costs for AI-generated code[1]. Another is the cost incurred by everybody reading AI slop instead of actual communication.

I don't have hard data as to whether these cancel out the benefits, but it's not as rosy as some seem to think.

[1] After years of people understanding that LOC is not only a poor productivity metric but also a negative indicator of code quality (shorter code for the same thing is better), we now have people touting how many LOC their LLM agent is generating. It's like everyone forgot what LOC actually represents and what it means for long term maintenance costs.


> They have the power to do it.

Do they? It seems like schools are pushing tech and "ed-tech" in schools pretty hard while being typically incompetent at actually controlling how students use it[1].

Some choice exerpts:

> Lisa Sunbury is a professor of early childhood education in Santa Cruz, California, and she had a child at Mission Hill Middle School. Her 7th grade daughter has a set of serious issues that require an IEP. Lisa did her part at home, enforcing the low-screen policy. One element of this plan was supposed to be minimal access to school devices and a clear requirement that the device be inaccessible outside of certain classes. This was all on doctor’s orders.

> Yet, Sunbury would regularly find her daughter awake at 3am, playing video games on the school Chromebook that she wasn’t supposed to have. She discovered a prohibited TikTok account, made on the school device, with dance videos posted from gym class using that same device.

> Beverly Hyde, a parent in Concord, North Carolina, was explicitly told that if her son wasn’t going to use his Chromebook, “he will just sit alone and spend the day doing nothing.”

> And this was no empty threat. Linda in Texas discovered that while her doctor-ordered opt-out request for her 2nd grader was technically being honored, the school wasn’t providing any alternative instruction. They were just “having her sit and draw while the other kids were online.”

[1] https://www.persuasion.community/p/inside-the-anti-tech-rebe...


The Saudis aren't "daring" with megaprojects. They're fucking[1] stupid[2]. Saying their megaprojects are "daring" is like saying I'm "daring" for claiming I'm going to build a catapult that will launch me to the moon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojena

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia


That’s what daring means. You try things that do not guarantee success. I remember a decade of people shitting on Dubai for all of the crazy projects it was building. It really paid off for them (pre Iran war). They made something out of nothing and still are. What’s stupid about a kilometer high tower? It’s fucking awesome.

Speaking of shitting on Dubai have they built any plumbing yet or are they still trucking their sewage out of town?

Still trucking but that’s another attempt at diminishing some pretty great achievements. Turning a sterile, hot piece of sand into a “destination” isn’t easy but they managed to do it. Do you bring up lead pipes and police violence every time someone talks about the US?

A comparison that only works if you say it and sink a few billion into foundations for said catapult.

I wonder how many times the UK and USA had to 'be stupid' to achieve some of their best achievements?

When curiosity gets replaced by bureaucracy and regs, you know a civ is dead..


Social media itself was the beginning of the end. Once we largely replaced a decentralized networks of blogs and websites with 4 giant sites containing content copied from the other 3 the jig was up. Many of the social media sites don't play nice with search engines and include features that auto-delete content or block linking to other websites as well.

I hate it and I hate that this is what became popular instead of what the internet was in its heyday. It's sad to see.


The "S" in AI stands for security.

Lol, not a chance. I'm sure whatever agreement you click through when you agree to this has all kinds of limitations on liability and an arbitration clause, so when they leave pictures of your house in an open S3 bucket you have no recourse to seek compensation. I'd rather let a stranger off the street live in my house - at least they have human emotions like shame.

There are plenty of examples of investors going off of vibes: Theranos, Juicero, WeWork. Though Anthropic would be a particularly egregious example if it does end up failing.

So in the span of 2 years we've gone from "AI will be our new God and solve all of our problems" to "AI will replace all your jobs and make SaaS companies obsolete", to now "AI will have some impact on the job market - might be positive, might be negative - who can say?"

I'm filing this right next to "blockchain for everything" and "we will all live in the metaverse" as evidence that most of these people are full of shit and don't understand much outside of their area of expertise (if they even understand that). I can't believe the level of credulous hype around this stuff. At least AI is a useful technology compared to what we saw with "The Metaverse".


" as evidence that most of these people are full of shit and don't understand much outside of their area of expertise "

Its interesting isnt it? That many humans dont seem to understand that unless you know a thing well, perhaps you should shut up and not comment.

How can Dario and Sam credibly say we are going to automate X, Y, Z job when they've never done it in their lives? Its like the idiots on here talking down on accountants - unless you've done the job and prove you understand the mechanics: shush. Dont talk about stuff you have zero clue about. I see this time and time again in posts related to finance - just shut up and stop creating noise.


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