the actual answer to this is accreditation. you will see safety standards rise across the board if engineers risk losing their license for shipping unsafe features.
one only needs to open a history book to see that this country used to be much, much more corrupt. while this country has problems, we are far from the first generation to face them.
Mind being more specific? You have a rapist, demented president who previously failed to coup his way back to power, who has gutted all institutions and is siphoning as much wealth as possible to the pockets of himself and his cronies. You have open financial corruption of the whole administration by industry leaders. You can now literally buy pardons and citizenship. The Supreme Court is a full-on political activist court, and created a whole concept of executive immunity that never existed before, to protect Trump. Every single week is a new scandal by this administration that should be career ending.
Please educate me, when was the country more corrupt?
i'm not sure why this is surprising. the socialist left, the coalition who care about equal access to good and services, is leading the charge against surveillance pricing.
> the socialist left would like nothing better than to have surveillance pricing, so long as it is deployed in the aid of poor people
nothing about this makes sense. i think you're making an argument that the socialist left wants poor people to afford more, and yes that's true. but comparing that to price gouging is where logic left the station.
You are underestimating how much they want to take from the rich to subsidize others. They want to do this so much that they just implemented an unconstitutional income tax against the rich. As long as it's only rich people getting price gauged I do not think they would lose any sleep.
literally all these things you've listed that you're working on would not be needed if AI didn't exist. which goes back to OP's point about spinning in circles.
I'm doing all this myself, and it's my first time getting a consumer facing product from zero to revenue generating on my own. I wouldn't bother doing this without AI, the project is too big. That being said, doing it with AI comes with a learning curve & many things I've never done before.
this overly cynical take is bad and wrong. c-suite does in fact care about customer satisfaction; it's why you get asked about it in surveys all the time. it's why a game will live or die by the review scores.
while it is true that c-suite behavior does not always align with improving customer satisfaction, that's usually because c-suite is dumb and bad at their jobs.
the enshittification we experience on social media, on the other hand, is due to the fact that we are not their customers. we are the product.
The vast majority of the Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel community has been begging Konami through surveys to remove cards like Maxx "C" from Master Duel's best of 1 format because it's the card that established Master Duel as the "coin flip format".
Guess how much Konami cared. Just because there's a survey doesn't mean that they're looking for any kind of feedback, but for very specific feedback. It's not Konami's balance team that tried to make for a fair game, but the C-suits that want to keep printing cards and keep power creeping, because the target isn't fairness or balance, but it's keeping the players who want to stay competitive swipe their credit cards more often.
i used to be in charge of these sorts of decisions for my team. the thing most people don't think about when it comes to rolling your own software is the upkeep. in other words, you don't _just_ pay for the software. you pay for someone to keep it running so you don't have to wake up at 2am to deal with angry customers.
if anything we've slowed down. i have no clue what the acceleration folks are talking about. we've been getting diminishing returns on models; the growth has been in usage and tools.
yeah, while gpt-6 is impressive, is it really as impressive as people thought it would be back in the times of gpt 3.5 or 4? let alone "omg ai acceleration agi" levels of impressive?
I dont think the comment is saying AI was able to replace the work people were doing but people are getting fired and their salary is being redirected into funding AI development.
Discounting the evidence of it being explicitly cited as a reason for layoffs and that its purpose to business is to replace human labor, there's no evidence that its replacing human labor. Got it.
In the case of Microsoft layoffs, that is how it is sold to the public, but the reality according to my former colleagues is that fewer people tasked with the same amount of overall work just end up grinding more. But the charade must be sustained, and so now "how much do you use AI" is one of the performance metrics pushed from the top. Nobody wants to be in the next layoff wave so everybody finds ways to meet those metrics, which then Satya goes and parades to the investors.
(I am an AI optimist, by the by. But that is not one of its success stories.)
There's strong sentiment bubbling that supports AI driven layoffs are going to happen or are happening[0].
I'll say its okay to be reserved on this, since we won't know until after the fact, but give it 6-12 months, then we'll know for sure. Until then, I see no reason not to believe there is a culture in the boardrooms forming around AI that is driving closed door conversations about reducing headcount specifically to be replaced by AI.
Some of the variables that made the Great Depression what it was included very high tariff rates and lack of quality federal oversight.
Today, we have the highest tariffs since right before the Great Depression, with the added bonus of economic uncertainty because our current tariff rates change on a near daily basis.
Add in meme stocks, AI bubble, crypto, attacks on the Federal Reserve’s independence, and a decreasing trust in federal economic data, and you can make the case that things could get pretty ugly.
Sure, you can make the case that things could get pretty ugly. You could even make the case that things could get about as bad as the Great Depression.
But for things to be much worse than the Great Depression, I think is an extraordinary claim. I see the ingredients for a Great Depression-scale event, but not for a much-worse-than-Great-Depression event.
How much worse could it be if the President was likely to fire the individual holding the position responsible for announcing "it's official, this is a recession"? And so on in that head-in-the-sand direction for as long as their loyalists are willing and able to defend the Presidents proclamations of fake news?
How long will the foot stay on the accelerator after (almost literally) everyone else knows we might be in a bit of strife here?
If the US can put off the depression for the next three years then it has a much better chance of working it's way out gracefully.
Certainly the current administration is taking actions that will worsen whatever happens.
The Great Depression lasted a decade and caused a 30% reduction in US GDP. That's really really bad.
I think people are just using "worse than the Great Depression" as a rhetorical device to mean "it would be bad", without out actually understanding what it would mean to be "worse than the Great Depression".
Federal debt before the great depression hovered around ~16%-17% of GDP and even in the throws of it got up to ~40% of GDP. Now it's at 120%.
If my claim of this all leading to a greater depression is extraordinary (to the point of being easily dismissed), then someone will have to walk me through the math.
I think that, just like in the 1920's, we've gorged ourselves on debt, speculation, and hubristic thinking and the humbling is coming at us like a freight train. Instead of producing value, we produced inordinate amounts of bullshit and now the bill is coming due.
> Federal debt before the great depression hovered around ~16%-17% of GDP and even in the throws of it got up to ~40% of GDP. Now it's at 120%.
> If my claim of this all leading to a greater depression is extraordinary (to the point of being easily dismissed), then someone will have to walk me through the math.
What I observe right now is that we are not, at this moment, in a depression despite federal debt being such a high percentage of GDP.
It is not at all clear to me that debt percent of GDP and badness of depression have a linear relationship.
The Great Depression lasted a decade and caused a 30% contraction of US GDP. You claim that this will be worse. Can you please walk me through the math?
> What I observe right now is that we are not, at this moment, in a depression despite federal debt being such a high percentage of GDP.
Because the "experts" keep redefining what it means to be in a recession, depression, etc. Not to mention the fake job numbers/revisions and the delusion that the value of the stock market is anything near representative of the actual book value of the companies it trades.
So, to that end, you're right. If we continue to delude ourselves indefinitely while the wealth gap continues to expand (and nobody does anything about it), then we won't have a book-defined depression (i.e., no sudden GDP collapse or soaring unemployment per se).
Instead, we'll have a slow but sure move to a full blown oligarchy—implemented by hoovering up hard assets (like real estate) with cheap money—thanks to low interest rates—while the middle-to-lower class are struggling to survive (and media narratives often reinforce the idea that everything is fine, even when data on wages, asset ownership, and real inflation tell a different story). Frankly, I expect this to be far more likely than anything based on the people involved and recent evidence of this very thing taking place [1].
> It is not at all clear to me that debt percent of GDP and badness of depression have a linear relationship.
I didn't say it had a linear relationship, but it is a bellweather of a country that doesn't have its finances under control (and is rapidly approaching an inability to service its debt). Eventually, you run out of the capital (in this case, either monetary or geopolitical) to simultaneously service the debt—which we're on track to do by about ~2030—and stimulate growth.
Considering how embedded the USD is in global economics, if the above oligarchy scenario doesn't take place, the only thing that could happen is a global depression (because the thing propping up the whole system globally—dollar hegemony—has just collapsed/hyperinflated—imagine Venezuela, but globally).
Put simply: if debt outpaces revenue, interest spirals, and trust in the dollar fades, then whether we call it a "depression" (on paper) or not, the outcome is the same: widespread economic pain, asset consolidation, and long-term instability.
Sure, I'm willing to agree that high and expanding levels of national debt can lead to economic crisis.
I still don't see why it would be worse than the Great Depression.
The national debt being low during the Depression and high now doesn't seem relevant. The national debt was not a primary causative agent of the Great Depression, we're saying that it will be a primary causative agent of this one, so why would a Depression kicked off by national debt be worse than the one kicked off earlier by not-national-debt?
That said:
> > What I observe right now is that we are not, at this moment, in a depression despite federal debt being such a high percentage of GDP.
> Because the "experts" keep redefining what it means to be in a recession, depression, etc.
If you are claiming "actually we're totally in a depression right now but actually no because we're redefined our way out of it", now that is an extraordinary claim. "Depression" means something more than "bad economy vibes".
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