It seems like at every technological step, we're sold the dream and delivered the meme. We always end up with the worst possible combination of players, ideas and outcomes; with the promise of what the said technology delivers in terms of additional freedom or free time never realised. How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?
It's "socializing the losses and privatizing the gains"… but now alarmingly supercharged well beyond purely financial realms, and into really basic and fundamental matters of individual physical autonomy and liberty.
> How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?
Having any kind of agency in those things would be a start.
If <FAANG bigcorp of your choice> announces with great fanfare "We're building this totally awesome new technology that will make everything better! And the best thing? You won't have to do anything, we will auto-update all your devices/accounts/etc with it for free! Trust us!", then whether you personally believe their enthusiastic predictions or not doesn't really matter a lot - you will get it anyway, unless you spend a lot of energy to deliberately avoid the new technology.
I felt compelled to write this email to 1password today:
Dear 1password,
Please stop trying to "innovate". I really like your password manager. That's all I want. I don't want "automatic watchtower AI phishing prevention" I just want a password manager that works across my devices. Make it simple, make it secure, and don't change it. You have a great product. Adding more features will only make it worse. If you keep this bullshit up I will churn.
From my understanding, we are pretty close to a Dystopian world where all elites of a certain group collaborate to run a Super Leviathan. We still gotta choose our flavors, which may not be feasible in maybe 5-10 years when those leviathans clash into each other.
Likewise, thank you for the recommendation. I obviously haven't read Goliath's Curse yet, but it seems like Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) might also be interesting for the same readers.
It's not like this is surprising, there have been plenty of sci-fi books/movies that have predicted this very thing. How many movies have the haves lived above ground/off planet, while the have nots have lived underground or stuck on a apocalyptic planet.
This is just furthering the previous history. Currently, the lords have just been able to keep the serfs appeased to a longer extent. Every time in history or in sci-fi, the serfs reach a breaking point and rise up.
You seem very confident. This seems to imply you feel the haves will know when to leave enough on the table for the have nots to still feel like they are a part of the haves. I'm not so confident in that.
People in technologically advanced societies have more than enough & the people who are not as advanced can not do anything that will have any effect on the people who own the fighter jets, missiles, robot factories, & "internet" satellites. The current system has no historical precedent. It is very close to an almost perfect panopticon w/ an associated media & police apparatus to keep everyone docile & complacent. Like I said, this time is different.
Far more likely is that we head back to a feudal era where data mining tech is used to identify and eliminate potential rabble-rousers. Once enough production is automated, all remaining have-nots are exterminated.
The weak link is that for “the haves” to have, the “have -nots” are needed. To have or to not is just a comparison, a millionaire needs the poor to be rich and to feel special otherwise when everyone is special nobody is.
It will instead eventually fall apart in more thoroughly destructive ways. But not until it does a possibly-unrecoverably (at least in the medium term) amount of damage to civilization, humanity, and life on Earth first.
It's already crumbling. That's why we have AI-powered fascism in the first place. Society destabilizes and a significant fraction of the population says "perhaps authoritarianism is a good thing." It's never worth it, though.
The story here is that a FedRAMP-authorized system had 53MB of Vite dev source maps exposed on a production government endpoint. That's not "sold the dream, delivered the meme," that's a specific auditable compliance failure. Meanwhile a fintech engineer explaining that this is all standard legally-mandated KYC infrastructure got flagged to death. The interesting question isn't whether technology betrays us, it's why US law requires this surveillance apparatus in the first place and why the security assessment apparently missed checking for /vite-dev/ on a government system.
Also every technological step? Ever? Really? This wouldn't happen to be typed on a computer from a climate-controlled room on a nice global network or anything?
Except it wasn't a production endpoint and there's no actual security risk in having source maps available. It's more annoying to read source code that has been minified, but if a security professional tells you that minifying source code is something that increases security, you should be wondering what other bullshit they've pedaled you.
I'm not a fan of persona and have gone out of my way to not provide my details to them even before this, and I really dislike Thiel, but... let's be honest about the stuff we're complaining about.
I think that's a natural outcome of a model where sociopaths climb to the top, with a layer of sycophants beneath them that shield normal workers from perceiving the amount of depravity going on at the top which would make them unable to continue and tank the business. AI might remove the reliance on regular folks and give sociopaths direct execution of all ideas they have without any moral opposition, and that would explain a lot of the rush for AI everywhere we see nowadays.
This is the part that doesn't get enough attention. The historical check on concentrated power wasn't just democracy or law — it was that executing any large-scale agenda required thousands of people who could refuse, drag their feet, or leak. AI doesn't just automate tasks — it removes the human friction that was always an informal veto on the worst ideas.
The surveillance apparatus isn't new. What's new is that you need fewer people with moral objections in the loop to operate it.
I would be careful with this kind of reasoning, because it suggests corruption within a corporate model is inevitable, giving it implicit permission to continue existing. It's not inevitable.
I would suggest it is inevitable when the goal is to grow without end. The sociopaths buy the shares and push the businesses to ether become "evil" or get pushed out and taken over. Its what the current models leads to when there are no checks and balances.
Pursuing growth at all costs is inevitable though. If you don't continue to grow, you get superseded by entities that do. Goes for both countries and companies.
Communist countries like the Soviet Union and China have even had the explicit goal of outgrowing the US.
Yes. Local government has long failed to focus on its core mandate of base infrastructure, instead opting for vanity and ego projects like stadiums and convention centers.
Wellington in particular has had a string of divisive mayors. Simply google the previous Mayor "Tory Whanau" for a never-ending list of controversy, incompetence and failure.
Previous socialist central government attempted to strip assets off the regional bodies and centralize them under a common scheme. Would have been successful, however a lot of race-based ideology was peripherally injected into the process which gave asset management an unaccountable and ultimately undemocratic race-based overlay which basically killed the idea (central govt were voted out).
Central Government also has a fairly miserable history of asset management before privatisation. It's a multi-decade process of slow erosion and precendent.
The intrusion of government and intrusion of identity politics seems to be the core issue. Failure to provide core services, failure to be competent but the conversation is almost always re-directed towards "racism" and identity as the root attributes. We had no trouble producing high quality functional and well managed assets before the arrival of modern identity politics. Bait and switch IMO.
There's a commercial product available from 6WIND that makes this much more supportable for mission-critical networks. It leverages DPDK and delivers excellent performance at scale.
Well, somebody has to go to jail if catastrophic decisions are made and you can't jail AI. We very often see CEOs being jailed in the real world, so the pay is actually a very fair compensation for the risk.
16GB is _not_ sufficient if you have Jellyfin or Immich or similar and a lot of media you want to scroll through quickly; I've found I need a lot of ZFS cache for that to be as responsive as I want, even with SSD storage.
Wonder when the TrumpDrone "made in america" will be announce. Just like the TrumpPhone, no doubt it'll end up being made in China. The jokes really do write themselves.
When you look at the actual list of those 4, it's not as hard to understand any more.
It's Firefox, Dillo, Links2 and Netsurf GTK :)
Dillo is something I'd love to daily drive like I did 20 years ago, but it would just fail on most modern websites. But it's what, 2MB in total (binary+libraries)?
Links2 is text terminal oriented. No modern browser can do that natively at all. All competition is even smaller (w3m, lynx). Plus links2 can run in graphics mode, even on a framebuffer, so you can run it without X server at all.
So Fx is the only "general purpose" browser on that list, but is just too big for old hardware.
I find it disturbing how long people wait to accept basic truths, as if they need permission to think or believe a particular outcome will occur.
It was quite obvious that AI was hype from the get-go. An expensive solution looking for a problem.
The cost of hardware. The impact on hardware and supply chains. The impact to electricity prices and the need to scale up grid and generation capacity. The overall cost to society and impact on the economy. And that's without considering the basic philosophical questions "what is cognition?" and "do we understand the preconditions for it?"
All I know is that the consumer and general voting population loose no matter the outcome. The oligarchs, banking, government and tech-lords will be protected. We will pay the price whether it succeeds or fails.
My personal experience of AI has been poor. Hallucinations, huge inconsistencies in results.
If your day job exists within an arbitrary non-productive linguistic domain, great tool. Image and video generation? Meh. Statistical and data-set analysis. Average.
Just like .com bust from companies going online, there is hype, but there is also real value.
Even slow non-tech legacy industry companies are deploying chatbots across every department - HR, operations, IT, customer support. All leadership are already planning to cut 50 - 90% of staff from most departments over next decade. It matters, because these initiatives are receiving internal funding which will precipitate out to AI companies to deploy this tech and to scale it.
The "legacy" industry companies are not immune from hype. Some of those AI initiatives will provide some value, but most of them seem like complete flops. Trying to deploy a solution without an idea of what the problem or product is yet.
Well, it's still powered by the old codebase doing slot-filling named entity/intent detection that will route you to safari the moment it gets stuck ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
no, it's very useful for setting timers and for setting garbled reminders for a soon enough time that I'll remember what I actually meant rather than being confused by whatever it spewed out instead!
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