> [E]specially Americans (I am one) have this weird belief that violence never has any place, ever, at any time.
So why isn't there a huge opposition in the USA against the wars that the USA started (currently: Iran; before: Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, ...).
The only famous exception of cultural impact I am aware of where there was a huge opposition against war in the USA was the Vietnam war.
I think Americans (and probably humans in general) have a distaste for local violence. Violence afar doesn't tickle the brain in the same way.
My ignorant take:
Media brought the horror of US casualties in Vietnam home in a mass and immediate way that didn't exist in prior conflicts. The novelty of that media combined with the casualty rates drove unpopularity. It made the violence feel more real.
Even if casualty rates in post-Vietnam conflicts were higher I'm not sure we'd see negative sentiment because media coverage of violence is so normalized now. Exposure to violence in media is no longer novel.
> Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast Simone Biles or out-skate Surya Bonaly.
Big sports events are the "circenses" part of "panem et circenses" [1]. Fun fact concerning this: the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten" (to keep at the bottom), i.e. to keep the mass of the populace at the bottom, or in other words: to prevent the mass of the populace from coming up.
> Would anyone watch these robots in competition?
I have seen robot fight competitions both live and in videos, and I have to admit that these are not boring to watch.
So yes, with a proper marketing I can easily imagine that lots of people would love to see broadcasts of some robot competitions.
> the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten"
No, that would be "Untenhaltung", which isn't an actual German word, but could be.
"unterhalten" in German can both mean to entertain (however, not as in "entertaining a notion") having a conversation, as well as "to maintain". It has several meanings, all of them positive.
>
AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity[.]
I would rather claim that this is a proper description of shadow libraries [1].
>
A lot of words to not say much of anything to defend the actual point - what can AI actually do that we couldn't do before?
The article indirectly considers the point:
What could an electrical motor do in a factory that a steam engine couldn't? - There is hardly anything.
But: by tranforming the factory from a central steam engine into one electrical motor per factory machine over a long time, the production process(es) got more efficient - and this is hoped for AI, too.
Of course the idea of many motors powering many machines didn't escape anyone during that period. It wasn't practical until motor technology improved.
Given that we're in the "inefficient motor era", per the analogy, what is the blatantly obvious next business innovation that is currently held back by needing a small improvement (say, faster token generation) from AI?
> what is the blatantly obvious next business innovation that is currently held back by needing a small improvement (say, faster token generation) from AI?
I would personally say: at least the capability for a fast generation of images (designs) - even if not perfect - does have potential considering how much professional designers charge for generating concept designs.
Even if you hire a professional designer to create the final version, the fact that I can generate, say, 10-20 design concepts to see which ones I like, and then go to a professional designer to make a final version based on the AI concept saves a lot of time and money.
>
Unfortunately that is an emotional topic and quickly gets into an area where classic libertarians (and there doesn't seem to be many left, these days) prioritize parental choice over freedom of speech.
Since I don't live in the USA, I might miss some US-specific political nuances, but I would say that
- I am both for freedom of speech and parental choice
- What I am against is control and surveillance by government and big tech - and this is what the age verification discussion is all about.
I didn't claim there is actually a conflict between freedom of speech and parental choice. My point is that libertarians in the US have been manipulated by years of propaganda, to the point where they now side with government control of speech under the guise of parental choice, instead of standing on principle for freedom of speech. That is the problem.
> But instead, we get a replacement for Git. [...] Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
While I personally doubt that for $17M one could build such a vacuum robot prototype (for a vacuum cleaner company, investing this amount of money - if it worked - would be a rounding error), I will rather analyze the point that you raised:
It is a very common situation that the workflows of companies is deeply ingrained into some tool
- that they can't get rid of (be it Microsoft Excel (in insurance and finance), be it Git (in software development), ...)
- that is actually a bad fit for the workflow step (Git and Excel often are)
So, this is typical for the kind of problem that companies in sectors in which billions of $/€ are moved do have.
I am actually paid to develop some specialized software for some specialized industrial sector that solves a very specific problem.
So, in my experience the reason why nobody [is] solving actual problems (in the sense of your definition) anymore is simple:
- nobody is willing to pay big money for a solution,
- those entities who are willing to pay big money often fall for sycophantic scammers/consultants.
> While I personally doubt that for $17M one could build such a vacuum robot prototype (for a vacuum cleaner company, investing this amount of money - if it worked - would be a rounding error)
The first Roomba prototype from iRobot was two weeks and $10k in 1999 [1], and S. C. Johnson's funding was up to $2M [1]. The public estimate for total pre-launch program cost is $3M. [2]
In 2026 $, that's about $19k, $4M and $6M respectively.
As someone who makes things it always confuses me when millions just disappear whenever a company or government contractor makes things. Give me $17M and I'll build a vacuum robot prototype in under 2 years, I can't imagine 10 engineers getting paid $100+k/year can't do it in less time? Tooling is expensive, but not THAT expensive...
I would agree. CNC-ing POM also tends to work extremely well for prototype plastic parts.
Also, I already built a robot arm, a robot car, and a custom camera in my free time. So I’m having a hard time imagining that a robot vacuum prototype wouldn’t be possible for me to build in a year, let alone with the team size that $1m in annual salaries buys.
Get it approved in a lot of large markets? Deal with ongoing supply issues as suppliers change and you need to maintain your product? Market it? I could keep going on, but making a prototype is the easy part, making a sustaining business out of it is the hard part.
For $17 mil you can't replace Git either. Can't get it done.
The problem is that the cost of replacing git isn't measured in money, it's measured in time.
It's one of the few programming projects that no amount of money can buy, and ironically getting more money often means having less time.
At the same time, you just can't scale up a company then decide to disruptively innovate on your core tech. You either put your nose to the grindstone or you let yourself play and explore but you can't do both at once.
> But the reality is, when I'm in a state of 'Tell LLM what to do, verify, repeat', it's really hard to sometimes break out of that loop and do manual fixes.
My experience is rather that I am annoyed by bullshit really fast, so if the model does not get me something that is really good, or it can at least easily be told what needs to be done to make it exceptional, I tend to use my temper really fast, and get annoyed by the LLM.
With this in mind, I rather have the feeling that you are simply too tolerant with respect to shitty code.
So why isn't there a huge opposition in the USA against the wars that the USA started (currently: Iran; before: Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, ...).
The only famous exception of cultural impact I am aware of where there was a huge opposition against war in the USA was the Vietnam war.
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