This is an idea I had in mind since I started developing for the Mac 20(!) years ago. I obviously never even got to create a prototype, so it's cool to see someone finally implement it.
> Natural selection will take care of them in due course.
While you are seemingly not at the moment, some day you might be at the receiving end of that "natural selection" in ways that seriously impact your remainint time on the planet.
In that case you might reconsider your stance, and especially question how natural is the selection of a few powerful rich people depriving others of their way to earn a living and their way to draw meaning from their lives.
The AI revolution keeps getting compared to the industrial revolution, but people keep forgetting the consequences of that one.
I'm not terribly worried. The reason I am not worried is that software isn't my only marketable skillset. That is deliberate. Even though I see myself as primarily a software engineer, in the past decade I've worked in areas that tend to be viewed as wildly different strata and domains.
And if the apocalypse comes, I'm actually not that bad at a handful of skilled blue collar jobs.
The people who should be worried are the ones with narrow skill-sets and no capacity for dealing with rapid change. Especially if those skills are shallow too.
But I wasn't talking about people. I was talking about companies. And the reason I'm not worried about companies going under is that they have gone all the time since the start of the industrial revolution. Yes, it happens faster and more violently today than before but neither the churn nor the reasons are all that new. They just need to be understood so you can deal with change rationally and without panicking.
It is a good idea to read up on historic innovation/disruption cycles and realize that they are nothing new. The only reason people think this is a new problem is that 50-100 years ago they used to take about as much time as your productive career. So people wouldn't need to understand how to deal with it. And every generation would be convinced that this is some unexpected and unique upheaval that only their generation has to deal with.
My stance is the only one that works well during disruption: you make sure you have more legs to stand on and you don't waste time fretting over things you can't change. If you find yourself out of options, you can only blame yourself.
> the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem.
Nuclear waste is small and solid, not a leaky green ooze like you see in the Simpsons. You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.
Belgium is notably lacking in mountains, which is why they now start building a site for low level nuclear waste storage, adding to the cost. For high level nuclear waste they have to build deep underground, waterproof, bomb-proof facilities at high expense:
As for the article by Shellenberger you linked, please note that he is a right winger criticising wokeism etc, who claims eternal growth can continue like until now without ecoogical impact
Edit: I just found out that Shellenberger now works on finding the Aliens:
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth", Shellenberger claimed sources have told him that intelligence communities "are sitting on a huge amount of visual and other information" about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)
It is your opinion that it is a bad thing and that it affects all his other points. That's why you felt the need to cite those points. And you did the same in this comment, which is again an ad hominem.
I know it's not a green ooze. But thinking it is possible to store something safely for >10000 years is just wishful thinking. The waste is a lot more dangerous than the uranium we dug out and packaging it in a way where you are sure it won't surface for sure is really not a solved problem.
> Nuclear waste is small and solid
As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.
> You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.
Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore. In the ideal case we invent better reactors where you recycle all radioactive parts as usable fuel and the output is truly 'spent'.
I don't disagree with you that the pros of nuclear (as opposed to fossil) outweigh the cons. But there are cons, and eventually we'd be better off harvesting our energy from the sun.
> But thinking it is possible to store something safely for >10000 years is just wishful thinking.
> Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore.
Things obviously need to be weighed against each other. Burying it in a mountain does make it safe to store indefinitely, but obviously not easily accessible. It can be dug out again, however, if it becomes useful again. It's going to be more expensive, but you pay for the safety.
> As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.
One of the articles I linked makes the argument that Fukushima is not as tragic as people think.
Quote:
> But now, eight years after Fukushima, the best-available science clearly shows that Caldicott’s estimate of the number of people killed by nuclear accidents was off by one million. Radiation from Chernobyl will kill, at most, 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people.
The same should be said of the senile old women that damage Europe's reputation. That is, if they were actually elected and not appointed by bureaucrats.
One thing you learn from game theory is that you need to understand the rules of the game everyone is playing. You cannot change them, you can only play by them.
"Making a cultural change" is not something you or any group of people can do. The superstructure of the game decides those, not the players. You can try, but nobody will play your new game.
There’s room for both pragmatic and idealistic solutions in most cases. Sometimes the rules of the game change on short notice, and being in the right place at the right time makes all the difference.
It is not about playing new games though, but about affecting subtle changes over prolonged periods of time. You can't know the outcome, but you can help steer the right overall direction.
Thats not at all a leason I learned during my years with game theory. It sounds like a life-lesson completely orthogonal to game-theory.
And wrong I must add, ignoring people who have made an actuall change in the world (although its true that most people end up making very little difference either way).
The same way you avoid it doing anything else illegal that involves cash.
Crime is risky, but not pure anarchy. It is still based on trust and rules, just not those written in the law.
There are plenty of regular people who interact with criminals, for example drug dealers, without getting murdered or robbed of all the cash they are carrying.
In Argentina, years ago, you could exchange dollars/euros for pesos on the street and get a far better exchange rate than in a bank. It was obviously aimed at tourists, who didn't get robbed, or the whole enterprise would stop.
Then the others should also not be shielded from criticism instead of focusing only on the one you personally dislike, or his social media.
There is plenty of toxic behavior on other platforms, especially Reddit and Bluesky, to name a few. That does not excuse the one coming from X, but the opposite is also true.
Do people actually only dislike one tech CEO at a time? I'm an equal-opportunity hater, it seems. Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg... even Cook, the whole lot are rotten
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