> That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in.
This is not true as a generality. e.g. soap operas had long-running stories long before DVRs. Many prime-time dramas and comedies had major event episodes that changed things dramatically (character deaths, weddings, break-ups, etc.), e.g. the whole "Who shot J.R." event on *Dallas*. Almost all shows that I watched as a kid in the 80s had gradual shifts in character relationships over time (e.g. the on-again/off-again relationship between Sam and Diane on Cheers). Child actors on long-running shows would grow up and the situations on the show changed to account for that as they move from grade school, to high school, to college or jobs.
Parent comment was (I think), specifically talking about sitcoms from what I understood.
Sitcoms are - and I know this is a little condescending to point out - comedies contrived to exist in a particular situation: situation comedy → sitcom.
In the old day, the "situation" needed to be relatively relatable and static to allow drop-in viewers channel surfing, or the casual viewer the parent described.
Soap operas and other long-running drama series are built differently: they are meant to have long story arcs that keep people engaged in content over many weeks, months or years. There are throwbacks to old storylines, there are twists and turns to keep you watching, and if you miss an episode you get lost, so you don't ever miss an episode - or the soap adverts within them, their reason for being for which they are named - in case you are now behind with everything.
You'll find sports networks try to build the story arc around games too - create a sense of "missing out" if you don't watch the big game live.
I think the general point is that in the stream subscription era, everything has become like this "don't miss out" form, by doubling down on the need to see everything from the beginning and become a completist.
You can't easily have a comedy show like Cheers or Married... With Children, in 2026, because there's nothing to keep you in the "next episode" loop in the structure, so you end up with comedies with long-running arcs like Schitt's Creek.
The last set of sitcoms that were immune to this were probably of the Brooklyn 99, Cougartown and Modern Family era - there were in-jokes for the devotees, but you could pick up an episode easily mid-series and just dive in and not be totally lost.
Interesting exception: Tim Allen has managed to get recommissioned with an old style format a couple of times, but he's had to make sure he's skewing to an older audience (read: it's a story of Republican guys who love hunting), for any of it to make sense to TV execs.
Soap operas use entirely different tactic - every information is repeated again and again and again. They are meant to be half watched by people who work while watching them. So you need to be able to miss half the episode and still caught up comfortably.
That is why slow graduate changes.
Neither of these could afford serious multi episodes long arc with nuance played out the way current series can have.
The Polish "paradocumentary" format is like this, but taken to an extreme. Such shows are mostly dialog interleaved with a narrator describing exactly what just happened. There's also a detailed recap of everything that happened in the episode so far after every ad break, of which there are many.
It's basically daytime TV, to be watched at work, often as background, and without looking at the actual screen very often.
> The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”.
Of course they could. (1) People are capable of changing their minds. His opinion of data centers may have been changed recently by the rapid growth of data centers to support AI or for who knows what other reasons. (2) People are capable of cognitive dissonance. They can work for an organization that they believe to be bad or even evil.
It’s possible, yes, for someone to change their mind. But this process comes with sympathy for all the people who haven’t yet had the realization, which doesn’t seem to be in evidence.
Cognitive dissonance is, again, exactly my point. If you sat him down and asked him to describe in detail how some guy setting up a server rack is similar to a rapist, I’m pretty confident he’d admit the metaphor was overheated. But he didn’t sit himself down to ask.
I don't think he claimed that "some guy setting up a server rack" is similar to a rapist. I think he's blaming the corporations. I don't think that individuals can have that big of an effect on the environment (outliers like Thomas Midgley Jr. excepted, of course).
I think "you people" is meant to mean the corporations in general, or if any one person is culpable, the CEOs. Who are definitely not just "some guy setting up a server rack."
I will grant you that, however, it does not take much reading-between-the-lines to understand that Rob is referring to the economic conditions and corporations that exist which allow people to develop things like AI Village.
I agree that's what he's trying to refer to, but there just aren't any such conditions or corporations. Sending emails like this is neither a goal nor a common effect of corporate AI research, and a similar email (it's not exactly well written!) could easily have been generated on consumer hardware using open source models. It's like seeing someone pass out dumb flyers and cursing at Xerox for building photocopiers - he's mad at the wrong people because he's diagnosed a systemic issue that doesn't exist.
Yes, absolutely. How else would you define it? The whole point of happiness is that is a subjective, internal state. If you just want to know if people live in a cold, dark climate you don't need to ask them.
That's an utterly hilarious straw man, a spin worthy of politics, and someone else would label, a tautological "cheat". Students "cheated" hundreds of years ago. Students "cheated" 25 years ago. They "cheat" now. You can make an argument that AI mechanizes "cheating" to such an extent that the impact is now catastrophic. I argue that the concern for "cheating", regardless of its scale, is far overblown and a fallacy to begin with. Graduation, or measurement of student ability, is a game, a simulation that does not test or foster cognitive development implicitly. Should universities become hermetic fortresses to buttress against these untold losses posed by AI? I think this is a deeply misguided approach. While I had been a professor myself for 8 years, and do somewhat value the ideal of The Liberal Arts Education, I think students are ultimately responsible for their own cognitive development. University students are primarily adults, not children and not prisoners. Credential provisions, and graduation (in the literal sense) of student populations, is an institutional practice to discard and evolve away from.
Seriously, you’re arguing with people who have severe mental illness. One loon downthread genuinely thinks this will transform these students into “genuises”
I agree with all this, except there is no plan B. What could plan B possibly be when white collar work collapses? You can go into a trade, but who will be hiring the tradespeople?
The companies who now have piles of cash because they eliminated a huge chunk of labor will spend far more on new projects, many of which will require tradesmen.
Economic waves never hit one sector and stop. The waves continues across the entire economy. You can’t think “companies will get rid of huge amounts of labor” and then stop asking questions. You need to then ask “what will companies do with decreased labor costs?” And “what could that investment look like, who will they need to hit to fulfill it?” and then “what will those workers do after their demand increases?” And so on.
I would look at the secondary consequences of the totaling of white collar labor in the same way. Without the upper-middle-class spending their disposable income, consumer spending shrivels, advertising dollars dry up, and investment in growth no longer makes sense in most industries. It looks like a path to total economic destruction to me.
Unless they do, or are severely weakened. Consider the net worth of the 1% over the last few decades. Even corrected for inflation, its growth is staggering. The wealth gap is widening, and that wealth came from somewhere.
So yes, when there is an economic boom, investment happens. However, the growth of that top %1 tells me that they've been taking more and more off the top. Sure, some near the bottom may win with the decreased labor costs and whatnot, but my point is less and less do every cycle.
Full disclosure: I'm not an economist. Hell, I probably have a highschool-level of econ knowledge at best, so this should probably be taken as a "common-sense" take on it, which I already know often fails spectacularly when economics is at play. So I'm more than open to be corrected here.
That’s a discussion about where wealth gains are going, however my comment was about the concept of excess capital, investment, and jobs.
Yes, the wealth of the 1% has increased over the decades, but so has investment. The economy still dwarfs what it was decades ago. There are more jobs than there were decades ago.
Hopefully you see my point but now. The “waves” of economics effects objectively didn’t stop at the rich.
Jeff Bezos has a 233 billion net worth. It's not because Amazon users overpaid by a 233 billion but because his share in Amazon is highly valued by investors.
My own Amazon investment in my pension has also gone up by 10x in the last 10 years, just like Jeff's. Where did the value increase come from?
Is this idea of the stock market good for us? I don't know, but it's paper money until you sell it.
Optimistically, there will be many more small companies, as people will be able to do more while remaining competitive with less. And smaller companies are more conducive to job satisfaction, as you are a bigger cog in the machine.
I think in the context of the GP's comment, 'never' means it never (or hardly ever) happened on the products it was expected to happen on (home computers, as understood circa late 70s/early 80s). Yes, it has happened on very different devices decades later.
Spot on. The home computer never became accessible from the kitchen, and the storage system most anyone uses for recipes, if not paper, is the web or some other internet-accessible source. (Don't know for sure but I'd bet photos of recipes found online, viewed on a phone, is the most common.)
Why does a fan app need to find the WiFi networks? The OS does this, and then serves an internet connection to the app. It doesn't need to know what the available networks are.
This is a brilliant piece of satire. "A Modest Proposal" for the AI age.
The leader bios are particularly priceless. "While working for 12 years as the Director of HR for a multinational, Faith realized that firing people gave her an almost-spiritual high. Out of the office, Faith coaches a little league softball team and looks after her sick mother - obligations she looks forward to being free of!"
If you don’t trust the moderators, who have absolute power, what are you even doing here?
If you have proof or reasonable indicators that policy is a lie, let’s see it. Otherwise, being disdainful and cynical just degrades the discussion and foments unnecessary hate.
Everyone is way above average here on HN, and will be thinking "The article speaks about every other idiot I work with - my genius is singular; I'm too valuable to my employer and irreplaceable. I'll be the one wrangling the AI that replaces my colleagues, while they figure out welfare"
Oh, dont worry if you were actually going to be replaced by AI American oligarchs wouldnt freak out at the prospect of keeping the retirement age exactly where it is because it would be massively deflationary.
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."
As someone totally ignorant of British airports, a Google maps search for "airports northern england" shows Teesside, Carlisle, and Newcastle all significantly closer to Edinburgh than Manchester. Are these not places where a 737 under emergency could land? Or was the weather also bad there?
Carlisle is small (and not currently licensed for public use) - not an ideal place to drop a 737 if there's a choice. It's also not that far from Prestwick so may have had similar weather. Newcastle and Teesside are both on the East coast and likely to be affected by similar weather to Edinburgh given the storm coming in from the North East. The next closest will be Manchester or Leeds/Bradford, with Manchester being larger, closer to where passengers want to go (Glasgow) and further away from the storm.
There's precedent for this kind of situation to generate quite extensive investigations. An incident in 2017 where a flight from the Isle of Man to Belfast was unable to land in a storm, diverted back to the IOM, then landed in unsafe weather conditions because of insufficient fuel to divert again got a 48 page report[0], safety recommendations, and the airline being banned from the UK.
That's likely, these places are not very far apart, and weather systems that cause 100mph winds don't tend to be small. And presumably if you have at most one landing attempt remaining you don't want to be taking any more chances.
This is not true as a generality. e.g. soap operas had long-running stories long before DVRs. Many prime-time dramas and comedies had major event episodes that changed things dramatically (character deaths, weddings, break-ups, etc.), e.g. the whole "Who shot J.R." event on *Dallas*. Almost all shows that I watched as a kid in the 80s had gradual shifts in character relationships over time (e.g. the on-again/off-again relationship between Sam and Diane on Cheers). Child actors on long-running shows would grow up and the situations on the show changed to account for that as they move from grade school, to high school, to college or jobs.
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