Ok, it's only because I assume people skim rather than bother reading whole paragraphs. I can paragraphs, honest.

I think one of the greatest advances of the Western Enlightenment was a kind of realization that it's really, really difficult to know something.

It's not just about personal biases, and it's not just about cultural biases. It goes way beyond that -- it's the systems we live in and depend upon.

When we were living in tribal times, you could probably find out through direct experience most of everything you needed to know. And anything beyond that was just magic. How to find food, how to make relationships, and the consequences of various strategies. The tribe was local and could learn and retain that direct tribal experience.

Today we live in an incredibly complex global system which is not only 8 billion people, but they are all agents who are part of systems, of systems, of systems.

We're all dependent on and using systems which we have no idea how they're actually made or how they're connected or what they even do.

We have this problem when you listen to what your doctor thinks is wrong with you, what legal advice you might be given, which foods are being promoted as healthy, which morals and ethical views are being enforced, which laws are being made, which things are taught in education, as well as the wider opinions around which side are the good guys in any particular conflict.

And so on and so on.

We seem to be living in a system that is far more complex than we can understand.

If the internet and now AI are to save us from this bizarre place of being both incredibly interdependent and nobody really understanding what the heck is going on, that tech has to give us exquisitely transparent and clear feedback loops.

When someone in some position of authority or influence, like a politician or a company manager, makes a decision, we have no idea what's really going on and why they really made that decision. Yet it can affect many and in unanticipated ways.

And that's even before we get into the fact that 99% of the brain is unconscious.

We are in the kinda Forbidden Planet scenario where we built an incredibly powerful system yet none of us understand the implications, and by the time the feedback loop completes, it'll be too late.

Fortunately there is a formal system for youtube to indicate exactly how public/private something is. We need not speculate. 200 and 401 are as different as .. two different numbers.

People do stuff. WTF, are we supposed to have a world-wide committee meeting every time some hacker starts a random project?

Sam Altman can have his own "AI," with blackjack and hookers. If you don't want yours to have that, then write it differently. If his project is affecting yours, it's because he's on the sharp end, running into scaling issues and regulators first. Let him bear the brunt of that, so you don't have to.

The only thing that can really go wrong, is if he uses his financial influence to get a government-granted monopoly. (And you'll have my support in opposing that.) Until then, though, how much is he shaping things? You can do something other than what he is doing right now. He isn't in charge of your project, is he?

I agree with this post. A $200 million failure clearly refutes the first portion of the sentence: "Concord wasn't a bad game, but it just didn't generate enough interest with enough players". Heck, where I work, a $200 million failure would have someone sent to jail.

This really requires a lot of faith. I can't blame people for having some but we're talking about putting all the eggs into one pretty speculative basket. I'd sure like to opt out of being impacted by this, if possible. If that means I "miss out," I am ok with that.

The sad part is that people believe that they are not paying a 5% premium for that 3% reward.

That's sad indeed, but probably rare. The issue we're facing is that rational people are saying "I'd rather pay a 5% premium to get a 3% kickback, than pay a 5% premium and get 0 kickback." Rewards cards put you into a prisoners' dilemma with other purchasers. Stab 'em in back, and you only get ripped off for 2%. Don't stab (i.e. don't use a rewards card) and you get ripped off for 5%.

Only if you get everyone to cooperate (get nobody to use rewards cards), then the 5% premium goes away. But if anyone defects, the 5% inflated price has to remain because the vendors sure don't want to lose money.

So the only way this is a win for me is if prices globally reduce 2% after this change.

The cards caused the price to be inflated by a lower bound of at least 2%, didn't it? (Though I guess it could theoretically be exactly 2.0%, so you'd only break even.)

Then I'm a fool. It's my foolish belief that whenever you remove an expense and thereby increase a margin, you create a competitive pressure to undercut that margin.

I've been this brand of fool for about 250 years, and I'm not about to wise up now!

That sounds like a good thing for consumers. I currently use a rewards card but I damn well know that everything (whether I use that card or not) is more expensive as a result of rewards cards existing.

Rewards cards are a type of prisoner's game ripoff. If you defect (use a rewards card) you profit at the expense of everyone who doesn't also defect and use a card like that, but if everybody got the kickback then obviously the total amount of kickbacks will always be less than or equal to the total amount that merchants collect through increased prices. TANSTAAFL.

If this is the death blow to rewards cards, then everyone wins. Let's hope!

Don't pilots usually train and certify on just one type of aircraft? In other words, Airbus pilots don't fly Boeing, etc. If all the MD11 planes end up permanently mothballed by the two main operators of them (FedEx and UPS), what happens to the pilots who are trained to fly them? Will they have an opportunity to train on another aircraft type, or will they end up without a job? Are there other planes sufficiently similar to the MD11 that their training won't be too lengthy? Wikipedia mentions it last flew for passenger service in 2008, but doesn't mention it having been developed into anything else.

Of course it doesn't seem like this is a great time to be a pilot, given the ATC issues we're facing in this country - but that's a different issue.

That makes two dictionaries that chose two words for the 2025 word of the year. I will say I like this one better than the choice from Merriam-Webster.

This likely violates fire code. I wouldn't be surprised if the practice abruptly ends.

Generally agree, I mean, companies don't need to make their own steel beams, cars, and teacups, Cloud gives the lower parts of the stack over to the specialists, who can industrialise their skill with a massive production line.

But what's kinda interesting is that there's still industries where lots of small players are needed, like housing construction and maintenance. We don't all live in an IKEA like mass produced kit house. There's huge variety of small custom house designs and arrangements, ad-hoc pieces, as every house is different.

I guess the question is whether an org's IT is going to fit and benefit more from the mass production line model or the custom local one.

Holy cow!

Was there no agency you could have tipped off about it?