The persons inside/outside the car may be weak, ill or too panicked to break the glass. Especially if the car has reinforced glass windows. It's an action that is a lot more complicated than just opening the door, in a situation where every second may count. The person inside the car may hesitate to break the glass because they're afraid of flying glass shards, or because they don't understand the urgency of the situation and don't want to damage the car any further. Yes that would be extremely stupid but people with that level of stupidity aren't exactly rare.

For example, imagine this situation: an adult driver with a young child (maybe early teens) in the backseat crashed the car. Car lost power and a fire is starting. The adult is passed out in the driver's seat. With manual-only car doors the child can get out of the back seat, open the driver's door from the outside and drag the adult to safety, if that's physically not possible then maybe wake them up. Or a similar situation where a child or an elderly person or someone who would have difficulty or lack the presence of mind to break the glass witnesses a car crash with the driver passed out.

On the flipside, what are you gaining from fully retractable doors? Slightly better aerodynamics? The gain would be very marginal. Better aesthetics maybe? This would be absolutely fine if it didn't potentially compromise the safety of the people inside the car.

Given the quality of writing we've recently been getting he can't be any worse then the randoms they would've given it to otherwise. This way we can at least be sure writing quality will be above fifth grader fanfiction level.

That's a nice idea but I don't believe that's how the c-suite think. It isn't 'we have one revenue stream, we don't need another', nowadays it seems to be 'we have one revenue stream, can we add another? And then another and another?'. See for example paid subscription services like Netflix and Amazon Prime trying to gradually push ads into everything. Free networks like Mastodon might be better.

I miss the old internet, where people would meet in forums and message boards. Nobody (generally) obsessing about likes and followers, nobody trying to monetize every kind of human interaction, just a bunch of people with common interests coming together to discuss said interests. This place, even such as it is, is one of the relics of this bygone age.

Yes that's indeed the goal of every business, but what matters is, how they go about achieving that goal. If businesses try to keep customers by making better and better products, that's a socially beneficial thing, because people will have better and better stuff. If they try to keep their customers by getting them addicted and exploiting their psychological triggers, that's socially negative, because you get psychologically damaged people out of this. You can argue about the extent of the damage done, but it's safe to say that any amount of psychological damage is a bad thing.

As for Meta failing to keep young people, it's arguable to what extent they failed, as far as I'm aware Instagram is still pretty popular. Certainly most if not all young people have moved from actual Facebook to TikTok. That's partly because teens naturally don't want to hang out in the same place (even if it's virtual) as their parents, but I think mainly because TikTok used the same strategy as Meta, but did it better. Better in this context means they banked on even dumber content that assumed even lower attention span and it worked extremely well for them financially. Meta set the standard on how to run social networks/meeting spaces for young people, now anyone trying to create such a platform will copy their methods, except perhaps even more cynically. It doesn't matter if Meta goes out of business tomorrow, the damage has already been done.

They're not building all the data centers for the AI that could solve engineering and scientific problems. Nobody cares much about those except small groups of scientists and engineers. It's all done for LLMs and and maybe a bit for image/video slop generation.

For IT staff, any reasonably organised place will have JIRA or some other project tracking software in place, which will show you exactly who did what and when. Amazon will certainly have something like this. For general office staff there may not be something like this but still a manager who has any degree of competence should be able to say who was assigned what and whether that got done or not (and how well).

This looks like it's copying what DOGE was doing with federal employees last year. I suspect it's preparing justifications for mass layoffs. Unless Amazon genuinely got so bloated and management structure got so convoluted that there are a lot of people who nobody knows what they're supposed to be there for.

That's just science though. Like, we can speculate with a high degree of certainty that in billions of years the Sun will turn into a red giant, likely ending any life that exists in the Solar system and then cool down, in spite of how far in the future that is. Non-living things behave in very predictable ways once you understand the laws of physics that govern them. Humans and their activities are very complex and much harder to predict.

So the argument is that the system will financially reward people with the ability to make correct predictions, but we all benefit because we can use them as oracles to predict the future (to some extent at least) and adjust the prices accordingly (and prepare in other ways). I don't know, it just seems impossible to make any sense from all the chaos. It seems especially hard to make any sort of accurate predictions of what the current administration will do next. I can believe that there are political-economic experts out there who can make some accurate predictions on the implications of the Maduro capture, but these people are academics. What I'm seeing from business people now is mindless short-term thinking, endless hyping and trend-chasing. In the financial crisis there were people who recognised ahead of time that there was a property bubble and made a lot of money from this. Has their savvy and foresight made us all collectively wiser? What I'm seeing now is a bunch of people mindlessly pouring a ton of money into the AI bubble, so doesn't seem to be the case to me.

This just seems like a gambling addict who convinces himself that he has savvy and a nose for things, before losing all the savings and having collections agencies call every night.

But let's suppose that you're right and there is some darwinian system that allows people with wisdom and nous and connections or whatever to get the info they need to make correct predictions, rewards them financially and lets us all benefit from their ability to make predictions by listening to them more next time, or at least by having smarter people having control of the most money. Let's assume for now that they've predicted things correctly because they were smarter, that their smartness, if it exists, benefits society, aside from any other of their qualities, let's set all these question aside. In that case, how does insider trading fit into this system? People who got inside information did so because they lucked into being in the right place at the right time, not because of ability to make correct predictions. They won't be able to make correct predictions next time, so the darwinian system ends up rewarding people with lower fitness.

There are also other considerations. Let's say that there is a secret operation being planned against a foreign leader and let's say that this operation is something you want to succeed. Let's also say that the foreign secret service is smart and checks the prediction markets and is able to detect a pattern that points to significant insider trading betting on such an operation taking place in the near future. Wouldn't that tip them off ahead of time that this operation will take place, possibly resulting in this operation failing completely?

I don't see how that makes sense. First, some events would clearly enable 'price discovery', like a revolution/civil war in Saudi Arabia is probably a clear indicator that oil may suddenly become more scarce, or at least people will need to find new suppliers. Capture of Maduro is far less clear, given that the same party is still in power in Venezuela, or that it's not clear if it's even possible to convict him of anything at all. The only thing that's certain is there will probably be more chaos in Venezuelan politics. As I understand, while Venezuela has huge oil reserves, it isn't that big an oil producer currently

Much more importantly though, you may perhaps get 'price discovery' when you learn of actual events that definitely happened. What you learn from a bunch of people betting on an event happening is that a bunch of people believe something will happen, but a bunch of other people believe that thing will not happen. In other words, you discover absolutely nothing. The whole thing just seems like horse race betting for bankers and financiers. I see no social value in this whatsoever, but if you allow it, might as well make it fair, so no insider trading.

If I had a penny for every time I've heard this 'everything is fine, we're just making some changes', I would long be retired by now. Bonus points for 'we're making changes because we're being innovative'. Changes can be for the better, or for the worse. It feels like lately most of changes are of the latter type. It is also possible to make changes that result in everything breaking down. Such changes are undesirable so it's perfectly valid to complain about them.

Undergraduate unemployment in the US and Western Europe isn't dramatically high, it's true, but then we're still in the very early days of the brave new AI world. It could be just a short term trend that will soon go back to normal, or it could be the first signs of the coming crisis. We'll see soon enough I suppose. But a lot of the economy is run by very simple minded very short-term focused greed and young people are being told and some may be starting to believe that all the thinking they need to do can be outsourced to the AI, so there is a lot of potential for problems here.

Yeah, but can you go inside the buildings? And can people inside give you quests?

It used to be that you didn't have to encourage or provide resources for young people to hang out together while at university, they did so naturally. The main concern used to be to stop or at least to limit the drunkenness, drug use, noise and various public disturbances as they did so. Certainly there were people who didn't fit the whole partying student stereotype but they were more of an exception.

But yeah, you won't be paying the ridiculous tuition fees and getting in massive debt for the rest of your life for some sort of young adult daycare. Higher education is for education. I don't know if people learn faster with an AI tutor (whatever that looks like) but you want to know that the things you learn are actually true (at least for subjects where you are at least somewhat able to claim that something is true or false).

Um, yes, US uses a lot of water, so 0.1% of that can still fill a lot of bathtubs. But 0.1% is a very small percentage. So, other usages of water that have a higher percentage can fill even more bathtubs. Thus it makes more sense to be concerned with those higher percentage usages, no?

I don't like anything to do with AI as much as the next man, possibly more so, but it's important to use arguments that make sense. So that was a bit of an unintentionally ironic post there.