The myth that somehow the industrial revolution made life harder is a hard one to break - mainly because of the tripe Marx, Engels, and his ilk spread. The reality is that the misery, deprivation, exploitation, and abuse of the individual were already there. The only thing industrialization did was make it visible by bringing large groups of people together. Before the Industrial Revolution, kids died alone and forgotten on the roads. Children were routinely sold by parents to make ends meet. Farm life? Not so easy when you're trampled under hoof, and nobody gives a damn. Marx and Engels saw the worst of humanity and jumped to the wrong conclusion in blaming capitalism and industrialization. The abuse was there - Capitalism FINALLY exposed it.

The push to have "generative" AI rather than assistive AI is what is causing this pushback. Artists want help rendering THEIR vision, not working with AI to create a collaborative vision. Which is how most tools work now. Because AI does NOT understand art. Doesn't get the nuance. So yeah - AI DOES suck. Now. But this latest MCP for Blender is where the tools need to go - not making the shit themselves.

Do you know what's even less nutritious? Nothing at all. As with EVERYTHING, this is a story of competing trade-offs. Would the ideal be less carbon in the atmosphere? Yes. Of course. But if consuming carbon-filled fuels helps to grow the food, maintain the food, harvest the food, move the food, and get the consumer TO the food. I think it's an all-over win for the carbon-based fuels, even if the food is less nutritious. So, hurray for oil! Hurray for our industrial society!! I cheer our moves to carbon-free sources. However, I don't believe we can accelerate the transition by artificially reducing our dependence. In fact, we may actually slow it down by making the creation of those resources necessary to drive the transition prohibitively expensive.

5th and even 6th generation aim to use the laws of physics to prevent a meltdown - and they have generally succeeded. Making the possibility of nuclear meltdown having the same statistical probability as stepping off a cliff and falling up.

How can you tax wealth based on current stock market valuations? What if the stock collapses? Do you give the money back? Of course, you don't, because the government would have spent it by then. And -- you know -- who cares --- they're rich!! Right. This will not solve ANYTHING and is just another reason California is actually having to ADVERTISE to get people to visit the state. Think about it. California. Needs to advertise to attract visitors to California. That would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2015. Just a sh&#hole.

Higher productivity ALWAYS seems to kill jobs - in the short run. But money is not static. It wants to be put to use. And the more profits and money are created from AI, the more people will want to do MORE. And that's where we will find the edge of just how much AI can actually do on its own. That's where the hiring boom starts. We just don't know what we are going to be hiring for yet.

I keep hearing about how "We don't want handmaid's tale!" These are absolute hysterics. That's like saying we don't want "Lord of the Rings" or "Alice in Wonderland". As if it were some sort of actual possibility. Live in reality. The real reason the numbers are going down is that the perceived cost of kids is so high from expecting perfect parents - who the f' would want to take that risk? I hope people are happy dying alone.

Exactly. Great retort. I hate self-righteous food and fitness nazis.

Screw you. Once you find yourself trapped by the fat your body FIGHTS back. So hey, your preaching about nutrition is great. But people who are already trapped in bodies deal with more than that. Some of us just want a little freakin help rather than being preached at and scolded. We KNOW this stuff idiot. We probably know it better than you. So your self-righteous preening isn't helping anybody.

"Necessary? Is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No, but I do it anyway because it's sterile and I like the taste."

Just because the Chinese government has implied "maximum wage' laws that limit the cost of labor does not make them "low cost". It makes them heavily subsidized and exploitative. Which is exactly the way the Chinese government wants it. They want us to buy the rope for our nooses when we can't build anything anymore. The PRC should be considered the adversaries that they are.

It never works. Give up. Have elections. REAL elections. For god's sake. You can blab about how horrible the US is all you want, but until you give the people a chance to vote for leaders. NOBODY CARES except your fellow despots and blathering Communist idiots who think one election that puts them in power forever is the true meaning of Democracy.

AI graphics are total crap. Everything has a yellowish hue and is completely overrendered. It doesn't know jack about the elegance of simplicity, and even if you try to make it understand it overrenders the simple stuff.

This always happens with new technology. First, it destroys some jobs. Some companies aggressively lay off people, looking to "realign" to the new technology, and then usually end up hiring much the same people back to fill slightly different but similar roles. The rise in productivity that occurs with a technology facilitates a productivity boost that pits company against company in a race to match those gains. Laying off people puts you behind the curve compared to other companies that use people and AI, rather than taking the attitude that you can just replace people. I find it interesting that anthropic itself isn't laying people off. Why? If it's so great? Why wait? Because they know. They KNOW that the will to create is not inherent in AI. Only the desire to placate.

The likelihood that AI will ever come up with anything that it hasn't been trained on already is dubious at best. They are grand regurgitators. So if you have a new control algorithm, and idea for a product. You can make it with fewer people and less money now that you have AI. But that doesn't mean you can say. Hey AI - make the new idea FOR ME!!. You need the idea and work with AI to materialize it.