Wait, we were assured that AI makes our work more efficient, and that means we should work fewer hours

Were we though?

I seem to recall Elon Musk predicting that in the next 20 years or something.

I also wonder if they end up consistently putting in 70 hour weeks of work in the first place. Maybe the hiring manager / entrepreneur just wants to hire people who are willing to do that as needed and ready to put their job and $$$ as FIRST priority at this time, they just don't want to hear the word "no."

I too would not do this in my position / age now but socking away several hundred $K early-career in the market can give somebody a tremendous leg up after a few decades of compounding.

Also pointless talking about hours without pay or other possible upside. I hear more and more about people making $500K total comp as engineers or line managers at FAANG. I don't know how many are lying but if true, you could expect to work 2 jobs worth of hours for 2 jobs worth of pay.

I feel like every China story this comes up and I post a link about the fact that CO2 emissions are monitored from space, and people still raise the same objection every time.

How's this from 2024:

Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.

A fleet response agent has a suite of tools to help them understand what a Waymo vehicle encounters on the road. For example, fleet response can view real-time feeds from the vehicleâ(TM)s exterior cameras and a 3D graphical representation of what the car perceives around it. They can also rewind available feeds to understand the immediate scene better.

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05...

As to how it's reported, I truly think yellow journalism / clickbaiting / scandal-mongering in the media has become endemic. I feel like very few news sources bother or choose to report all the facts that a neutral observer would consider relevant. Instead they just build a "story" to appeal to an audience - using true facts usually, but selectively.

Waymo has always been open about this - except perhaps the location of the people doing the monitoring.

It does somehow feel a bit different than accessing "layoffs.xls" on the internal HR website, but it is the same information. It's the sort of thing I can imagine myself having done though, like, "oh look what I can do," and getting canned.

You can tell they aren't counting the "AI Overview" that comes with every google search, because if they were it would outnumber ChatGPT by orders of magnitude.

Oh I hate the Rufus-suggested questions on product reviews so much.

"Is the item easy to use and reliable?"

OpenAI has a piece to the puzzle but Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon etc have the apps so it makes sense partner. But lack of business pull is what makes ChatGPT good. Amazon made Alexa into a joke because it was driven solely by Amazon's business interests. Right now I pay OpenAI directly and it connects me straight to answers without having to go into the mess the Web has become (unless I want to check by clicking the links it gives as source), and I hope this remains an option.

On top of Covid, I am glad to see the decrease in drug overdoses:

Drug overdoses, one of the leading causes of injury deaths among adults, fell 26% in 2024 from 2023, marking its largest percentage decline since the drop began in 2022. Rates of drug overdose deaths declined for all age groups, with the largest falls in younger age groups. According to CDC data, deaths involving synthetic opioids such as fentanyl showed the largest decrease.

I don't remember reading anything that would have prompted me to expect that.

So don't read it, stay in your ignorance.

Is it though?

In any case my point was simply that there already are government programs that support people long-term. How to do it is not unknown.

Which is called disability and also exists.

In any case, nobody is starving to death so that is a de factor guaranteed minimum income.

What annoys me is I take all the time to do all those kinds of settings and they get wiped out at the next forced upgrade anyways!