Freedom of speech exists exactly BECAUSE speech is dangerous, particularly to entrenched powers.

The reason why it's enshrined in constitutions is because the people that wrote those constitutions wanted the citizens to be in charge, for them to push back and reform governments when they went astray. Protesting and reporting are usually especially enshrined because we know that without those rights, the people are oppressed. The first thing that goes when authoritarians come in is an abrogation of those rights, SPECIFICALLY because authoritarians know that free speech is inherently dangerous to their grasp on power. Only by keeping people in the dark and spreading propaganda can they retain their hold on power.

We saw it happen with Trump and Fox News and all of his toadies buying up TV stations and news networks. If speech isn't powerful and dangerous, then why are so many people concerned with the ability to control it?

And yet, even in these societies with free speech, there have also been limits put on it, because there's no way to run a society with unfettered free speech. We've long since decided that libel and slander are illegal, you can't make threats of physical violence to other people, conspiracy to commit [some crime] is itself a crime.

So I dunno man, how is it that you think that there's no such thing as hate speech? A violent threat can send someone into hiding very nearly as effectively as actually attempting the violence. It was just speech, but it still had an effect. Can you really possibly believe that words have no weight? That speech has no consequence? Have you never read any history, particularly of charismatic cult leaders or politicians?

People are spurred to action by words all the time, and you can't just dust your hands of it and say, "hey, I was just saying words over here that made them believe that that guy was coming to kill their kids in the night and poison their water and salt the earth. Of COURSE I was as convincing as possible and they believed me and attacked him, but that has NOTHING to do with the things I said!"

Your claim is absurd on its face. There's literal millennia of evidence.

My company instituted it because it was too hard to compete on salary alone. I make a bit less per year, but my hourly rate is now higher.

It's been an amazing experience. 4 days a week is more than 20% better than 5 days a week. I'm excited to work on monday, I don't feel like I've been through the wringer on thursday. I would guess that averaged over a whole year, I get at least as much work done on the 4DWW, though for shorter periods of time, 5 days WILL generate more work (much like crunch will also generate a lot of work in a short amount of time, but as it goes on, productivity drops).

But 4DWWs have nothing to do with AI. We mostly don't use it (I work in games; the discussion is fraught, so we mostly just don't use it at all, and most of us at the company want very little to do with it) and our productivity is just fine.

Something that I think a lot of people miss, particularly with programming, is that when you use agents, you effectively make programmers into managers whether they want to be or are good at it or not. Making programmers outline broad tasks and review the results and iterate without writing code themselves is manager work. It's all the worst parts of programming and none of the stuff that we actually like. And not everyone wants to be a manager! I'm a programming lead, and I enjoy it, but it's hard and it uses my brain in a completely different way that I would not have been interested in when I was 25. I may not have even been ABLE when I was 25.

AI doesn't relieve you of any work, it just changes the nature of the work away from the actual job description. Of course nobody's switching to the 4DWW--you just made everyone's job harder and worse, so everyone is always behind.

I work a 4 day work week. My pay is slightly lower than at my last job, but my hourly rate is higher. My company started offering it years ago because they couldn't compete on salary, but they realized that some of us would really just like a better life, and that was something they could manage.

The 4DWW isn't as transformative to me as remote work, but it's been so good for me. I'm excited to get back to work on Monday, and I don't ever feel like any part of the week is a slog. I'm happy to occasionally sit down and fix something on the weekend quickly because my brain happened on the answer while I was relaxing.

If we all must work in this capitalist hellscape, 4 days a week is much more than 20% better than 5.

There's a reason the aphorism, "the Pen is mightier than the Sword," exists. You cannot simultaneously hold that the only power is physical power but also believe ideas or ideologies are powerful. Of course they are. It's the basis of religion and politics writ large.

People can be convinced that an ideology is correct, and then do terrible things in the service of that ideology. It's not that complicated.

The reason why wealth itself is important is because wealth begets wealth. You're right that to some extent it's an under-consumption problem, but fundamentally, wealthy people use their wealth to accumulate more wealth.

And that sounds a bit tautological, but what I mean is: if you have a huge amount of wealth, the things you buy are things like property, stocks in other companies, natural resources, etc. Wealth accumulation accelerates over time. But there isn't an infinite amount of wealth to be had. There's a limit to how many homes there are, how many farms and oil wells and all those things. Governments are in debt and can't help their citizens because they no longer own big blocks of apartments, they no longer own productive land or natural resource companies. (Actually, some do, and you'll note that they're the ones that provide ongoing support to their citizens.)

Even with a little bit of wealth, you can anchor your whole life. Owning your own home is huge. Put enough money into investments, and there's a time at which contributions to your portfolio are less than the money the portfolio generates on its own. And of course, this wealth is both real and illusory; stocks have no value until you sell them, but they can serve as collateral for loans at lower interest rates, and you don't pay taxes on loans.

The rich DO compete with folks for real estate, they become landlords, which is an inherently parasitic position. Consider: a landlord buys a home and rents it out. They pay the mortgage and for upkeep, and they charge a tenant for their own costs, plus some amount of profit (or, occasionally, no profit, on the basis that land value goes up over time). If the tenant can pay this rent, that means they could own the property themselves, but there's an intermediary skimming profit off the top.

So more and more people are locked out of ownership, because the initial cost of ownership is too high, but we know factually that they could actually pay for and maintain that property themselves, because that's what the rent covers. Where does that extra money go? And what is it paying for? It's paying for nothing; the landlord is a parasite, plain and simple.

But anywhere that someone with tremendous wealth goes, the same story is allowed to play out. We've all seen the stories of these private investment firms buying up good businesses, saddling them with debt, taking all the good stuff, and then leaving the business to go bankrupt. It's wealth extraction that only rich people can do, and it destroys businesses big and small.

Ultimately, the accumulation of wealth is a de facto accumulation of power. Our politics is not SUPPOSED to be influenced by money, but it definitely is. Elon Musk doesn't need to be able to vote multiple times to influence the outcome of elections, he can just throw hundreds of millions of dollars at it--an amount he makes back in a trivial amount of time--and get the outcome that he wants.

You're right that the extremely rich use the same phones as I do, eat the same food as I do. What that tells us--what we all already know--is that they don't NEED to be that rich. They can live a life of extraordinary luxury with so much less. So my concern with wealth is that it is not created out of thin air, and there's a finite amount of it to go around. The billionaire class growing in number as well as their fortunes growing by huge amounts happening at the same time as governments running huge deficits and the middle class shrinking is not a random coincidence. One is the cause of the other. That's why when many of us talk about wealth, it's as a *transfer*, from one class to another. Billionaires are literally impoverishing the rest of us.

Depends on the studio and position. A very well paid senior programmer might make $150k-$170k in the US. But that's pretty much the top end of the scale. Salaries in the game industry are infamously low because it's so FUN. Aren't you grateful to have such a FUN job? It's FUN, be grateful that you make any money at all so you can be creative!

Designers make less, Artists make less. QA makes WAY less (which is a travesty, because we depend on them so much in the development cycle. As a programmer, I probably talk to QA as much as I talk to design).

But if you're a Canadian programmer, you might make $150k and live in a city like Vancouver which has insanely high housing costs. Maybe you have kids, or pets.

You've kind of hit the nail on the head with regards to the issue, though: many developers aren't paid particularly well, even by huge companies that make billions of dollars (and indeed, that's why the companies are so profitable).

I interviewed at Roblox, and their salary ranges STARTED far beyond where most studios ranges ENDED for my position (Senior Programmer, 20 years experience). They told me that they consider tech companies like Google to be their competition for talent, not other game studios, so their salaries are adjusted accordingly.

So yeah, very easy to believe that people are feeling the pinch after getting laid off. It's not a lucrative industry for the workers.

This comment is very stupid for a lot of reasons.

1. Not every developer needs help
2. Not every developer wasn't able to find a new job
3. The intention is not to distribute money to every person that lost their job in the layoffs, it's to extend a lifeline to people who are struggling
4. The thing that would meaningfully change things is to implement strong labour laws, tax the wealth of the extremely wealthy, and make it easier to form unions. The number of roadblocks to unionizing have increased over the decades, which is one of many reasons there's been such an obvious, ongoing, inexorable transfer of wealth from the working class to the owning class.

When the government is in the pocket of these huge companies and actively make laws diminishing the power of workers, it's an obvious bad-faith question to ask why people don't do something about it.

I have lots of ways to meaningfully change things, but I can't buy a politician because I'm not a billionaire, so changing things take longer. Don't worry, though, we're making some progress despite that.

No amount of forest management can help a forest that's tinder dry the whole year.

I live in the Okanagan valley in BC, and this winter we got so little snow, and the snow pack had melted off extra early. A deeper snow pack lets the water feed the water system over a longer period of time, keeping the ground wet for longer. Our early summer was a little cooler and wetter than usual, but our lake levels are the lowest in recorded history. (My city is in between two lakes: Okanagan and Skaha.) I talk to the farmers at the market every week, and every farm exists in a different microclimate, so sometimes 10 minutes between farms is the difference between ground so wet you can't walk in the fields and dusty-dry conditions.

But overall, it's hot and dry here, and getting hotter and drier. We've been on level 2 water restrictions since early May, if I remember right, and we've had a campfire ban for about the same time. There was no ice on the lake over the winter--the long-distance outdoor swimmers swam the whole winter this year. 40-50 years ago (long before I moved here, this is just what the older folks around town say) the lake froze over so solid that you could drive a car across it.

The tinder isn't the issue anymore, even though it's true that we ignored the indigenous people here for too long and should have adopted their land use practices. I wish it were as easy as you say.

As someone with aphantasia, the settings never really stick with me (or that may be separate from the aphantasia, honestly, I don't know) but the vibe is very much what I was hoping for.

I read the book again a couple years ago, and it's aged really well, honestly. The things he gets wrong aren't that critical, in my opinion. I've read a lot of scifi that has done a much worse job of hanging together, even though it's only 10 or 20 years old. Neuromancer was published when I was a kid, and even the NAME is still cool as hell.

Labor is also cheaper than AI.

Companies need to burn thousands of dollars in tokens to get agents to do even vaguely equivalent work. Sure, the agent works all night and doesn't need breaks, but it also costs money literally every second you use it, and the end result STILL needs to be checked to make sure nothing insane happened.

Humans--even if you pay them a fair wage--are remarkably efficient at turning food (and coffee) into code and systems. The so-called 10x or 100x programmers (guys like Carmack) really DO exist. And while they're a nightmare to work with, generally speaking, they'll code circles around any agent. If you want something that nobody likes working with that will also give you hard to maintain code, hire a 10x programmer. At least you'll get a working system at the end of the day, and he didn't use a swimming pool full of water an a small gas power plant worth of energy to get it done.

Interestingly, literally the only person in my friend group that still drives stick is a woman. It's a relatively modern Honda (like, new enough that it has a backup camera in it). She's also one of the smoothest drivers I've ever ridden with. Her shifts are impeccable.

The oil from the tar sands isn't really good for petrol that you put in a car, and we let our refining capacity wane over the years as it is.

Everything we're doing here in Canada (I'm also Canadian) is such a boondoggle. The pipeline that Trudeau bought will never be profitable, and any other pipeline we pay for will be a similar money-loser. (If pipelines were as good investments as Danielle Smith claimed, oil companies would pay for them.)

I'd be willing to see EV subsidies go away if the government would also get rid of oil and gas subsidies, AND get rid of the tariffs on Chinese solar panels. Like, everything the government does right now is a tilt towards some ultra-profitable oil and gas donor, and we could save a lot of tax dollars just doing a reset and not subsidizing anything. On that basis, EVs would almost certainly win on their merits.

(I bought a used EV. It was still the most expensive car I've ever bought, inflation adjusted. But it costs $2/100km to drive for the electricity. The only other thing I need to maintain are the tyres. The running costs are ridiculously low.)

I think the global numbers are low, honestly, and that's mostly down to this misadventure in Iran. Countries that had to ration oil and gas are seeing people flee to solar panels and Chinese EVs.

I actually kinda think that's what's going on already, tbh. My Ioniq 6 gets 100% of the claimed range at 90% charge, as near as I can tell. They've definitely fudged it a little.

Used EVs are such a good buy. My Ioniq 6 came with 40k km on it, and that's basically brand new. Certainly the interior and exterior look pristine, and without many wearing parts, the thing rolled off the lot with 100% of the claimed range (actually, a bit more) and hasn't given me any trouble at all.

It costs me about $2/100km of driving. I've seen petrol and diesel up to $2/L here on bad days, and even in a very efficient car, you need 5L/100km.

(One hiccup: someone literally stole my charging cable while the car was charging in my driveway. My fault, though. I didn't see the setting to keep the cable locked to the car unless the doors are unlocked. They just disconnected the power and it unlocked itself. But L2 chargers are so cheap, I'm only paying a 30c premium over home charging.)