AI has done nothing of the sort, and in fact, has done the opposite. Individuals in creative industries have lost their jobs and income because consumers have chosen to either generate their own slop or purchase slop because it's cheaper than real, human-made work. And there is no reason to believe nor any evidence to support the notion that AI will lead to this post-scarcity paradise you claim will come into being. Simply legislating it will not make it happen. As much as I respect Sanders for the attempt, it fundamentally fails to address the core, underlying problem with generative AI, which is that it can only thrive by stealing the collective output of actual humans, and in doing so, suppresses the desire to be creative.

Nobody will WANT to be free to do what they want if everything they do is watched, tracked, datamined, analyzed, and repackaged for consumption. The problem is not even about the economics of labor. It's about what the quality of life means for a society in which every thought and action is being analyzed. I don't want to live like that. I don't know anyone who does, and if you do, then YOU go and do it. I don't want any part of your dystopian panoptic bullshit.

Well, we should certainly be able to distinguish between 'policy that has value for the community at large' and 'policy that supports a single stakeholder's objective (even when that's the stakeholder with the gold)'. So I don't disagree with you.

If it was a real currency, it losing value would generally be considered a positive. It means the sale of a good would earn more of the stuff. But this is where the bullshit hits the road. Its not a currency, nobody is using it to facilitate economic trade. Its just a shitty ponzi token. And the favor of the market has moved on from Dunning Krugerands to AI slop.

I wouldnt underestimate the complexity of an MMO. They are genuinely some of the most complicated software assemblages ever created, and usually involve teams of hundreds of people working for upwards of a decade just to get a beta out the door.

Creating a cloned server is a hell of an achievement.

"When everyone is thinking alike, no one is thinking."
https://quoteinvestigator.com/...

The US has had price shocks with Iran and Russia and..... there was a flight to quality. To GOLD. The price of bitcoin sat flat, and then shrank, whereas the price of gold keeps going up and up. Bitcoin never really recovered after that. First real test of bitcoin as a store of wealth and it failed. It's never really recovered since then. Gold remains king.
 
I don't actually own any gold and don't have an interest in it, but it's been hilarious to hear people claim bitcoin was digital gold, and when push came to shove, people pushed bitcoin off a cliff, and the price of gold stayed strong, proving all the bitcoin promoters wrong once and for all.

Is that really a bad thing? There are certainly plenty of examples of old things that suck; either because genuine improvements became available after they had already solidified or because they were always broken and are now running purely on denial-fueled risk tolerance; but, in principle, it seems like it should be a bad thing that age is seen as a bad thing. Especially when software is more like math than like civil engineering in terms of the tendency of its materials toward corrosion, embrittlement, and fatigue. (and when so many 'modernization' projects turn into expensive failures or go way behind schedule and over budget to eventually death march toward feature parity, sometimes even achieving it in time to be declared legacy themselves.)

I'm not calling for a crusade against 'fast fashion' software; if people want to bang out an app on the fast and cheap to catch the moment when people care they can do that; fine, whatever; but it seems like software built on real long term service timescales should get a lot more credit than it does. Absent specific criticisms; it's not "eww, there are people who weren't even born then", it's "the software has been in service for a generation".

All the more if there are a lot of outfits doing the same thing: having some unique oddball legacy thing means having potentially crushing maintenance requirements unless everything was gloriously secure from day 1, which it probably wasn't; but if there is some big mass of enterprise Java 8 why should we call it all eol and scramble rather than just maintaining java 8? Especially when we can do so in software, without some of the vendor and hardware inflexibility you see with things like old school mainframe applications where there's an implied commitment to a single old school mainframe vendor in perpetuity.

It's not elegant; but realistically we are far enough both into the history of computer science and the history of computers-as-hardware-you-can-buy that there's a lot less obvious, low-hanging, progress to be had by going 'modern' relative to the amount of fashion and fad chasing. Especially if (as is the case for a great many people and organizations) the scale of your problem has grown at or below the rate at which hardware advances have made systems not particularly well designed for scalability faster.

See https://www.iso.org/standard/7... And for the history of COBOL language standardization, see the table here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Programming languages managed buy ISO committees change slowly. That's a FEATURE. I worked a bit on the Ada standard. Each proposed change was carefully weighed for its impact on existing code, as well as the value for new code. The standard was updated roughly every 10 years.

Obviously this would require coordinated action, and some people likely have other reasons to want to either poke at or kill legacy applications; but(since all those java versions are solidly post openjdk) I'd be very curious to know how the cost and risk associated with "modernize because java 18 is going eol!" would compare to just...not...having java 18 go eol. Unsexy maintenance project that you'd need to pay to have done, sure; but very plausibly better characterized and lower risk than trying to deal with a lot of the oddball internal accretions that would otherwise need updating; and, depending on how much people have running on java 18, certainly possible that they'll individually spend a fair bit more running the treadmill than it would cost to just keep kicking java 18 down the road until (almost) nobody cares.

Modern smart devices offer awesome quasi-magical advantages over my very first computer which was a mobile pocket handheld computers I brought when I was 16, sporting Basic and 1.2kb RAM.

However, the distraction and mental load that comes with these devices and services these days is larger than any single human can reasonably consume in their life. The idea of ditching the smart devices and going back to paper notebooks and dumbphones the size of which I can _actually_ handle has been quite enticing to me too for the last decade or so. And I might actually do it some day.

Then again there's Google Maps, Communications, Notes, an ultra high end Digital camera, automatic sync and Backup, times and alert, notes, checkliste, calendar, groupware and a full blown VM with programming environment (I do Web) right there in my pocket. Star Trek is bronze Age compared.

Maybe it's just best to use these devices but work on the discipline in using them. A thing I'm equipped for better than anyone as an 80ies computer kid. The best way is probably some combination of both.

I don't think that's a meaningful question to ask, since it seems to be based on the flawed premise that there should only be a limited market for creative work, and that the forces of supply and demand ought to dictate how we as a society should value such work.

And what the developments in generative AI have shown us is that those same market forces have no problem trying to replace the underappreciated, underpaid work of countless artists and creative industry employees with a neverending firehose of AI slop.

The human desire to create and the desire for imaginative self-expression is extremely deep seated. To be told that this is economically worthless, easily replaceable, and undeserving of recognition, while at the same time the very means for automated generation of AI slop are stolen from and built upon centuries of handcrafted, human-imagined labor, is the height of hypocrisy.

So, to answer your useless question, no. The world does NOT need more starving artists. What the world needs is to properly recognize the value of human art and creative expression. And to the extent that technology is being used to suppress the worth of others, I say artists have every right to reject it. I hate the panoptic, uneducated society we have become. I detest how creative people are being forced to choose between bringing something new into this world, versus preventing some tech oligarch from training a LLM model on it. I despise the fact that mega-corporations routinely wield their vast financial and legal resources to protect the enormously profitable intellectual property that they pay slave wages to artists to create.

I don't know this Eggers guy. I haven't read his books. Whatever he wants to do with his time and money is up to him. But wanting to give more people a pathway to create, and to do it without having it stolen by the Zuckerbergs and Musks and Altmans and Bezoses of this world so that they can turn around and claim that the same things they've stolen are not really worth anything after all, is, in my opinion, better than sitting behind a computer asking whether the market for art is saturated.

Brexit happened on lies upon bloody lies by populist douchebags like Nigel Farage. The British people were once again screwed over epic style by the political class. Which made things even worse after Brexit, ironically.

We all knew Brexit would hurt, but holy cow, as much as we like to make fun of the Brits for doing Brexit, this is painful to watch. We feel you guys.

My response was specifically to the original poster who, for some reason, was taking a "we are losing the class wars; breed faster!" position rather than the "if you are already losing the class war why would you even think about putting in that much effort and cost so your children can deal with a bad or worse outcome?" position.

It would honestly not surprise me if that is a nontrivial contributing factor: If you aren't emotionally invested in children as an end in themselves the wage and cost of living numbers have done very little to encourage you to see them as affordable since roughly the late 70s(with a combination of substantial stagnation for anyone who is primarily wages rather than capital gains; and such good news as there is mostly confined to people who complete at least undergraduate education and remain in a career track full time) and people who are emotionally invested in children are often willing to go to considerable lengths to try to improve their children's outcomes; but are presumably discouraged by the prospect that they will most likely be downwardly mobile instead.

It's not a surprise that people who want labor, cannon fodder, or taxpayers to be abundant for them are fretting about it; but it's hard to see why most of us should care. Why do things that are good for society when society is pretty overtly disinterested in being good for you? You may be able to squeeze the current labor market a bit; because people who already exist tend to take the "or starve" possibility pretty seriously when deciding what they will put up with; but if you offer nothing but the demand for a toiling underclass to encourage people to have children that's not terribly compelling, either for those who aren't interested in sacrificing for children and see hitting education and career hard as increasingly existential or for people who would sacrifice a lot to better things for their children but are more or less accurate in seeing it as highly unlikely that they will be able to.

... a post-cyberpunk post-scarcity economy. If he only achieves half of what he's pushing for that wealth won't mean that much. It's precisely that he's acting that way that puts him in a position to be this wealthy. The final goal of capitalism is to make itself obsolete. We might actually be getting there just now. Musk being a trillionaire is just an intermediate step on that scale.

I'm rather doubtful of the plan's viability; but if they are willing to justify the company name by chaining Bezos to a rock so a bird can eat his liver repeatedly I could be persuaded.