has been there since ww2
... Anyone can be rich if they’re handed a cheat code.
In the case of the USA, WWII handed you two. Almost all of the other industrialised countries were rebuilding from having their factories bombed. And the UK handed you the brand new computer industry on a plate by destroying all the computers it had built during the war while not requiring that you do the same with the licensed copies you had built.
It's perfectly possible to build a machine that will incapacitate a human at close range; all of the world's militaries have been doing it for years.
It's also possible to deliberately dial down the machine's combat effectiveness to the point where a fight against a human might not be a foregone conclusion.
OTOH, having done the latter, what have we learned? That we can design and build a robot that we nerfed just enough that it usually loses in hand-to-hand combat?
You could make the same observation about an obstacle course: completely artificial, simple engineering to make one no human can pass, but typically dialed just to where some humans can manage it.
What are weight classes other than a way to artificially give people opponents they can beat?
As far as sports go the point is simply that the outcome isn't guaranteed. That leaves room for human ingenuity, risk taking, and showmanship, with possibility of both reward and consequence. (In this case, even if the robots were a literal pushover, the spectators and maybe even the opponent couldn't have known that for sure. Any future of the sport would have to adapt to preserve those unknowns between bouts.)
Ask a mediaevalist about ancient Rome?! Surely they can't have run out of interesting on-topic things to talk about?
Debt is indeed a rising threat. Us federal debt has reached $40 trillion (greater than the total GDP), with interest payments now the second-largest expenditure after Social Security. The bill works out to $4k per person, or $12k per tax return filed.
Really consider that the first $12k on your tax return bought you nothing. Not just nothing personally, it funded no library, no road, no food stamp, it just evaporated into financial fees. And we're hitting a higher-interest era where borrowing is more expensive.
AI related growth and investment is what's been keeping the present economy floating in the wake of tariffs, accounting for something like 30-50% of recent GDP growth and hundreds of thousands of jobs.
It also the only thing that could possibly result in enough growth to offset the rising debt ratio and prevent a painful economic future. (Even then the growth will have to be on the very high end of projections.)
So it's weird to come away from that and imply AI is imposing an existential risk ("The Real AI Threat") due to "weaker or less durable investment and profitability in artificial intelligence". That's like if your take on medicine was "medical research is a catastrophic thing to get involved with, instead of curing all cancers we might only cure certain varieties, do you want a future in which you die from those cancers?"
99 little bugs in the code,
99 little bugs.
Take one down, patch it around,
107 little bugs in the code!
-I wonder if that charger would work with other USB-C-powered devices.
MOAR POWAH = faster magic smoke production! Efficiency!1!!
The "preceding year" bit doesn't seem to get much respect either, because it takes longer than that to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The problem comes with hardware which doesn't have a way (or, at least, a user-friendly way) to update its locale data. I recall having problems a decade or so ago with discrepancies between two computers because one of them hadn't been updated with the then-very-recent changes to Chilean law about summer time and the other one had.
But maybe an authoritarian dictatorship isn't a great example. Then turn your eyes to France and Spain.
On a point of order... Spain was in GMT until an authoritarian dictator decided that being in the same timezone as Nazi Germany would be convenient. France changed when it was occupied by Nazi Germany. Where you arguably get away with the examples is that there is a question as to why they haven't changed back.
There are use cases you're not covering. Last month I needed a photo of my sister-in-law's ID card to prove that I'd correctly transcribed her address (bureaucrats don't always understand that other countries do things like addresses differently) when applying for a document to make it easier for her to visit. If she'd had to be there in person we'd have had a circular dependency.
The World Should Accept Some Bad Things Happening to Sam Altman to avoid the downsides of AI.
Eh, I'm sure it'll be fine. No need to be alarmist, like they were about Trump.
Maybe you use different OSes to me, but I expect whoami to be deterministic rather than stochastic.
More generally, there's a strong negative correlation between reliable contraceptive methods being available and birth rate. There's also a strong positive correlation between infant mortality and birth rate. Comparing the situation today with Victorian Britain as though the only thing which had changed is the working time directive overlooks those two significant differences (and surely many other relevant ones).
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory keeps all its data in an old gray trunk.
