A lot of us are old enough to have worked through the dot-com bubble and crash. The AI boom over the last year or two feels a lot like the late 90s leading up.

That said, if the market hadn't gone so all-in on the Internet and world wide web, investing stupid amounts of money into so many idiotic crackpot ideas that were doomed to fail, we arguably wouldn't have the Internet that we enjoy today.

In other words, you have to throw a lot of shit at the wall to see what will stick. 90% of just about everything we humans create is unremarkable. It's the 10% that we end up with that matters.

And we will get the 10% out of AI. Which is another way of framing what you are saying.

I've been a pretty big skeptic when it comes to the hype vs actual productivity gains, but that doesn't mean I haven't found a few areas where it has been useful in my workflow. LLMs are a cool magic trick. They can create some breathtaking illusions and are exceptionally useful at a few narrow applications such as searching and pattern matching.

While I don't want to see the ugly side of the crash (layoffs and unemployment), I am looking forward to when the hype train is over so everyone shuts up about their overstated fantasy and we can get on with doing actual work. The blockchain hype was annoying too, but since it wasn't obvious how blockchain could be applied to all types of work we didn't hear every single CEO at every single company talk about how AI is going to fundamentally change the way we work.

I use LibreOffice writer all the time, have for years (I'm old enough to say that I've used Star Office), and wish it all the success in the world ... but it has issues.

The thing that drives me crazy the most is when I select [highlight] some text in order to change the formatting (make it bold, italic, underline etc.) and it changes the formatting of surrounding text. Lists have similar issues when you're trying to add some preexisting text to a list but not other text.

The only reasons I have for reaching for a word processor over a text editor is a) rich text formatting b) print features c) embedded images, tables etc. and d) import/export of other document formats.

If a word processor can't make text styling/formatting painless then it is not ready for prime time IMO. That's one of it's most primary basic features that people just take for granted in any WYSIWYG editor.

Right, just like it's impossible for an English speaking Canadian to communicate with people from Japan or Germany. I mean ... no one has ever solved that problem *rolls eyes*.

To me the fundamental issue at hand is the role of the government and individual freedom and liberty. My operating definition of liberty is an environment in which all interpersonal relations are consensual.

In order for two parties to communicate with each other, there must first be an intent to communicate. When that intent exists, the mechanisms will be negotiated between those parties.

For a 3rd party to enter the picture and dictate the mechanisms under threat of force is morally wrong in my opinion. There is no justification for that.

The only narrow area that I can think of is when government adopts a policy that says "For the purposes of communicating with the government, specifically, these are the languages that we promise to support."

That is no different than private individuals saying "If you want to communicate with me, these are the languages and tools that you can use to reach me."

I don't know what makes business so "special" or different that you would hold them to a standard above that of the government. Food labels? You might as well say that a company is required by law to print food labels in every single language that exists on the planet... as their may be some customer that walks into the store that doesn't speak English or French (to keep this within Canada). That would be absurd.

Government's job is not to "protect" a language. Government's job is to protect the rights of each and every individual that exists within it's operating jurisdiction. Those rights include the right to express yourself freely and to associate freely. Compelling that communication between private individuals take a specific form is to infringe upon the rights of those individuals.

There is no "middle ground" here. Either two parties are able to communicate using whatever means THEY chose, or some other 3rd party is interfering forcibly under threat of punishment. That latter scenario is not "middle ground", it's the illegitimate initiation of force against individuals who are just living their lives and going about their business. The fact that they are choosing to do so using a language or tool set that you don't like or approve of is none of your business and doesn't hurt you in any way. Go read a book or something and stop worrying so much about the private lives of others, you authoritarian nutter.

[Citation Needed]

I'm Canadian. Private practice is ILLEGAL here. I don't even want to jump in to the argument about whether single-payer or multi-tier or the Canadian vs the US system is better or worse. I'm just stating the facts as I know them to be as a Canadian. At least it is in Ontario, it might differ for other provinces, there are no private options. I get to choose the public one or the public one. If I wanted to pay out of pocket to go visit a private clinic somewhere, that doesn't exist.

Stop spreading misinformation.

I agree with both of you.

I grew up below the poverty line. My brother and I were raised by a single mother who collected welfare as often, if not more, than she held low paying jobs. It's cliche to say "we stole ketchup packets from fast food restaurants and ate ketchup on crackers" but I literally have memories of that. I remember when my mother put utility bills in my brother's name because she had been delinquent on bills and owed them money and we had gotten shut off.

This poverty led to teenage "rebellion" and delinquency. I conceived my first daughter when I was 16 years-old. I married her mother, so I feel very fortunate to have found my soul mate in high school and we are still going strong almost 30 years later. But those early years when we were teenage and young adult parents was more poverty to a level that I doubt most people who are struggling today would be able to comprehend unless they are also young parents without great employment prospects.

It wasn't easy, and I would never dismiss the real struggles that people are facing. But I did manage to pull myself and my family out of poverty through intelligent decision making and hard work. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" might sound cold and callous, and gets used as a straw-man by people who think it is intended as being dismissive. But my own personal lived experiences serve as a proof of concept. Chance is a factor, but it is not one that you can control so I've always chosen to focus on what I CAN control. And it's not like I had rich parents or family. My entire family was below the poverty line and my father was absent.

I came out of those struggles not believing, but having observed empirically, that even when you are screwed six ways to Sunday, there ARE choices you can make. Some of those decisions can leave you slightly better off, and if you consistently make those you can gradually climb yourself out. It takes time and it's hard, but you can do it. Other decisions, like reaching for a credit card out of desperation, will leave you worse off. I would argue that a decision that leaves you worse off is worse than just doing nothing. Worse than not reaching for it as a last resort. I think that's where a lot of people fall into the trap. They have bills, their utilities are about to get shut off, they're going to get evicted (I've been in ALL of those positions with kids to think about!) ... and so they reach for a credit card not knowing what else to do and they justify it as "this was for emergencies anyway".

And it only makes things worse.

I don't share your pessimism.

The Achilles Heel of LLMs is that they are trained on human generated content. If that human generated content disappears, then so does the LLMs. People, in general, don't just crave "content", as if the concept is something ephemeral that exists in a vacuum. They crave specific content that meets specific requirements.

Maybe someone will be content watching entertainment, for example, that is completely artificial in every way (AI generated with nothing novel). But have you noticed how fashion, trends and subcultures tend to form around loathing cookie cutter, bland and artificial? Have you heard the term "Corporate Memphis" ? It is a recognized art style that has caught on amongst marketing teams and departments. It has it's advantages but it also has entire groups of people who deride, make fun of and hate it.

Now, even if you then argue that an AI's super power is that it can produce content in any kind of style or aesthetic... it can't do things that are truly novel or original. Of course now we open the door to a philosophical discussion about whether humans can generate *truly* novel content either. But what an AI will always lack is that "human touch." The authenticity. The culturally relevant commentary. The empathy and touching on something that people "feel" is "real." The "human touch" that most everyone, except on tech news sites :P, seems to be craving more of in the social media era.

I realize that part of your thesis is that novel content will continue to be produced by "altruists." To this I offer that the second commercial interests start to sense that their competitive advantage will come through distancing themselves from AI content and embracing branding and messaging that feels authentic and novel and is not artificial .,.. suddenly human artists are going to find themselves in big demand. And then maybe that new content will train new LLMs and we will cycle when the economy does poorly and people embrace LLMs to cut costs again.

And I give that like ... a year at most.

We need to remember that the consumers of content are human beings. And human beings are picky and judgy and finicky and trendy af. And businesses are there to sell shit to those humans.

I don't know.

I'm all for making education as accessible as possible, and something is definitely broken.

But education can never be "free" in an absolute sense. It requires educators & administrators. Someone has to put in the work of creating the curriculum and teaching the students... not to mention acquiring the skills and experience to be able to do so effectively. And if it is a physical school that we're talking about, there are a lot of maintenance costs associated with the property as well.

All of that said, something contributed to tuition costs getting absurdly out of hand, and of a cultural shift towards more and more skepticism regarding the value of a degree and the return on an individual's investment. So tuition prices definitely seem skewed.

In most areas of the economy, the path to low prices is abundance. And I don't think that an education qua education is necessarily expensive. But some specific tuition at specific universities have gotten outlandish.

My question, and I don't pretend to know all the answers, is "why"?

I'm skeptical that free tuition is an answer to any problem. To begin, at best it casts doubt on a university's ability to make common sense financial decisions. At worse it supports the suspicion that their business model is so skewed towards political favours and handouts that they believe that it won't make any difference to their bottom line. Both scenarios spell bad news to me.

Secondly, while I have been focusing on the business side of education, there is an individual element as well. I'm a firm believer that ALL education is independent. You can have the best teachers in the entire world, but if the student doesn't put in the individual effort and hard work to understand and integrate the knowledge being shared, they won't be "educated." It will just be a complete waste of time and money. I'm sure that a good amount of students benefiting from "free of charge" education will put in the work, but you also risk turning universities into the joke that is primary and secondary public education.

I don't have the answers. But my knowledge of economics tells me that if you want maximum quality education at rock bottom prices then the best route is to encourage as much competition in the space as possible. You do that by removing barriers to establishing new schools, and making sure that incentive structures are sane. Instead of trying to restrict the amount of money that can be made in the space, you reward success and punish failure by creating an environment where it is very easy to start a new school, and if you succeed you get to reap all the rewards, but you're also taking all the risks so if you fail you go out of business.

You used an operant word there: "force."

I don't have a problem with people who want to drive less. I don't have a problem with advocating for more bike-friendly and pedestrian friendly cities. I don't even have a problem if vehicles become less prevalent and people choose to use different means of transportation.

But tell someone they can't. Pass a law. Force them to change their lifestyle because you think it's better for x, y and z and now there's a conflict by necessity. It is an act of aggression. You've left someone without choice. They didn't do that. The ones doing the forcing did.

A lot of people use government as the hammer and see every single problem as a nail. We don't need to apply the strong arm of the law to every single "problem." Sometimes, it is nice to get into a car and grab a whole bunch of things in one trip so you don't have to leave the house as much and you can get those chores done faster and more efficiently. That's a valid reason to want to drive a car. We can and should have conversations about environmental impacts, noise pollution and all other problems that vehicles can and do introduce. But the second you try and force people in some way, the conversation is over. That's just the way that force works. It is the opposite of dialogue, diplomacy and consensual interaction.

It often strikes me as odd how often people frame it as some kind of morally superior or preferable way to organize society. I'm personally of the opinion that force should be reserved for retaliation and that we should try to live and let live as much as possible and not use laws and the strong arm of the government to bend people to our way of thinking as long as all relations are consensual. But that's just me.

Others have already responded to this, but I want to add my own $0.02 because this is a fallacy.

Every technological invention throughout all of human history, going back to the wheel or the most basic of primitive tools, has been created in the service of reducing the amount of human labour required to perform a given task.

The trap you've fallen into is " leading to less human economic activity." This is, to put it politely, bullshit. When people have to do less manual labour, they can perform more tasks in a given time period. If you can cart your goods from place A to place B instead of having to carry them in your arms through multiple trips, you have more time in your day to devote to other productive activities like making more things to put in that cart to sell at the market.

So technological inventions, while they do occasionally cause disruptions (motor vehicles certainly disrupted the horse and buggy industry for example), they do not have a history of causing productivity to decrease through "less human activity." The major disruptive technologies that have reduced the amount of human labour required to perform a task have INCREASED the sum total of human productive activity across economies.

The less manual labour required to do a given thing, the more shit gets done. The more shit gets done, the more abundance of goods & services exist, the more abundance of goods & services the lower things cost (supply vs demand), the lower things cost the more money people have left over to invest in other activities (even just to save or invest on a personal level) and on and on and on.

Even if AI had the potential to be extremely disruptive to labour markets, productivity should be increasing and thus GDP should be seeing a similar climb ... that is to say IF AI were not snake oil that is failing to deliver on its productivity gain promises.

I just bought my wife an HP laptop through Amazon without thinking too much on the brand. It had decent reviews and the price was right. If I had known that they had some arbitrary imposed 15 minute wait time for customer support calls, in any country, I would have bought a different brand.

I guess it's good that they are course correcting but doing something like that in the first place is enough to get them on my shit list. It is a deliberate and calculated wasting of their customers' time. Having lost a parent to brain cancer with all of 5 months notice, any amount of deliberately wasting time is the best way to get me to hate you with a fiery passion. It doesn't even have to be my time that's being wasted. It's the principle of the thing.

I think the reason people find this noteworthy (no pun intended - ok maybe a little) is that notepad has always been something you reach for when you don't want bloat and just need a bare-bones ASCII editor for something quick. It's not that there is a feature that can be safely ignored if one doesn't want to pay for it. It's that said feature's code (bloat) has made its way into what always used to just be there if you need a bare bones text editor.

So after decades of being able to rely on it, I predict that some users (such as myself) might find themselves taking the time to install something FOSS for this purpose. Which is a very small deal, admitted. But it means Windows as a whole just became slightly less valuable / useful straight out of the box for reasons that few are able to fathom (who needs or wants AI features in notepad of all things?!)

The word "freedom" can be contentious. Everyone has their own idea of what it means, but few people really think it through. A lot of people think of it as "the freedom to do whatever you want" and then temper that with "freedom has limits."

This is why my personal operating definition of freedom/liberty is: "an environment in which all interpersonal relationships are consensual."

It's still imperfect (or at least incomplete) because we do have interpersonal relationships where it's more nuanced than that: such as parent/child relationships.

But the reason I like it is that it relegates the concept to its proper domain: politics. In philosophy, politics is the subject concerning itself with how people get along with and interact with each other. Humans have the capacity for both reason/diplomacy and force. Force is, by definition, a violation of consent. An environment where the element of force is removed from civil existence to the extent that even government itself recognizes that it has a very special and exclusive power and therefore can only morally and practically exist with the consent of the governed plus a ton of checks and balances, is an environment that I, personally, would consider to be "free."

This means, even if others would find it unfortunate, that a company can be a "mini dictatorship" without contradicting the idea that the country in which they operate is a free country, as long as people can choose whether or not to work there. Despite how we might talk about it colloquially, no one "owns" a job. A job is an agreement between two parties to exchange value for value. It's the terms of that agreement that we (including myself) are objecting to. Anyone that doesn't like the terms of a contract shouldn't enter into that contract.

FWIW I disapprove of the the CEO's position and think it is unwise for a myriad of reasons, including business reasons. But I recognize and respect his right to run his company how he wants to. It's not a crime to be wrong.

Yeah I should be counted as a "TV" viewer but YouTube will see me as a desktop/web user running Linux ... since I don't connect my "smart" TV to the Internet and instead use a mini computer running Linux with a heavily customized KDE and a USB remote control to make it feel like a smart TV UI. I'm probably in the extreme minority and wouldn't really skew their metrics at all. But device detection is kind of tricky with a "platform" as massive as they are.

You got modded down, so I'm not sure that this response is necessary, but do you realize how old Disney is?

40+ years ago, when Michael Eisner was CEO and EPCOT was under construction in Florida, one of Eisner's teenager relatives (might have been his son, can't remember) opined that "Disney is for kids" and that inspired Eisner to put in an attraction at EPCOT that is no longer there but was loosely based on the Terminator movie (Disney doesn't own Terminator so it was something different, but Terminator was a hot commodity at the time and they were facing competition from Universal Studios so they basically copied the concept and did their own knock-off in the form of a ride).

This is also why Touchstone Pictures existed. Touchstone was Disney's way of producing and marketing movies that don't fit with the family friend "Disney" brand.

So this has been something Disney has been good at dealing with for DECADES. It's not like they are a 30 year old company and now all the Disney kids are grown ups for the first time. There were "Disney kids" who were children when the first Snow White animated film came out in 1937 who have since grown up so much that they died of old age.

I don't think we have yet to solve the triage problem. I hate chat bots as much as the next person and wish they'd go away, but I also sympathize with companies that need to spend an inordinate amount of money having people take calls that could be solved if the user would just rtfm. I also get that not all documentation is good either. Again, this is a complex set of issues that's difficult to solve purely through technical means.

I've noticed that a lot of phone menu systems don't support pressing '0' to get a human anymore. That's probably because people got "trained" to just always press 0 and not even listen to the menu. But this ends up driving customers crazy when there is no menu option that applies to what they are calling about.

Cost is a factor too. People want good customer service, but they also want inexpensive products. I'm a little bit surprised that we don't see more companies offering paid support tiers so they can keep costs low but cover support costs for customers willing to pay for it.

No real point, just musing about the challenges that having good customer support in an online context presents. I don't know anyone that doesn't want better customer service in general. I also don't know anyone that wants to pay more for stuff they buy. All I know is that I hope someone at some point thinks of a novel solution that ends up being a game changer because CS is very broken across most industries.