This nation does now and always has depended on immigrants. This recent ICE nonsense is capricious (no public plan), punitive (targets mostly political opponents), and illegal (targets skin color).
Generations hence, I see a future where school children are taught their lessons:
“Now that we’ve studied the classic American authors, like Emerson, let’s learn about the next generation. Their leading light was cantor_S_drug, who brilliantly updated a classic author with modern sensibilities. Just look at those double ellipses — truly a poetic legend.”
Just to be clear, by “steal his company’s lunch” you mean “use software his company published in the manner specified by that software’s license,” right? It’s a funny definition of theft.
> I dropped from the Pro Max to the Pro last year because I was tired of how much it hurt when I dropped my phone on my face.
Now this, good people, is a real use case. If it seems like an edge case to you, I guarantee Apple’s design and product people know of — and optimize for — use cases much more rare.
I'd rather optimize my $20 running shorts around my $1000 phone than the other way around tbh. No phone is comfortable in the pocket when running though, I used to use an arm strap and more recently just take the watch.
I carry two phones on me and if I run with just my SE it is comfortable enough to run with
But its not about optimisation it's about freedom. I don't enjoy having to baby around a lumbering 6 inch phone. I want my phone to optimise around me being able to not worrying about a brick sagging in my shorts.
The horizontal rear waistband zipper pocket on Patagonia Strider Pro running shorts genuinely makes my phone not noticeable at all during runs, unlike any other shorts I’ve tried. My experience is limited to smaller phones (6S, 12 Mini) without any cases, though.
It also hurts when I drop the iPad mini on my face. In fact, I was considering getting a Pro Max to replace both a iPhone Pro and iPad mini combo but figured it might too big of a compromise.
I wonder if anyone has successfully gone down this path.
You know, for many decades — centuries, even — people have had ideas like you had here, mandarwagh. You extrapolate ideas into the future, think really hard about it, and try to lay out a compelling vision.
Typically people also wrap character and whatnot around this skeleton and call it a “science fiction short story.” That also requires that you justify parts of the narrative, though, otherwise people might claim that what you’re writing is unrealistic.
Good point, and you are right that a lot of futurism reads like sci-fi. That said, this piece is not just imaginative storytelling, it is mechanism-based forecasting. The timeline links observable trends—rapid LLM capability gains, falling inference costs, cloud APIs that make deployment trivial, and huge economic incentives to replace repeatable knowledge work—with plausible policy and social responses, like UBI and regulatory lag. History shows these transitions can compress once the cost/benefit threshold is crossed, think smartphones, cloud services, or the sudden shift to remote work during COVID. So yes, the dates are aggressive, but the logic is empirical: if the technical and economic levers align, adoption can be much faster than we intuitively expect. If you want a stronger case, I can add a clear assumptions list and evidence anchors for each step.
> This paragraph really pisses me off and I'm not sure why.
No hate, but consider — when I feel that way, it’s often because one of my ideas or preconceptions has been put into question. I feel like it’s possible that I might be wrong, and I fucking hate that. But if I can get over hating it and figuring out why, I may learn something.
Here’s an example:
> Didn't google just prove there is little to no environmental harm, INCLUDING if you account for training?
Consider that Google is one of the creators of the supposed harm, and thus trusting them may not be a good idea. Tobacco companies still say smoking ain’t that bad
The harm argument is simple — AI data centers use energy, and nearly all forms of energy generation have negative side effects. Period. Any hand waving about where the energy comes from or how the harms are mitigated is, again, bullshit — energy can come from anywhere, people can mitigate harms however they like, and none of this requires LLM data centers.
> The harm argument is simple — AI data centers use energy, and nearly all forms of energy generation have negative side effects. Period. Any hand waving about where the energy comes from or how the harms are mitigated is, again, bullshit — energy can come from anywhere, people can mitigate harms however they like, and none of this requires LLM data centers.
Presented like this, the argument is complete bullshit. Anything we do consumes energy, therefore requires energy to be supplied, production of which has negative side effects, period.
Let's just call it a day on civilization and all (starve to death so that the few survivors can) go back to living in caves or up the trees.
The real questions are, a) how much more energy use are LLMs causing, and b) what value this provides. Just taking this directly, without going into the weeds of meta-level topics like the benefits of investment in compute and energy infrastructure, and how this is critical to solving climate problems - just taking this directly, already this becomes a nothing-burger, because LLMs are by far some of the least questionable ways to use energy humanity has.
The logical end step of these trains of thoughts is always the same. If you aren't contributing to the solution in a big way, you should kill yourself. And even if you can't take that step, you should absolutely not have children, and advocate that others do the same.
Viewing energy use as an axiomatic evil necessarily leads to the removal of man from the earth.
Moving the goal posts, IMO. The post I was replying to said “there is no harm.” That’s all I was contradicting. You can argue all day that the harm is _worth it_, but that’s not what OP was doing.
This nation does now and always has depended on immigrants. This recent ICE nonsense is capricious (no public plan), punitive (targets mostly political opponents), and illegal (targets skin color).