Mordisquitos

I think you missed the point of my message. Web browsing still happens by connecting to data centres, so why are consumer laptops so much more (unnecessarily) powerful today than they were 20 years ago? All the more so given that, at that time, you were running MS Office locally rather than using Office 365 or Google Docs remotely.

The trend over the past three decades of personal computing has been for devices to become exponentially more powerful regardless of the actual computing needs of users. The excess computing power has famously been requested by projects such as SETI@Home and Folding@Home, and been exploited by bad actors for crypto mining. The most basic laptop today used only for web browsing and word processing would be a powerful workstation 20 years ago, when the most basic laptop was also used only for web browsing and word processing (and arguably for more things, as it was all mostly local software).

There is no ceiling to the power of consumer hardware. If it's cheap enough, it will be bought.

> That's fine. We need a fix for today's problems today.

No, we don't. It is Anthropic, Google, OpenAI et al. who need a fix for those problems today. Let them deal with it.

It's not the net fart that kills your connection, it is the server smell.

So you're saying that four-day-workweek companies saw no decline in their productivity, in contrast to the Australian average productivity which went down overall‽

That means the four-day-workweek is even better than we thought it was!

That's an insightful prediction! Agentic LLMs won't only replace the browser, they will also optimize and enhance the content that you should consume. Would you like us to go deeper into how human comments and conversations on HN submissions will also become obsolete thanks to AI?

> I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos.

Absolutely, I just made a similar comment before I saw yours. In fact, I would argue that the headline is also arguably burying the lede on commencement speakers believing that their AI pep talk speeches will be well-received by students. The newsworthy item is 'Man Bites Dog', not 'Vet Treats Bitten Dog'.

What I found surprising of the couple of video examples I've seen was not the students' reactions; those were completely predictable. Rather, what most stood out to me was the absolute detachment displayed by the speakers in believing that the students would like to hear their dystopian AI maximalism, and their inability to read the room and understand the reaction from the audience.

> Most games bought on steam will never be played, not even once.

How did you gain access to my Steam library statistics?

In fact, I find your very comment as an example of the variety of visual experiences that exist that I hadn't even thought of. I mean when you say “Like when you are exhausted you get double vision” that itself sounds alien to me. I have been exhausted many times but never associated it with seeing double. I have only experienced involuntary double vision in certain circumstances during my recovery from a severe TBI.

I have a similar intuition to yours. On many topics it isn't so much self-censorship, it is simply that for many people there is rightly no motivation to go around announcing their nuanced, moderate, or no-opinion-but-unimpressed-by-extremes positions.

Even when people do have strong opinions on a topic (and a moderate opinion can also be strong), most people have better things to do with their lives than to go around blasting their opinions to the world as a hobby. And the few in this camp that do are not very likely to be amplified by the engagement algorithms.

I am not impacted by this issue on either side, but I am in the "dehumanising" camp, so here are my opinions:

> Is it dehumanizing to Filipinos that Filipinos probably now do their job more efficiently without having to learn an accent that they are not exposed to?

It's already demeaning to expect them to "learn an accent", unless their job description is to literally pretend they are from a different culture (e.g. if they were actors). Introducing an "AI" middleman to change their voice is demeaning and dehumanising.

> Is it dehumanizing to Filipinos that they no longer enjoy having their accent heard as a externality of a counterfactual arrangement?

It is dehumanising to any person that their own human voice is no longer heard when performing a job involving human contact.

> Is it dehumanizing to the customers that the company does not expect their customers to be cosmopolitan enough to understand a foreign accent with ease?

Not quite dehumanising, but it is certainly patronising that the company has an opinion as to what voice their customers can or cannot understand. And if the company is hiring customer service agents whose accents are a serious hinderance to understanding, I would argue that their hires are not likely to accurately understand the very customers they are supposed to assist.

>Is it dehumanizing to the customers that the customers are now more sensorily shielded from a current-day reality regarding globalized providers of service?

Not dehumanising, but again patronising, and also disrespectful and borderline dishonest.

I won't get into the final two points, as those are prior to the accent-middleman "AI".

The quality of the content is not the issue here.