eloff

That matters little.

The point is people on HN missed the potential of Dropbox because for them it was a problem they already had a half solution for. For regular people who don’t know what an rsync is, Dropbox seemed like magic.

The moral of the story is that if a solution is only available to a technicaly savvy minority, the market opportunity is still wide open.

I stand corrected!

There's a important lesson about using nuclear power as an energy source in there. Contrast that with Germany which is shuttering their nuclear power plants in favor of renewables.

Don't be pedantic. From Oxford dictionary: "advance or development toward a better, more complete, or more modern condition"

Then you get a revolution and the whole system is torn down and rebuilt in a different form. That's highly undesirable, and as I mentioned, is a real tail risk to consider.

"progress is inevitable": It's not actually. Progress is only made if people take the risk and effort to advance progress. That does require rewarding them appropriately for the risk taken. I'm not saying we get that balance exactly right currently, but it is necessary.

In general just taxing the winners (wealthy) period is well tolerated politcally, but it also requires a goverment that's somewhat fiscally responsible and not spending $800B a year on their military instead of social programs. The US hasn't had a fiscally responsible government since Clinton, and the pigeons are currently coming home to roost in the form of inflation and loss of confidence in the US dollar as the reserve currency.

How that is handled really comes down to how your society has agreed to establish a social safety net.

In Northern Europe it’s handled quite well. In the U.S. it’s handled with a “callous lack of empathy” as you phrased it.

My point is disruption is the engine of progress, but it also causes temporary pain (that might not be temporary on the scale of human lifetimes.) It’s the wrong reaction to want to stop or slow progress. You can actually prove that through the lens of game theory and the fact that we have multiple human societies. The right thing to do is ensure your society doesn’t leave the losers of that process behind.

I agree, I said as much about winners and losers being created.

It’s still a good thing for society - the alternative is halting or slowing progress.

That cycle has gone on since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Jobs are destroyed, people complain and protest, new jobs are created and the total economic pie and the absolute size of the average person’s slice increases.

A valid question is are there inventions for which this would not be true? I think yes for general AI, but also yes for people who are unable to migrate between a job lost and any of the new jobs created due to lack of education or willingness to reinvent themselves or relocate to where the new jobs are. Innovation can definitely create winners and losers. That’s bad for the losers, but not necessarily for society as a whole. Unless so many losers are created that they rise up and overthrow the system. That’s a real long tail risk if the pace of change sufficiently outpaces our ability to adapt to it.

It’s both really if you look at IQ tests. It’s part of the reason immigrants will often score lower, they lack the culture or language specific knowledge being tested.

IQ is a proxy for intelligence. People often use them interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Your statement is more valid for intelligence than IQ.

I use gbd so rarely that I often forget the commands between sessions. Then I use print debugging when it’s not the best tool just because I don’t want to lookup the commands. I could see the use for this kind of thing.

Same problem when coding shell scripts. It’s like they tried to invent the hardest to remember language. I often use python instead of bash just because I can remember it and read it.

Even the plants are trying to kill you in Australia. That continent seems to have a bonanza of deadly critters.

Still, when you look at the statistics, any urban area in the U.S. is more dangerous than Australian wildlife. Both the roads and the people.

Edit: downvoter doesn’t grok math

You are not only more likely to be attacked by a human in New York than the wildlife in Australia, you’re more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker than a critter in Oz.

I’m just a computer guy, but I also see that as likely. When it comes down to it there’s less than 100 elements, made of a handful of forces and subatomic particles that make up the incredible universe that we live in. It seems somehow to get simpler as you go down.

Until you hit all the quantum weirdness and then it’s all wave functions and probabilities. That maybe comes out of something simple as well.