scottLobster

> No matter what happens, humans won't stop being humans.

Yes, and humans evolved in an environment of resource scarcity. Literally every instinct we have, including addiction and every psychological condition we categorize as mental illness, is tuned to that.

We are not biologically equipped for a post-scarcity environment, and to thrive in such an environment without destroying it would take a monumental cultural adaptation that not many would be capable of. Children is a bad analogy, because even children have forms of material scarcity guiding them. The reason to grow up at all is to be able to provide for yourself. Everyone is jealous of the "rich kid" in school.

Beyond the theory, see the global transition from hunter gatherer to agriculture. It was insanely violent despite the overall growth in material resources and took thousands of years to truly stabilize into what we'd call civilization, and that civilization was plenty violent all on its own.

Ironically, if we ever did get a material utopia, part of it would have to be manufactured scarcity just so we don't all go insane. And now imagine what the predators amongst us would do in such an environment, their utopia is destruction of others, and they'd have all the resources they'd need to do it.

Agree to a point, but I don't think it would be the majority. It would be a minority of people who subscribe to philosophies that provide meaning and motivation to life beyond hedonism and material gain. The rest will be happy, or at least resigned, to vegetate in endless endorphin loops.

It's already visible today, with people of all ages spouting all sorts of hedonistic nihilism to justify not making an effort to improve their condition. Some sort of technological singularly would simply be an amplifier of our current dysfunctions.

To some extent it would be the apocalypse. The motivated people would band together and live in physically secure communities, while the nihilists form what amount to a vast expanse of homeless encampments and wallow in their addictions, occasionally making poorly coordinated attacks on the gated communities to dry and drag the motivated people down to their level out of spite.

Picture drug addicts who win the lottery. It won't be pretty

More like humanity still has plenty of problems worth solving, and most people aren't so high on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as to ignore them.

If someone handed me 50 million dollars today I'd probably "enjoy learning" a lot more, like when I was a child and all my material needs were met so spending time learning obscure facts about dinosaurs didn't have a marginal cost.

As a FF user, I've had to fall back to Edge/Chrome many times because some obscure hospital telehealth portal or bank website or whatever has issues.

I want FF to be successful, but unfortunately it's not really up to Mozilla

I tried a couple of times to post questions on SO. Every time I followed the instructions, searched first and didn't find an answer, spent the better part of an hour composing the best possible question and simplified examples...

All to have my post locked/marked/closed/whatever either as a duplicate (it wasn't) or some other bullshit.

Call it a skill issue if you want, but I was going there for help at the time and just got the door slammed in my face repeatably with no guidance as to how to stop that from happening. The gate-keeping was simply insane, and it's clear I wasn't the only one that decided it wasn't worth the time.

And while they claim to be peaceful, the underlying argument is that human life is the problem to be solved, and if you believe in increasing living standards or having children you're the enemy.

Hard to see how that stops at halting powerplant construction. Theses people would accidentally cause a famine with their agricultural policies and look upon the starving children as "progress", even if they're socialized enough to never say it out loud. Scary shit.

Yeah that's my point. Sooner or later a human is going to have to go hunting "inside the box", and those humans will have to be capable of doing so competently.

I'm not seeing post-AI training of juniors handled at all, anywhere. The closest thing is what my employer does where for liability reasons every command executed by an AI agent, even as simple as an ls, has to be manually approved by the developer. This has the side effect of walking you through the AI's analysis, which can be quite educational.

Given the general culture of corporate cost-cutting (the whole appeal of AI is it doesn't need a benefits package), it's possible we're heading into a future where people trained pre-AI turn into a dedicated guild of professional troubleshooters, demanding fat paychecks to parachute in and put out fires when a company's giant blob of agents fails and their in-house staff lacks the deep knowledge to figure it out.

You just stated the reason why engineers have a hard time getting hired as baristas when they're laid off.

The hiring restaurant knows you can and will walk as soon as you land another engineering gig.

And how will you have the skill to go hunting inside the box if all you ever do is high level systems work?

Even if you're relying on extremely thorough test and validation, well someone who understands things at a low level has to write said tests and validations.

So long as humans are legally liable, this approach will only work until someone gets sued. Which means human experts will need to still exist and be trained, perhaps their training will just have to be more explicit rather than gained through the act of building products. Companies will hate this.

I wasn't "exploring" in the spiritual sense or "talking", I was brute-force-searching the entire map to find whatever stupid magic button or item or conversation the devs were forcing me to have so I could keep playing the game.

Completely immersion breaking.

> but there's really a way in which "figure it out yourself" and/or read the guidebook/talk to people was better.

Going to have to disagree on this one. Perhaps if you have an extremely well architected game that will organically guide a lost player in the right direction it can work, but I have many painful memories of just blindly exploring entire maps and clicking on every NPC because the obvious route of progression wasn't doing anything. Sometimes it would be an actual quest bug and I'd just be wasting my time.

Particularly in large open world games like GTA/Witcher 3/etc, quest tracking of some sort is mandatory.

And DOGE decided to deal with that cancer by blasting it with a shotgun and leaving the patient to bleed out

Not when it's below freezing and/or raining outside

We used the firefighters busting it out as an excuse to put in a stove insert. Much more heat, just as good ambience.

Could be I'm the weird one, at least in this community. There's at least one thread on here every day about how some language or platform is better/worse due to some esoteric feature or other and every time I try to read one of those I just can't bring myself to care. Seems like the same tasks can get done in roughly the same amount of time, most of the time. I'm also the only one of my coworkers who uses vi/vim daily, strictly because some variety of vi/vim is on every machine I could ever possibly need to access and I hate having to ask permission to install things just to do my job.

Just offering the perspective from someone for whom grad school (or at least my taste of it) was more difficult in aggregate. I'm glad people like you exist, for all the time you waste navel gazing you occasionally stumble across something incredibly useful that people like me would probably never find. :)