my assessment of the situation: "we've spent so much money on AI's promise to give us 5x, 10x returns, that now we have to earn it back by foisting the burden on developers to make up the gains by working harder, at least enough to recoup the exec's decision to pour money into the boondoggle".

"Hey developers, we spent $x million on Claude, who promised 7x returns, so YOU better make it 7x more efficient so we don't look bad".

yea the real frightening thing about this is, if there is a clear failure to get roi on this stuff, the top-level people will be very reticent to walk it all back and admit it was a royal fuckup

You are using the fact that government officials are inept, inefficient, and corrupt to imply there is some big secret that somehow nobody else knows?

Do you claim this absence of evidence is actually evidence of some fantastical claim?

And phased-array antennae. The network would be next to useless if each receiver needed to track the satellite physically.

Beamforming is an old technology though. It's not hard to do, just a pain to do cheaply when you've got a bajillion emitters unless you have custom silicon.

>Beamforming is an old technology though. It's not hard to do

Well, so is satellite launch right? Cost, efficiency, and scaling are hard to do. That's SpaceX's entire raison d'etre. Doing a general public usable all weather maintenance free well designed phased array terminal they can sell for $250 and pump out by the millions is as worthy an achievement as near anything else in the Starlink project. And I'd love if it was more available too even terrestrially, for PtP/PtMP links alignment even motionless is a certain amount of work at long distances. And long range high bandwidth stuff isn't cheap. It'd be pretty cool if you could have units for $250 that you just needed to aim vaguely in the right direction and then it all just worked.

Hardware gets a bit easier in some respects when you have unit scale and don't need to make COGS+margin back on the sale. If Ubiquiti sell a base station, half of the unit price is gross margin. If SpaceX sell a Starlink terminal, they don't even have to cover COGS for it to be a good business case, because they're selling the service not the device.

The Starlink terminal is a very cool piece of kit, but it's not nearly as interesting as what they're hucking into LEO, and how they're doing it.

> Well, so is satellite launch right? Cost, efficiency, and scaling are hard to do.

The famous phrase 'Quantity has a quality of its own' comes to mind.

I disagree. Driving a small dish antenna only requires a couple of small electric motors. The receivers would be more expensive, and require more power, but they would still be affordable enough.

They would break more often. This was a key limitation of LEO systems prior to Starlink.

but what about the interruption when the satellite crosses over the horizon? you would then need a 2nd antenna that was ready to take over, or tolerate several seconds of lost signal.

Space is big. Really, really big.

Even with 10,000 satellites, any one satellite is probably going to be 100 miles away from the next nearest satellite.

Roulette uses a physical process and is not compromised.

I know roulette is random enough but here is a fun book by some physics whizzes who tried to make money off the game.

The Eudaemonic Pie is a non-fiction book about gambling by American author Thomas A. Bass. The book was initially published in April 1985 by Houghton Mifflin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie

The book focuses on a group of University of California, Santa Cruz, physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp, that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos.

Yes if you hold a camera and capture the speed and position of the ball and wheel you can gain an edge, people have tried it. Good point.

It literally has to be compromised to work. If the roulette machinery was perfect, you would be able to predict the outcome with Newtonian physics at the start of the spin. It has to have irregularities and asymmetries to trigger chaotic behaviour – and those same irregularities and asymmetries make the outcome biased!

But if that physical process were somehow complicated, why, you could break the bank at Monte Carlo!

I would love to hear the Bluetooth engineers battle it out. I know BT isn't the only reason people want wired, but it's got to be one of the aggravating factors.

Is it the specs fault? Hard to believe if they have gone through at least 5 major revisions. Is it those stupid engineers that didn't implement the spec? Is it the chipsets? I want to see a "who made Bluetooth suck?" Showdown

Job loss is a horrible reason to ban something. Think about our history if we always did that. We would all be stuck working on farms today, because we didn’t want to allow tractors or other machinery because it would take away farming jobs.

Instead of banning tech to save jobs, pass laws that make sure tech prices in externalities (tax carbon emissions), and find other ways to assist people who lose jobs (UBI, good social safety nets, etc).

Don’t stifle progress just because it makes us have to work less.

Right - fix the economy instead. Why should increasing efficiency cause people to have less resources - that makes no sense.

Because there are people who live off rent (in a broad sense of this world), and there are people who live off selling their ability to work. Increased efficiency and productivity may or may not benefit the second kind of people, depending on whether they can sell their labour to be used for something else.

So instead of figuring out ways to limit the ability of people to live off rent, we want to ban beneficial things that people could extract rent from?

This is like saying, "We don't like how landlords extract value from housing, so we are banning apartment buildings"

Well, usually we tax the landlords instead. But when the landlords make up the overwhelming majority of the legislature, this tend to not happen.

The situation with apartment buildings is even more quirky because the USA has quite ridiculous zoning regulations, which AIUI many landlords actually support? It's really a wonderful barrel of worms, and I am glad I have no paddle in it.

Banning AI does increase efficiency. It makes it more efficient for a working class family to afford to survive. What perverted definition of the word were you considering?

How is this different from saying "Banning mechanical farm equipment does increase efficiency, it makes it more efficient for farm workers to afford to survive"

You are fighting against productivity improvements when you should be fighting against people hoarding the benefits of productivity improvements.

That doesn't answer my question. My claim is that people working is efficient.

Your definition of efficient doesn't make any sense. If people can work less and produce more, that is the definition of efficient.

I agree that keeping everyone fed and sheltered is of primary importance... but wouldn't it be better to have everyone work less while doing that?

Let's have robots do all the hard work and then share the wealth with everyone. Why force people to work at jobs that could be done easier just to make sure we employee everyone? Might as well just pay people to move rocks back and forth.

Just increase taxes on robots and use that to pay basic income.

> Let's have the robots do all the hard work and then share the wealth with everyone

That sounds fantastic, except that in our capitalist economy the wealth will not be shared by everyone, and will instead be funnelled directly to the tech oligarchy, while workers get laid off. Until we fix that part of the equation, innovations to efficiency will continue to result in working people getting screwed over by technological innovation.

Sure, but this entire thread is about hypotheticals anyway.

It will be equally politically difficult to ban AI as it would be to grab some of the wealth generated by AI for the exact same reasons - either attempt would be fought against by the same tech oligarchs, for the same reason. To protect their money.

If we are going to have to fight them anyway, let's fight for the one where we don't have to work jobs that could be done by computers instead, while still having the same income.

And we don't have to get rid of capitalism entirely to spread the wealth. UBI can be used in a capitalist society, too.

A carpenter using a hand saw instead of a power saw just to keep more carpenters employed is not being efficient. It's Pareto-better to keep all those carpenters employed, earning the same salary for fewer hours.

> Job loss is a horrible reason to ban something. Think about our history if we always did that.

The US has continually set up protectionist policies to preserve a local workforce. Automotive manufacturers, the shipbuilding industry, etc.

These are bad things

In an economy that depends on consumer spending, you can only wipe out so many jobs until no one can afford to purchase consumer goods.

Car dealerships would like a word.

Another example why these types of laws make things worse for people.

If the idea was that laws must be motivated by a negative occurrence rather than preemptive, then that'd follow yeah (if counting job loss as a reason to ban something, which I think is questionable). But note akersten is saying that it's normal for laws to be preemptive in both cases.

Just like when musicians were on strike and the radio people decided to play a recording over the air (gasp! a record!) rather than live performances.

A nice ban on playing recorded music would have saved those jobs.

Bad example. You are agreeing that copyright is owned by the people whose work an AI agent is trained on. Sure, come take a class of jobs, and then pay them in perpetuity to license the exposition of their work. For 75 years after the authors death, just like current copyright.

I want reverse age verification that lists the ages of every social network post. I think a lot of people that criticize social network toxicity don't realize their interlocutors are half their age. It's not one-to-one, meaning maturity doesn't follow from age, but I think there would be some affordances made in both directions. A younger person would be less surprised that a 60+ yr old would hold certain views. And vice versa.

This was the thing the saws-all (or whatever it was called, the brake that stops you from cutting your fingers off with the table saw) tried, right? I don't know if it succeeded but the idea was a government mandate for an otherwise good idea. Everyone then pays more.

SawStop