Oh, I absolutely agree with you on the probable outcomes if America did implement structural changes these days. That has like a 1% chance of actually being something positive. I think perhaps the most recent, best possible time for significant reforms was somewhere between 1930-1990. It depends mostly on the specific kind of reform (basically whether or not women or minorities were relevant to the change, farther in the past would be worse outcomes for them).

But some things like campaign finance reform, how many seats there are in the House, Supreme Court Reform, etc could’ve been accomplished with a relatively high likelihood of positive outcomes.

Basically before the complete collapse of proper journalism, when broadcast media was still king and most politicians still tended to compromise and were at least mostly interested in actually governing. It feels like post 90s, our governing body has passed some sort of tipping point where the majority of members are simply gaming the system, obstructing others from actually doing anything and shooting down any and all reasonable compromises. The actual productivity of Congress seems to be in total free fall. Bad actors pretty much always existed, but they only became a crippling number somewhat recently. (Or at least this seems true for the last 100 years, I have no idea if Congress was this dysfunctional in the early 1800s or something)

I’m not sure if anyone could conclusively declare a certain country’s democracy is totally better than ours, but several more recently created democracies have avoided many of the pitfalls that have been discovered with American implementation. Things like mandatory voting, ranked choice voting, better and stronger rules around money and political campaigns, more comprehensive list of citizen rights, etc. Most of those countries have their own missteps as well, but a lot of our issues have been solved, we just haven’t adopted the methods and improvements already shown to work. Typically because they’d require pretty extensive reform, which is incredibly hard to achieve with our government especially in the current political climate.

I’ve often thought that America suffers from being the first successful iteration of our style of government. It was great and a huge improvement over all the other examples at the time. So much so that much of the world eventually followed in its footsteps.

But where other countries looked at our first successful attempt and further improved and refined the idea, we’re still stuck on that very first version. What was once a radically new idea that worked so much better than everyone else, is now an old, outdated and barely functional relic. We’re the early prototype iPhone 3g, while several other countries have iPhone 6/10/etc

You’re expected to go to prison where they can legally use you for slave labor

I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I’m not even that old and it’s super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It’s not that we’re doing more with less, it’s a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.

I just hope to be dead before the circus breaks down

I’ve always kinda wondered about this. I’m not an audio guy and really can’t tell the difference between most of the standards. That said, I definitely remember tons and tons ‘experts’ telling me that no one can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p TV at typical distance to your couch. And I absolutely could and many of the people I know could. I can also tell the difference between 1080 and 4k, at the same distances.

So I’m curious if there’s just a natural variance in an individual’s ability to hear and audiophiles just have a better than average range that does exceed CD quality?

Similar to this, I can tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, but not 60 to 120, yet some people swear they can. Which I believe, I just know that I can’t. Seems like these guidelines are probably more averages, rather than hard biological limits.

I mostly agree, with the caveat that 99% of AI usage today just stupid gimmicks and very few people or companies are actually using what LLMs offer effectively.

It kind of feels like when schools got sold those Smart Whiteboards that were supposed to revolutionize teaching in the classroom, only to realize the issue wasn’t the tech, but the fact that the teachers all refused to learn and adapt and let the things gather dust.

I think modern LLMs should be used almost exclusively as an assistive tool to help empower a human worker further, but everyone seems to want an AI that you can just tell ‘do the thing’ and have it spit out a finalized output. We are very far from that stage in my opinion, and as you stated LLM tech is unlikely to get us there without some sort of major paradigm shift.

Would sky trains be as reliable? I assume subways are more reliable partially due to not being exposed to the elements.

Am I remembering yesterdays door locking or today?

The only way we’ll save ourselves is if we’re lucky enough to have some no name genius be born that somehow makes off world colonization possible. Our existing structures will not accomplish this.

Humanity has, in my opinion, only lasted as long as it has because every so often people were able to just walk away from a failed, corrupt society and start over somewhere else. Now that we’ve basically claimed the entire planet, that’s no longer possible. Only by being able to colonize other worlds do we regain that.

Existing human biology/neurology doesn’t seem to scale properly for governing existing populations. It just doesn’t work and the failure rate keeps accelerating.

Had a similar issue with a dishwasher. Unhooked it without asking us, refused to reinstall it. Bonus is that for whatever reason we apparently have a complicated dishwasher installation (it’s not next to a sink like they normally are). $300 to redo it.

New rule, billionaires must maintain a horde of gold and jewels worth at least 100 million at all times. If it gets stolen they have to make a new one. Anyone can try to steal it, but the billionaires can set lethal traps.

When literally every car manufacturer does it and does it on something that is technically a luxury, but most people have already got used to (like heated seats or apple carplay). The public has long revealed that they have basically no immunity towards these sorts of high level collusion tactics. And the government agencies meant to stop it seem to think it only counts if all the car manufacturers met in some sort of ‘let’s be evil’ conference to plan it out, instead of, you know, just copying off what everyone else is doing.

The fact that I’m forced to buy a car just to participate in modern life, but then not really own that car is infuriating. I’d rather just have functioning public transit, not this abomination of capitalism that electric cars seem to herald for us.

Basically any movement against bad people who happen to be part of a minority seems to get hijacked by bigoted people eventually.

I really don’t understand how people who are reasonably devout followers of different religions ever end up together. Almost all of them make it against the rules or at least extremely problematic. Why would you marry someone that your religion says is going to hell because they don’t believe what you do? And if you do it anyway, why would you stay in that religion? Makes no sense.

Same. Also all those tldr bots too

McCarthy wasn’t extreme enough was what I meant

Pretty sure no matter how horrific, it’s still a drawing and therefore not illegal in most Western countries at least