The bigger issue is weak competition. When a few companies dominate a market, they can raise prices, suppress wages, and capture more of the gains from economic growth.
That is also a big part of why wealth has become so concentrated at the top. If there were ten real cloud competitors, eight GPU makers, or several serious Office competitors, those companies would have a much harder time keeping such a large share of the profit. Instead, concentrated markets create enormous profits, and concentrated ownership turns those profits into enormous fortunes.
In my opinion, that has a bigger impact on the bottom 90%, and even on the upper middle 10% you are talking about, than the direct consumption of the top 10% ever could. It would be much better to raise the purchasing power of the bottom 90% than to reduce the consumption of the top 10%.
Currently AGI has been re-defined mostly as "can do any tasks (of the same modality) a human can, equal or better". I feel the "equal or better" includes properties like how fast they can get the task done, not just that eventually they can succeed at it. If you want to have AGI stock buy/sell for example, speed of decision will matter, and there are many other use-cases for which it would matter, not all, but definitely for many tasks, speed does matter.
I might go Steam Machine route in the PS6 era, I know it's technically same on Steam, but they have at least been much better at not rug pulling, and there are easier way to circumvent things on a Linux/PC machine. Unless Sony changes their stance so that either I have full lifetime use of the game or an explicitly stated period of time (which if shorter than lifetime I'd expect to be cheaper).
I'm even willing to drop resale of individual game, if I can just sell off my account as a whole to someone else.
Valve is also pretty amenable to adding third-party games to the box as well. It's trivial to add games from GOG using Heroic and play them alongside regular Steam games.
My main "game console" is a NixOS box running Jovian, and I have made oodles of Flakes that I use to make custom non-Steam games that launch deterministically, and as far as I'm aware, Valve is perfectly fine with this (not that I particularly care if they are).
You're conflating the goal with the approach. If the goal is to bring back or grow US manufacturing, the question is whether the current tariffs are an effective way to accomplish that relative to their trade offs. From the evidence so far, the historical research, and most economic analysis, the case doesn't look particularly strong. We haven't seen a meaningful revival in manufacturing employment, and even analyses that project some growth in manufacturing find that it comes with substantial costs elsewhere in the economy, including higher input and consumer prices, weaker growth in other sectors, and lower overall GDP.
> Is the addiction so strong at this point that people don't have the willpower to stop?
Yes. I've stopped Facebook and Instagram, and it simply got replaced by more time on HackerNews and YouTube. I've failed to cut those out as well. The addiction is a lot stronger than we'd all like to assume in my opinion.
> and it simply got replaced by more time on HackerNews and YouTube
I don't disagree with you at all, but doesn't this go against what most people are claiming in this thread (that Meta products are uniquely engineered to be addictive, to a significant degree)? Hacker News doesn't have any especially "addictive" features. They don't make money off this site, there's no ads, there's no personalized algorithm, no promotion of ragebait, etc. Yet plenty of us use it day after day or find ourselves distracted by it.
Youtube is more obviously addictive, but it's hardly social media. It's just media.
Meta has done a lot of harm in the world, don't get me wrong, but I think people are stretching a bit when they act like none of these technologies would be addictive on their own if not for the company's design.
Upvotes, downvotes, trending, there's still an algorithm on HackerNews.
Meta is the one being sued currently, obviously they are the biggest one, and have tried even harder to keep users coming back in addictive ways, and likely targeted children more directly.
I'd say HackerNews also has better moderation where they actively will remove ragebait, where Meta services often encourages it.
I see your general point though, but I don't think people act like these technologies wouldn't be addictive separate from some corporate endorser. A homemade cigarette is still an addictive cigarette, but that doesn't stop you from suing and regulating tobacco companies.
The other question you might raise is, what alternative isn't addictive? I think many have said that feeds should simply be chronological, same for comments. Instead of upvote/downvote, there should be reviews (score how much you liked the video/article), and users could sort by review score as well. You shouldn't be allowed to push content that users didn't explicitly subscribed too (ads should be ads on the side, not promoted content injected into your feed for example). And so on. Is it too restrictive, maybe, I think it's an interesting debate to have though, like what do we lose/gain making it less addictive, and what is actually less addictive?
You can just be explicit. We already do this with controlled substances, maintain a defined regulatory schedule, and give a designated regulatory body a legally prescribed process for adding to it, removing them, or changing their classification.
But a substance is not a specific product or a corporation. Maybe you could call "infinite scroll" the substance, but then you're playing whack-a-mole with whatever new interface they cook up. But then we end up with a long list of "disallowed" software features which might not be inherently addictive
This, with a decent regulatory agency, wouldn't be that difficult to manage. We really could just say "infinite scrolling" and then add more things to the list as needed. We do it with firearms, medicines, drugs, vehicle parts, and about a million other things.
Regulating specific interfaces that have been shown to be addictive is the same as regulating specific classes of drugs. And it’s not like we have a plethora of variants of interfaces that have been equally discovered to be toxic. They are finite and enumerable as they come up.
If they have a set of characteristics that line up with social negatives, they should be disallowed or not permitted for persons under N years old (like for gambling or smoking). This doesnt solve the problem for adults of course, but its a good compromise.
I would very readily be in favor of outright banning infinite scrolling video feeds, even if its just for under 18s
Look at video games and you'll see the surface area of "addictive design" is basically infinite. People have gotten addicted to a huge variety of games, with not all that much in common.
You can still regulate the addictive features that are in common though. Paid Lootboxes for example. Isn't there some jurisdiction that already regulates those?
I think "the right thing" implied by "civil" in "civil society" means equal say in legal matters, immediate calling out of corruption and full transparency requirements, rule by pre-established and mutually agreed-upon laws, absolute adherence to pre-agreed human rights that require total consensus to alter, etc.
Therefore you can re-read the sentence as:
> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to uphold those shared rules and principles, even when doing so is inconvenient or runs against their immediate self-interest.
Jank is Clojure hosted on C++/LLVM, and Jolt is Clojure hosted on Chez Scheme.
Jank compiles to C++, C/C++ interrop is direct, you just import and use any C/C++ library directly as if you were coding in C/C++. There's no FFI, it feels the same as how you use Java from ClojureJVM.
Jolt compiles to Scheme, but doesn't yet have Scheme interrop, though it is planned. Scheme doesn't have a large ecosystem of libraries. So Jolt is almost more of a "pure Clojure" runtime. It mostly relies on using other Clojure libraries, and provides a subset of Java for common I/O and threading ops that you'd use interrop for in ClojureJVM to get most commonly used Clojure libs working (ring, reitit, integrant, malli, hiccup, etc.)
Jolt has a C FFI, but it's not very convenient, you have to declare each C function yourself, manually manage type conversions, memory, etc.
They can both take your Clojure code and make a compiled native single binary out of it. Jank also plans to allow Jank programs to be compiled into static or shared libraries such as .so files, so they can be embedded in or depended on from C++ and other native applications.
If you consider all AI generated text or code slop, then sure, the project's code is AI generated.
But in my case I think there are levels. In this case, the author has the expertise needed to properly design the work and assess the quality of the output. And it seems they intend to maintain and evolve the library actively and long term.
Would I prefer a serious Clojure on chez that's all hand-written, for sure, but beggars can't be choosers.
That is also a big part of why wealth has become so concentrated at the top. If there were ten real cloud competitors, eight GPU makers, or several serious Office competitors, those companies would have a much harder time keeping such a large share of the profit. Instead, concentrated markets create enormous profits, and concentrated ownership turns those profits into enormous fortunes.
In my opinion, that has a bigger impact on the bottom 90%, and even on the upper middle 10% you are talking about, than the direct consumption of the top 10% ever could. It would be much better to raise the purchasing power of the bottom 90% than to reduce the consumption of the top 10%.
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