The real story nobody is saying out loud is that CEOs are much more replaceable by AI than are software engineers.

How the F do you square that circle? If you're at the top you either are responsible or you aren't.

The AI will get blamed and they can switch from OpenAI to Claude to something else.

Throwing away all the humans to replace them with AIs is a move only an AI CEO would make, because and AI couldn't give less of a shit if something it does blows up in its face. Well, apparently real CEOs couldn't care less either. Imagining you're going to run a successful software organization (once you've hollowed out the people who both understand the work and actually give a shit about it) is insane. These people know that it will blow up, but they hope that it is only after they can rake in their bonus pay for the mounds of short term profits that result form layoffs, after which they'll float away under their golden parachutes leaving their former companies to collapse under the weight of institutionalized incompetence.

They'll have to live in bunkers for the rest of their lives.

Imagine that you're one of them, and you want to go watch a game (or a T. Swift concert) -- so you hop on your private jet and go to the stadium/arena. If you happen to be caught on-camera and your face is up there, on the Jumbotron, every single person there is gonna boo you. That's what your life will be like. What's the point?

Some healthcare ones did for a few weeks, after one of them got whacked by someone truly over their bullshit.

Wasn't that the whole point of AI generated images / video?

> You still need a face of it at the end of the day.

Feel like that one's solved with 30 seconds on DALL-E

My biggest gripe about Win11 is they stole from us the ability to move the task bar. It can ONLY be pinned to the bottom of the screen now. For the longest time, I was a top of the screen taskbar user. From what I've read, they have no plans to implement or change this "feature".

Are you using it for your old macs?

Of course, it’s not perfect but what is.

https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/releases...

“As to be expected, macOS Sequoia support is still in active development. This is a community-driven project, and as such we ask users to keep expectations in check and use older OSes if you encounter issues that affect you.”

Mild example: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040513-00/?p=39...

[ExplorerPatcher]: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

It was in Windows 95! AT LAUNCH!

Would you also defend any of the above?

Also, this has been a feature since the XP days, people have built muscle memories around it, and then for literally no reason M$ decides to remove it, requiring 3rd party devs to do their job for them and restore this basic functionality that has been there forever.

> There are gazillions of UI changes in every app we use

And this is a good thing to you somehow? I don't want my OS switching up on me at random every day of the week, I want to login the next day and have everything be where I last placed it, not have some troglodyte PM at M$ trying to suckle on the promotional teet decide where my icons go for me.

> "M$"

Are you perhaps one of the aforementioned troglodyte PMs over there? I've noticed that M$ employees get pretty bothered about that little dollar sign in the name.

Perhaps the problem is a deeper one, which is constant and likely unnecessary UI makeovers. But among the endless blizzard of these, this is an odd one to make your last stand for. More to the point, onto:

> Do you actually not understand why customization is something people want out of the operating system they use for upwards of 8+ hours a day, every single day?

All the examples you listed are much more significant IMO than whether the taskbar goes to the bottom or top of the screen. I imagine that MS would be less likely to remove those features.

> M$ decides to remove it, requiring 3rd party devs to do their job for them

But why isn't that the end of the issue then? The feature can be fully restored.

For me it's personally not, it's mostly about how slow and bloated W11 feels. On my 9800X3D (an insanely powerful and fast chip!), explorer is slower than it was in the windows 95 days on the i386 of yore. They've converted half of everything in Windows into a web view and you can feel it, don't even get me started on the adware.

> All the examples you listed are much more significant IMO than whether the taskbar goes to the bottom or top of the screen. I imagine that MS would be less likely to remove those features.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here, to me the taskbar is one of the most central parts of a modern OS next to file navigation and things like the start menu. It sits on your screen, visibly and permanently, and takes up a good chunk of your screen real estate. I know for many people they prefer it vertical because otherwise they have a kilometer-wide, mostly-empty taskbar taking up ~5-10% of the bottom of their screen. For me I keep it on the top of the screen because A) It's what I'm used to since the XP days and B) I find it easier to reach for than on the bottom, because my cursor is pretty much always on the top half of the screen rather than the bottom half.

> But why isn't that the end of the issue then? The feature can be fully restored.

You could make this same argument for basically every feature though, including the ones I listed. Why not remove background images and let it be handled by some 3rd party tool as well? It's about as basic as customization can get in an OS, so it should be handled natively by the OS. Not to mention that, due to it being 3rd party, it's also prone to breaking on Windows updates, and some applications rely on the OS to handle things like where to place the application window, and having things hack around OS-imposed limits like this does lead to weird behaviors and bugs.

It shouldn't require someone download 3rd party tools for functionality this basic, especially since it's already been in there since the basically the inception of the OS. Even MacOS lets you do the vertical taskbar/Dock, and that's the epitome of closed-down customization (not that Apple doesn't have similar problems, such as requiring 3rd party tools for external mice or window tiling via Rectangle).

Everyone has their own personal last straw.

Really the pettiness of spending effort to remove a feature for no good reason is the annoying thing here.

1) It's a line in the sand between decades of customization versus "my way or the highway [third party tools, some of which get banned for 'hacking' to implement their features, all of which are generally banned in things like corporate environments]".

2) It's a customization feature that has existed since Windows 95. Removing that feature broke decades of user habits.

3) At least one of the third-party tools has been briefly banned by Microsoft Defender for "hacking"/"reverse engineering" Windows. Most of them can be accused of that. The existence of third party tools today does not imply the continued existence of third party tools.

4) It's often compared to how Apple prefers a lack of configuration for "strong opinions". It's an especially funny comparison because Apple has almost always allowed you to move the macOS Dock to different screen edges.

5) It's a great waste of space on Widescreen monitors, and especially Ultrawide monitors. I've been using a right-hand side taskbar since square CRTs, because I felt even in 4:3 that horizontal real estate is at a much higher premium than vertical space. As a user of widescreens, including ultrawide, I especially feel like horizontal real estate is much useful to me as additional app space than vertical space.

6) Microsoft knows how much real estate is spent on a bottom taskbar. They know that's a valuable band of real estate. They've been selling selling ads on it, and assuming things like Copilot can go directly on it without user opt-in because they seem to feel they've got all the space they want and "own" that space. It's not the user's to own anymore.

It's a marginal feature in the number of users that used it, but those that did use it, used it for decades in many cases (myself included), and taking it away is a message that Windows belongs less to the users and User Customization is less important in today's Windows than yesterday's. It's emblematic of so many other problems in Windows 11. As a modest feature, it feels so much like a synecdoche, a part that resembles the whole, a part (of the problem) that represents the whole (problem).

Not only that, but the users who did move the taskbar are more likely to be the "power users" who will help to evangelize Windows in an organization. Those are users who Microsoft should want to keep happy. When you lose them, you lose any sort of grassroots support in an org.

It's a small change in terms of code and number of users affected. It's a big change to the affected users and in user perceptions.

Luckily I'm not the only one and there are many tools to pretty much keep Windows stuck in time.

I think this part depends on the person. I've personally been programming since I was a kid making games for my TI-83+, and in all that time and fatigue have been the limiting factors in how much of what I wanted to build that I actually could build.

So something able to write code rigorously enough to replace SWEs would be an absolute dream! I love programming with all my heart, and it's the thing I've spent most of my life doing... but I feel in love with it because it could make things.

A way to make even more things at a greater scale I'm individually capable off is such a joyous idea that if anything, I get annoyed at the idea they'd tease that without knowing it's possible (of course, they're trying to raise so...)

The aspect of wanting to replace SWEs is completely ok with me and I think there should be a rush to see it through. Imagine if every researcher could have an army of top tier SWEs at their beck and call for example. Or even imagine learning to program alongside a personal world-class expert from day 1, after all the fact AI could do it wouldn't mean we couldn't still do it ourselves if we wanted to.

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Unlike the "AGI in 3 years crowd" I don't actually know that it's possible, but where I agree with them is that the route there is probably not going to be a slow burn. Most companies need to demonstrate some external value along the way or they won't be able to continue, hence the chasing down of usecases that they can ship today.

Unfortunately not all of us can raise $1B on a txt file and a promise not to release our product :)

So powerful that it'd also raise the floor on quality of life for the 8 billion people on earth almost with ease, even if its owners stayed deeply profit/power motivated.

After all, it's not like the tech bros will get to make money by hoarding the AI and it's fruits after all. They need to apply to downstream tasks to actually cash in on its value. They could hoard the AI itself, but if OpenAI was suddenly able to break into every industry with a tireless AI army of top engineers and researchers they'd still be be producing real advancements for the world.

(and to be clear that's closer the worst timelines where AI advances so greatly. I think the more realistically we'd seem competition lead to something much closer to widespread advancements rather than some singular superpower emerging)

Concentration of wealth.

GenAI consumes content, even that created in low resource languages and regions, and spits it back out, separating the creator from the traffic due to their labor.

This isn’t entirely unknown - we’ve all been inspired by someone else stuff and copied our own.

Now, genAi firms have inserted themselves into this loop. And they’re cutting out the creator.

The scaled, automated pseudo workers that these firms promise, are owned by the firms. The productivity they create accrues to a small group of foreign multi nationals.

Economically - this shouldn’t be an issue. More productivity, means more capability of people doing newer work.

I do expect this to happen. However firms are also very good at making sure they capture the greater share of the market.

Our societies are not in any way equipped to deal with putting what may well be a sizable majority of working-age people out of work, possibly for good, nor are we in any way ready for the kind of power certain tech billionaires would have if their workforce were to scale with just the amount of hardware they own.

At this point I kind of hope the current breed of AIs will plateau quickly and stay there for a while so that maybe society can catch up instead of getting surprise bulldozed by a gaggle of tech giants.

likely followed by either a French Revolution (if lucky) or a Russian Revolution (if not)

It would seem that the Lord‘s will have nothing to Lord over though. Who’s gonna buy their crap and for what reason will they they create anything? The whole thing seems like a massive doom spiral.

You have machines that can design and build mega-yachts, mansions, private space craft, ....

You can afford to purchase vast areas of land from people selling whatever they have to get by, ...

--

Asking what billionaires will do when they can't sell to the poor, is like asking why the human economy didn't crash ages ago because we have any off planet aliens to sell to.

Or how did we keep the economy going all this time, given the ants and trees couldn't afford anything we produce?

All an economy needs is someone with the means of production, who is able to get resources, and use those resources to produce something they want. I.e. you can have a working economy with just a single person. Or self-interested AI.

Hermits have an economy. Now imagine the hermit has trillions of dollars of resources and square miles of intelligent circuitry and robotic servants.

That hermit doesn't need the rest of us. Customers? Where we are going, we don't need customers.

Thanks for this, but Solarians have an economy that sells robots to other planets. Earth has no such luxury.

Our societies were built before there was a technology that could replace its smartest people with machines that never tire?

I don't get why people keep trying to imagine current society + super-intelligent AI: by definition it won't be our current society if we can actually get there would it?

I mean if we have AI that can even replace the researchers (I wouldn't dream so boldly tbh), imagine how much faster the pace of scientific discovery becomes. Imagine how much more efficient we can make power generation and transmission, discover new treatments for disease, democratize learning at costs never before possible...

I don't love to spend too much time daydreaming what we could do down that because SWEs already feels like a bit of a pipedream, so all novel research being automated away is just completely in fantasy land... but realistically we're already on a pretty terrible trajectory otherwise.

Our next billion people are about to be born into some of the worst off parts of the planet. AI becoming good enough to replace researchers would be an infinitely more positive trajectory than some of the others we could end up on on otherwise.

I think a lot of the unchecked pessimism around super-intelligent AI is just people being a bit naive or shut off from the reality of just how terrible things are going to be over the next century.

We're waging 25% tariffs over planefuls of people, what's going to happen when it's 100 million people trampling over borders trying to escape disease, famine, and temperatures incompatible with human life?

Compared to that, even if these companies abuse their ownership of AI and monopolize the gains, an AI capable of producing novel research and development by itself would still bring us much closer to solving major problems than otherwise.

There's about to be 500 billion dollars invested in generating even more electricity for these monstrosities, instead of literally anything else actually useful today that we could be putting towards climate research or renewable energy. Nope, we're just gonna generate even more spam and bullshit while spinning up nuclear reactors to power it all.

People tend to take different pieces of mutually exclusive end states. Like my comment is speaking to a fantasy like outcome where again, we have AI that puts all researchers out of jobs.

If it can do that (which I don't think it will, but if we're dreaming it), let it boil oceans, let them abuse it, you can become unfathomably wealthy by solving world hunger.

Let them force countries to take out loans that practically put then in OpenAI's permanent debt to access the advancements they come up with.

It's still better than the alternative, and it still allows room for them to be as evil as they want.

I mean either way countries are going to become indebted to companies eventually if we keep down the current path. I don't see how the ultra wealthy can't use mass upheaval and desperation to secure extremely cheap labor and solidfy their power even without AI.

At least now, even if it's for their own personal gain and amusement, they can trivially solve

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It's like we're talking about someone potentially developing a cure for all cancer, but everyone is worried because the company behind it is evil and will hoard it for themselves while charging $1B per dose: let's still get to that cure if it can be developed.

It'll be a truly miserable and awful world watching people we know die while there's a cure, and watching them die because they're not able to pay this villain... but today there's no cure, no proof one can exist, no hints on how to get one.

It's better to have the cure and no clue how to fix the broken situation that it creates, than to have no cure and no clue how to fix cancer, because one is a problem of people/power/ethics and the other is a problem of unknown proportions and guaranteed ongoing suffering not more damaging than having a cure, no matter how inequitable access to it is.

So instead of being used to improve quality of life, AI gets used to improve efficiency of death.

Though I think you misunderstand or underestimate human nature of self interest. Everyone that is in control of a superpower like this will abuse it. Be it on a presidential level, be it on CEO level, be it a major shareholder of a foreign NGO. That is why we had democratic splits of types of power in the first place. I say "had" because the trend globally is leading to right wing autocratic ideas due to manipulation of social media.

Human self interest and egocentric world views is what gave us this mess.

The only thing capable of evening out the odds is a federalistic decentralized approach, which we desperately need for AI. Something like a legislative system for lots of overfitted mini AI assistants that also give outliers a chance to be the social trend.

Otherwise we will land up with the ministry of truth, which, right now is Facebook and TikTok effectively. The younger generations that grew up with social media tend heavily towards populist right wing ideas because those are easily marketable in 30 seconds. Paint the bad guy, say that it is established fact, next video. Nobody is interested in the rationale behind it, let alone finding and discussing a compromise like you would in a real debate that wants to find a solution.

We need to find a way to change beliefs through rationale rather than emotions. Ironically this problem is also reflected in trained LLMs that turn into circlejerks because they've learned that from the dataset of us easily manipulateable humans.

For another, research isn't an end unto itself. As you note, for some people an already-unfathomable level of societal knowledge has resulted in nothing but continued poverty. Benefit from scientific knowledge requires a stable economy full of consumers who can and will purchase high-tech items. Where will that wealth come from once the value of human intellectual labor has been so undercut by cheap AI intellectual labor? Without the capitol to make AIs work for us, most if not many people will be left to live their life as servants to AIs so that those AIs are able to have autonomy in the real world.

OpenAI alone spent $20G plus some unknown value to make the first version of it we have now. They and all the others need to justify the investment.

First mover / Fear of missing out.

Frankly, inclusion of "AI" in a tool is a great way to ensure I don't use it.