I mean, part of the systemic problem here is that "results were so bad they couldn't publish."

That shouldn't ever be a thing. As long as your methods are sound, it should never matter whether your results are just completely random noise; that's still an important result.

While I agree with your basic premise, that 3.5% "rule" is much more of an observed effect than an actual rule.

There needs to be an actual mechanism for the protests to bring about the fall of the authoritarian regime. Unfortunately, in our current context, a lot of the feedback mechanisms that should cause protests to change actual policy and affect the people in power are broken, largely due to the Republicans' efforts over the last several decades to eliminate accountability both from the actual institutions and as a valid concept in our national consciousness.

Your first critique has a massive hole in it, because it assumes that every person whose job is replaced by "AI" is actually going to be done as well by the "AI" as it was by the human.

To the extent that it's even true that this is going to happen, that is laughably false.

Yes; LLMs can answer some questions well (but unreliably) and with the right setups, can be rigged to perform some tasks well (but unreliably).

There is no way they are ready to take over a single full-time job. If any employer tried, the number of errors in the performance of that job would jump by a huge amount, because LLMs are not reliable and cannot be made so.

I don't know what computers you were using.

I had occasional crashes, sure, but unless you had some very dodgy computers, it seems like you're overcorrecting for those supposed rose-colored glasses.

I never knew anyone in the '90s who was constantly living in fear of their programs crashing and losing their work.

Were they using Word? That was absolutely a fear of mine at the time.

I used Word—mainly on Mac, version 4.01—all through middle and high school for my homework, and never had any particular problems with it. Frankly, I think it was much more stable then than it is now.

> To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece.

I disagree.

To properly understand this, you need to focus not on the specific people who happen to have ended up on top of it, but the systems that enabled them to get there.

And to (probably over-)simplify it for the sake of a short post, I believe the root cause is in Ronald Reagan's deregulation and gutting of antitrust. With a robust antitrust regime through the '80s and '90s, we would not have had the kind of tech behemoths we did then, leading to the unstoppable tech juggernauts of today.

And that's not baked into the Constitution—it was set by law in the early 1900s, and could be changed by law.

If we were to uncap the size of the House of Representatives, and instead change so that each district contains 50k people (or close to it), we would have roughly 7k representatives in the House.

That would effectively eliminate the disproportionate advantage small states have there. (It would not, of course, do anything about the Senate; that would have to be addressed separately.)

> If we were to uncap the size of the House of Representatives, and instead change so that each district contains 50k people (or close to it), we would have roughly 7k representatives in the House.

Nice and proportional, but a completely unwieldy number of representatives. 700 reps for 500k people each would be more manageable.

(of course, that means very little if (a) they're only from two parties and (b) all 7k districts are gerrymandered six ways from sunday)

It's definitely looking like we've passed the peak of the S-curve here.

But there is one difference between now and the dot-bomb that could make the shape of what's next different (note, only "could"; it might very well be very similar): with the massively increased financialization of everything, the link between reality and stocks/private equity investment has become much more tenuous. Speculative investors, as a group, know to some extent that they can keep the bubble going just by continuing to buy.

For a time.

But eventually they will have exhausted all they can squeeze from the "greater fools", and someone's risk analysis department will say "if we don't sell it all now, we'll be stuck holding the bag." And that will start a cascade. Because the other big difference between 2000 and today is the degree of automation in trading....

The problem is, as is so often the case with our modern companies, the things that got broken were other people's things. The things that were gained were made theirs.

In other words, privatized profits and socialized costs. Again.

There's many such problems with it. Don't misunderstand, I do not condone it :)

What you say is absolutely true, and is a serious problem—but the way our system operates does not allow us to correct for it.

Anyone trying to spin up a competitor to TSMC would have to first overcome a significant financial hurdle: the capital investment to build all the industrial equipment needed for fabrication.

Then they'd have to convince institutions to choose them over TSMC when they're unproven, and likely objectively worse than TSMC, given that they would not have its decades of experience and process optimization.

This would be mitigated somewhat if our institutions had common-sense rules in place requiring multiple vendors for every part of their supply chain—note, not just "multiple bids, leading to picking a single vendor" but "multiple vendors actively supplying them at all times". But our system prioritizes efficiency over resiliency.

A wealthy nation-state with a sufficiently motivated voter base could certainly build up a meaningful competitor to TSMC over the course of, say, a decade or two (or three...). But it would require sustained investment at all levels—and not just investment in the simple financial sense; it requires people investing their time in education and research. Dedicating their lives to making the best chips in the world. And the only reason that would work is that it defies our system, and chooses to invest in plants that won't be finished for years, and then pay for chips that they know are inferior in quality, because they're our chips, and paying for them when they're lower quality is the only way to get them to be the best chips in the world.

China is 10 years into what you describe, no?

> the way our system operates

They have the other system.

This bit, I mean:

> A wealthy nation-state with a sufficiently motivated voter base could certainly build up a meaningful competitor to TSMC over the course of, say, a decade or two (or three...).

Yes. And then taking down TSMC will be a nuclear bomb that wipes everyone else’s economy at once.

They don't even need to nuke TSMC to wipe everyone else out.

They just need to blockade Taiwan.

The same thing everyone who's paying attention to the real world (and not the financial fantasy world) does: that OpenAI's purchase commitments are wildly unrealistic and unsustainable.