@Former_Player I'm not sure if you'll see this, but I saw your reply. I apologize for the length in advance, but maybe you'll read it.
- 'another window':
Tech work is 99% sitting there wondering and 1% typing, if even. At least for me. Might be different for cookie cutter corporate robots who just dump the same thing all day ('RAD' - rapid application dev as their euphemism goes. Garbage for the masses.). I refuse to work for some tyrannical globalist tyrant. What I do is about helping small orgs and real humans, so the solutions are often convoluted and less about some algo almost everyone just copies, and more about solving a real life problem. Sometimes I keep a window with a chess game or something else open. I don't need to hide it, it's all 'remote' anyway. It even helps see a problem from a different angle. Staring at the same thing for 10 hours is usually less productive than those 5 mins when you're not even trying hard. And I don't have 'breaks' anyway. Never had a vacation or an 'ordinary' break. Laws officially would've required it, but there's a universe between theory and reality. In a previous job, I straight up did 48h once, and it was unpaid. A 'hearty handshake' does not pay rent. But in these weird times, ego is so prevalent, colleagues would've killed for a handshake from someone richer than them. 'oooh the director noticed meeeeeee'
- Germany: Just the first search result, and that's even from 2019 before the recent manufactured crises that exploded food inflation almost to Weimar Republic levels:
www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2019-02/obdachlosigkeit-wohnungslose-sozialpolitik-zuwanderung-wohnungsnot-deutschland-faq N.B.: This is a government-controlled newspaper, like virtually all. (ownership all comes back to the same gov-linked rich) This is already 'prettified' very much. It also includes the common abuse of putting the blame on the victims, which is plain absurd. Each and every single one of them would be more than happy to make use of his UN human right to shelter.
Germany and Europe in general, especially all those places marketed as 'rich 1st world', are exceedingly great at hiding this or straight up faking the numbers (for instance: if you're 'registered' and get a totally useless 5 EUR/m which don't even buy you a single kebab anymore, you may not be counted, as you're in a 'project', and similar shenanigans. If you're registered with any of the gazillion fake NGOs (whose 'managers' are filthy rich) you're deemed 'safe' and that's often it. The gov even finds a way to keep you out of unemployment statistics! It becomes very apparent when you live outside the small middle-class bubble.
You can see grandmas digging through trash to survive. You can see that the handful of charitable organizations actually giving out food are always overcrowded and run out instantly, even leading to fights. (Which are all religious, by the way. The rest is just virtue signaling online, yet doing nothing!)
The pretending is so strong, it also applies to death. Every winter masses of homeless freeze to death, but they're 'cleaned up' so quickly, unless you happen to be there yourself/know someone, you're never going to know. People are too self-centered and too busy to even look up from their phones, anyway.
Same for lonely people. But that's everywhere now. In the UK, they recently found yet another dead woman. She'd been dead for years and nobody noticed.
The fakery even went as far as changing the entire language. It's like this George Carlin skit:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc. There used to be various words for 'homeless' in European languages which seemed direct, and even 'offensive'. It was more honest. Now they invented a bunch of terms that distance you from the suffering. It's a trend.
Now a middle-class hipster 'social worker' can declare you <insert trending euphemism>, take a pic for his instagram, then go home to his luxury life, without ever having had to feel the suffering himself. The modern era creates psychopaths.
Want to know who's been best in all of this in my experience? Those who have nothing. The real street scum, not the internet-gangster-rap-trash, they have nothing. But many of them will share their last bit of food with you. It's normal to them. The 'social worker' with his far above-average salary and far-below average work hours will typically not.
Europe also has a TON of 'hostile architecture': This stuff:
nsucurrent.nova.edu/2021/02/17/hostile-architecture-how-our-cities-attack-the-homeless/ It ensures that the rich people who can afford to go to restaurants, normal, 'better' grocery stores, entertainment etc., will never see the truth.
I was amazed to see that even exists in Canada. Canadian stereotype of being friendly and all. Seemed more like a US thing, but no.
- 'AI'
I understand the point about outsiders seeing a bigger picture you may not notice when you're in the tech swamp, but I think that doesn't apply here for a simple reason: It really is so much simpler than you think, it's hard to overstate. There is nothing to it.
You've surely heard the saying 'an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters will eventually produce Shakespeare'. That's literally it. With enough money and brute power, eventually you find an arrangement that can generate the bias you want. But that's all it is, primitive raw statistics. The literal math in formulae behind is beyond me and of course can grow complex, but it's nothing that you would not be able to dissect, if you're willing to spend the time. And nobody even messes with this. That's done by a literal handful of people in the usual corporate-financed uni groups (which are typically the same handful in the US). The rest of the world uses what they already made.
All the random trash you see online (God forbid, youtube) is usually people who couldn't even solve the simplest real life task masturbating over their ability to use a premade library, spewing buzzwords. Generating their 'bio', so they can sell themselves to corporate. They now expect everyone to have 'social' media, to judge their worth. Social credit score in China? Hah! Exists worse in the west, but under more accepted branding. Heck, even lichess has 'likes' and 'reactions'.
What you and others might be afraid of / have in mind is 'generalized AI', also known as 'strong AI'. It does not exist. It's fiction. That would be the one independent and potentially 'conscious'. There are strong reasons to assume this can never exist. But that quickly leads to spirituality. You can't prove it either way right now, so pundits can profit off whatever. As far as I'm aware, the current state of things is a bunch of privileged people philosophizing over it without any results whatsoever. I can only think of Penrose as actually exploring it, but he is 'controversial' (what isn't these days?):
nautil.us/roger-penrose-on-why-consciousness-does-not-compute-236591/. Personally, I'm 100% convinced there can never be 'AGI', because I don't believe we're just biomechanical machines. A huge number of documented cases of unexplainable placebo effects, unexplainable paradoxical lucidity, and other fun incidents, suggest there is something we don't know. If we were the simple machines that some claim we are, these wouldn't be hard to figure out. But it's controversial to even ask questions, so we'll probably just never know. What I can guarantee you with 100% 'scientific' accuracy is that every 'AI' product I ever saw is a complete sham and could not be further from the specter of AGI. And I've wasted a lot of my life with my damned curiosity.
Thinking about all the other 'progress' helps put things in perspective.
'Rocket science'? It could hardly be simpler. Ape put explody thing in tube, go boom. Nothing changed there in a hundred years. Sure, it got more 'refined', but there's nothing new. It's literal brute-force in real life. They have the money and willing volunteers to blow up 9999999 times until one works out. Not to mention the willingness to sacrifice our planet in the process. The US and Russia detonated nuclear bombs all over earth for their 'experiments', never bothering once about the consequences.
The computer necessary to go to the moon was infinitely less powerful than your 'phone' now.
'Smartphones'? That's a weird one. Somehow, nobody remembers PDAs. A 'smartphone' is nothing new whatsoever. The 'Palms' had a giant touchscreen and even the same exact 'app' concept Apple popularized.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_1000The concept is even much older than that.
'touchscreens'? Not new either, just became popular thanks to Apple's marketing, I suppose.
'processing power'? Nothing new there either. A bunch of 'fancy' speculative algorithms have been invented that appear to make things faster, but the principle is the same. Density has been increased brute-force as well. No magic 'progress' fantasy here.
'quantum computers'? Not new, and another thing absurdly over-hyped. Fun to look into. There has been so much media fanfare about quantum computes breaking encryption. Even in the best possible theoretical scenario, they don't.
quantum-computing.ibm.com/lab/docs/iqx/guide/grovers-algorithmAlso keep in mind the mandate of capitalism: Profit. 'Staggered release' is not just common, but a must. If a capitalist acted like an empathetic human being, he would not have any company. Produce an actual good product like a smith 1000AD would, and you will never sell that product to that customer again in your lifetime. People in the few really rural areas left sometimes still use items produced in NS Germany or even earlier, because they still work just fine. Sturdy by design.
That reminded me of storage: Also nothing new there. What changed is their willingness to risk the user's data. Mechanical disks are simply stuffed to high heaven now, literally physically. The density has not increased due to some magic 'progress' fantasy, it's the same concept. Reliability is not important to many people anymore. It's outsourced to the 'cloud'.
Flash storage is also nothing new. The 'staggering' there might have been one of the most profitable. Same concept there as well:
www.howtogeek.com/444787/multi-layer-ssds-what-are-slc-mlc-tlc-qlc-and-mlc/Can you guess how the 'cloud' solves this problem? Right, brute-force. They don't care, if they have a million disks dying every month. They're just thrown on the trash dump and replaced.
We're not that far removed from 100, 200, even 300 years ago - mostly in the willingness to destroy nature for gimmicks, and the concentration of wealth. The latter cannot be overstated. Every modern technology can be explained to a 16-year-old, given a theoretical universe with infinite time. But only a handful of trillion-dollar corporations can have a shot at building it. The resources spent are enormous and really did not lead to any improvement in life quality. Depression and suicide are worse than during the great wars and famine. It's ironic I'm typing this on a computer - but what choice do I have? I cannot afford to buy a farm. I did not choose tech.
Almost all 'progress' has been purely brute-force, not magic. Most of the time plain lies, even.
I wish you a great day anyway, dear internet friend.
