> I just note that she and other prominent retired politicians are now doing the circuit on Anthropic's behalf

Are you sure it’s not OpenAI?

or both?

They will feel like they’re doing great as long as they’re getting paid and the cameras are up in more places than they’re not.

When you have everything you could ever want, you spend a lot of time worried someone might take it from you.

I agree that we don’t need a central planning committee.

But if you’ve ever worked with the public, you know there is almost no cultural onus on nontechnical people to properly hire or contract technical people for technical tasks.

So…no: The market isn’t very good at this - yet.

When was the last time the federal/state government failed to collect taxes? Or disburse social services? When did your bank not credit your interest?

This stuff is all contracted or subcontracted to these sorts of companies. You don’t need technical geniuses. You need good enough at the lowest cost.

The IRS getting okay work out of a contractor is not the same as a random food manufacturing or trucking company trying to contract work out.

Consulting companies, especially the largest ones, are known to employ more hacks than competent folks - because they can. (This is the “lowest cost” you mentioned.)

Just read the stories here about the big names.

Succeeding in not being sued - most of the time - doesn’t mean you’re doing good work or good business.

So…visually reviewing domains will finally become impossible, forcing us to make certificate and key pair stuff actually user-usable?

Not the worst outcome, but…it’s going to be a mess.

that already happened during previous round

Or they’ll give it to the highest bidder =\

It should be available to the public and businesses without a(nother) company in between: if we had our act together.

> I don't mean value-generating in the profiteering sense, but in the "this is worth operating on public funds because, ultimately, it is more than worth what tax payers put into it".

Very sure the amount those companies make yearly is worth saving.

> We tried to make a COVID-tracking app and spent $59.5 million, and it was an abject failure.

and then we just…kept letting those people stay in charge of spending our money.

and there’s a story of very expensive incompetency like that every quarter at minimum.

What AI?

> What should the rule be? When is it okay for police to receive a distress call and not show up in actual reality with actual lives at stake? Who's responsible for the consequences of not showing up?

Currently there is no legal responsibility to “protect and serve” any single member or group of the public.

Just a moral one, due to it being their tax money used.

Does this include or exclude places like China?

Idk, has china printed houses successfully? And if there are reports of that can we trust that the information hasn’t been gov altered to make a failure seem like a success?

You could probably just look at the pictures of all of the structures, and housing developments, and decide for yourself how real they are.

But leaving them out of this conversation like it doesn’t even exist is bonkers.

I’m not “leaving them out” i literally just don’t know anything about them.

And yes i am skeptical as a default on this subject. But still - photos don’t actually tell the whole story. What was the cost? How was the project schedule? Etc.

Hey, we’re all having this conversation ^_^

I was skeptical when they first started doing it 20 years ago.

Now, right wrong or indifferent, it’s a known entity there - for a LOT of projects. Enough of them exist now that…I’m skeptical they could find enough stupid people to keep paying for it. I know the government has a hand in a lot, but that only goes so far, for so long…