“Technology, for a long time, has been promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going to have all this leisure," Altman said, adding that things have gone in this direction.

He explained that people now have more time for leisure and a higher quality of life than in previous points in history.

"But somehow we never get the promise of the 4-hour workweek on a mass scale in society. And I don’t expect AI to change that,” Altman said.

OpenAI CEO added that people’s expectations always go up, and they want more.

“We think of new things to do, to create for each other, to want for ourselves. People are very focused on how they’re doing relative to other people,” he said.

Altman then spoke about the competition that drives the economy and people’s desire to be useful to others and to create.

Altman’s predictions are in stark contrast to the vision of Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, the company behind the chatbot Grok.

In a recent interview with the Economist, Musk envisioned a future in which jobs are optional, and money doesn’t matter, but he didn’t provide much detail on the transition to this level of abundance.

Yeah, I think that Altman is probably closer to being right than Musk is, at least for some time to come. If you’re talking about the kind of systems that OpenAI and xAI are working on, then certainly.

A lot of people — on the Threadiverse I see plenty posting — are really worried about permanent expanding structural unemployment. Something like “there will be no jobs” or something like that. And, okay, it’s not immediately obvious why that wouldn’t happen. And there have been some very prestigious people who have predicted otherwise.

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong

The economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote an essay titled “Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren.” It was 1930. And in the essay, he made a startling prediction. Keynes figured that by the time his children had grown up, basically now, people might be working just 15 hours a week. David Kestenbaum with our PLANET MONEY team tried to sort out where Keynes went wrong.

To date, what has consistently always happened over time is that as our productive capacity increases, someone finds some way to create a higher standard of living using that productive capacity. That higher standard of living has always been more-appealing than the leisure time. If we wanted the standard of living that was present in 1900, say, we could work a lot less and just accept that standard of living. What happened instead of increasing leisure was increasing standard of living. Larger houses, air conditioning, cars, video games, elaborate movies, out-of-season fruits and vegetables, all that.

It’s possible that that phenomenon will end, but I’d bet against it in the near term. We’re really good at finding new things that people would like.

Now, I do expect that there will come a point where you can produce an AGI that is truly superhuman in the sense that it’s more-capable in every significant way than a human. I do not think that that is going to happen in a year or ten years, but it might not be that far down the road. And then, unless you see demand specifically for something made by humans — think of the way that there is demand for, say, expensive handmade fountain pens, something like Veblen goods — we’re going to have to rejigger things for a post-scarcity society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.[1][2]

Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services. Instead it means that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services.[3] Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.[4][5][6][7]

But I would be pretty confident that ChatGPT isn’t getting humanity to a post-scarcity society in the near future.

And I think that there are a whole host of other things that would change in human society in such an environment that I’m not sure that structural unemployment would be the first thing I’d think about. Like…what does the military balance of power look like in a world where an individual can hypothetically manufacture robots that manufacture factories that manufacture military drones, say? I mean, it’s a awfully different world in a lot of ways.

I have never actually played Minecraft itself, just open-source clones like Luanti, but I could very easily believe that those have extremely low VRAM requirements, even if the engine isn’t optimized. Most VRAM goes to storing textures, and Minecraft normally has few textures and very low-resolution textures.

Thing is, I also would guess that unless the engine is really inefficient, that GPU isn’t really buying much, either. Like, you have lot of crunching power and bandwidth, sure, but you probably don’t have many visible triangles either.

Maybe some modded Minecraft?

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https://old.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/31es0c/cpu_bottleneck/

It’s not abnormal for shaders in minecraft to more than half your FPS.

If that’s true, if people have done some really crazy shader mods or someone’s using ReShade or similar, maybe they could be soaking up that GPU compute power. Though…I have no idea what kind of system this guy is talking about. He could be talking about a cell phone or something too…

I mean, you can do things with limited VRAM and a lot of compute power, if you’re going to program stuff targeting this particular system. Like, the idea of such a system isn’t intrinsically crazy.

But given this:

The Radeon™ RX 9050 4GB was developed specifically for a partner system designed to deliver strong overall value for entry-level gaming customers.

I can’t help but think that the OEM selling this is doing nothing other than trying to exploit people who have trouble navigating the technical specifications.

A year and a bit on from taking the reigns, Folmann’s put up a post reflecting on the new regime’s first year running the modding site and outlining hopes to turn it into “an operating system for user-generated content in gaming” in the long term.

I think that that’s a nice idea, but I think that ultimately, it’s going to be really hard to do that on the distribution side.

There are definitely improvements that can be made on that side.

• Trying to deal with malware. Some of this is arguably more of a platform vendor or Steam problem — almost all games really could run just fine in a sandbox, without access to the broader system. But mods massively exacerbate the problem, because you have lots of very small programs from anonymous authors and little review present.

• Making it easier for end users to diagnose conflicts. I remember Conflict Catcher, an extension manager for the classic Mac OS, that had quite a good system for this — I’ve set to see a similar software package that implements this to the same level. The first bit I have seen elsewhere: when you have a problem, switch off approximately half of the mods (though if you have mod dependencies, you’ll need to take that into account in selecting the ones to flip off). Ask the user if the problem is still recurring. Repeat. For a single-mod problem (this mod just doesn’t work on this system), this isolates a problematic mod in O(log N) tries, where N is the number of mods. But what Conflict Catcher would do is to also extend this to identify conflicts between two (and IIRC, more) mods that had problems with each other.

• Improve the creation and distribution of “mod sets”. For very moddable games, where you’re dealing with maybe thousands of mods, this is important. Right now, Wabbajack does something like this — I actually just used this successfully under Linux for the first time the other day, using Jackify — things have come a long way on Linux — and while they build on NexusMods, NexusMods doesn’t natively have the ability to do this.

• Improve the situation for load order dependency. Maybe let mods provide partial ordering recommendations WRT other mods and versions; not sure what the best solution is here.

But a lot of the work to make games moddable in the first place, or to work well when being modded, really needs to happen on the game developer side:

• Some of the ability to diagnose problems with mods really has to happen on the game side.

• Trying to track down the performance impact of mods in anything more-sophisticated than a “restart and see if problem is present” Conflict Catcher-style approach — and some games don’t deal well with disabling some mods that have already been used in a game, so it can be very time consuming to run a pass.

• In particular, I’d like support from the game for trying to run mod code in parallel, where possible. Like, “this code module doesn’t mutate anything, just looks at the world state and computes a result”, and runs in a VM that enforces that non-mutability, so all of that code can run in parallel each frame. A lot of mods have historically relied on running in various game scripting systems that do not support parallelization, which is nice from an “avoiding bugs introduced by scripts written by people who aren’t writing correct parallel compute code”, but not so great from a performance standpoint, given that modern computers have a lot of cores and as the amount of script code run by mods increases, it can place increasing pressure on a single thread bottleneck.

• Improving startup times for modded games. For me, this is a pet peeve with very large modsets in Bethesda games. They need a system — maybe it’s building an index and caching it, or allowing init code to run lazily, or a dependency system or something (“this flag indicates whether this mod need to be loaded before the menus creen is displayed”) — to allow mods to be loaded intelligently in a way that doesn’t massively increase game startup time.

Tomatoes do have a wide variety of cultivars, some of which have considerably-higher sugar content.

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https://growingfruit.org/t/what-are-the-sweetest-tomatoes-highest-brix-lowest-acid-possible/69110

Many cherry tomatoes can brix between 12 and 16.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64b974963cb8f079e9f7c83f/t/652f1cf07f8b2f125c06fd7b/1697586417068/BrixRefractiveIndNologo.jpg

Botanically, yes. Not in common usage, though. Someone also tried pulling that regarding tariffs in the US and the US legal system said “nice try, but no”.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden

Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893), is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court unanimously held that tomatoes should be classified as vegetables rather than fruits for purposes of tariffs, imports and customs. Justice Horace Gray delivered the opinion of the Court in holding that the Tariff Act of 1883 used the ordinary meaning of the words “fruit” and “vegetable”, instead of the technical botanical meaning.[1]

https://grammarist.com/phrase/misery-loves-company/

“Misery loves company” is a well-known proverbial phrase we use in the English language. It is usually meant to describe situations where unhappy people want to share their misery with others. It’s been around for centuries, and we still actively use it today.

This age-old proverb was originally said in the 16th century by the demon Mephastophilis in a play titled “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus,” created by Christopher Marlow. The excerpt was in Latin, but it translates to “It is a comfort to the unfortunate to have had companions in woe” or, more simply, “misery loves company.”

But guess what? Marlow actually isn’t the first person to use this Latin phrase. Dominick de Gravina, a 14th-century Italian historian, wrote this Latin phrase in his work, Chronicon de rebus in Apulia gestis.

The problem is that you have to be really careful about the laptop you buy if you intend to do that. A lot of laptops now have soldered, non-upgradable memory, as we’re hitting the bandwidth limits of what DIMMs can do, but the bulk of the industry hasn’t transitioned over to CAMM2 (the new removable standard) yet.

EDIT: Here’s a Reddit discussion from four years ago saying that even at that point, it was very difficult to find any laptop models that didn’t have at least partially-soldered memory:

https://old.reddit.com/r/laptops/comments/uzjmim/ultrabook_without_soldered_ram_do_they_even_exist/

Yeah, though last I looked, Xfce was still really X11-only, so unless that’s changed, I’m assuming that you’re running X11. A lot of my unknown here is “how does a Wayland-based system operate under low memory environments”, because that — well, and systemd, but I’d bet that systemd is less memory-critical — is probably the largest chunk of the system that got replaced in recent years.

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It sounds like it’s working in very preliminary form, but they’ve got a ways to go:

https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

For Xfce 4.20, the plan was to add preliminary support to Wayland to core components without losing X11 support. This doesn’t mean that by the next major release an Xfce session on Wayland will offer all existing features, but we hope it will be minimally usable. We also intend to continue refining our applications to work acceptably on Wayland (those that already work or can be made to work with low effort).

For Xfce 4.22, the stabilization work continues. Reaching X11 feature parity is not yet our target.

We are now working on our own Wayland compositor. It is very early, under heavy development, and not usable yet. Please see its FAQ for further information.

You know, that honestly does make me kind of wonder what an actually decent, modern low-memory configuration for a Linux desktop is. I generally avoid blingy desktop stuff, but I also usually max out the RAM on my systems. I did once, for the hell of it, use a 2GB (upgraded from 1GB) eeePC for a few years for work, just to see whether I could reasonably do it. Had a lot of other software engineers chuckling at me, but I put the thing on a cantilevered platform to put it right in front of my eyes, so the tiny screen filled most of my visual field, and used an external keyboard with it. I used it mostly to run a web browser and terminals on a remote Linux system, so mostly as a thin client, was doing compilation and such remotely. The basic configuration, aside from being Xorg, i3, and urxvt instead of Wayland, sway, and foot, was pretty similar to my current configuration — just that I had about 2% of the memory I presently do. I didn’t run heavyweight things, like games, compilations, etc. I’m pretty sure that I occasionally used LibreOffice locally, though.

I kind of wonder if I could reasonably use a 2GB Linux desktop system today without too many tradeoffs. A lot of games would be off the table, but outside of that…I wonder if current browsers could be made to run in a reasonably low-memory configuration.

You can definitely run a 2GB Linux system now if you’re using it like a traditional Unix system, console only — there are much smaller, specialized Linux systems out there, like OpenWRT routers. But I’m talking graphical and at least lightweight use of typical productivity software.

EDIT: Debian says yes for the current release:

https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/amd64/ch03s04.en.html

Table 3.2. Recommended Minimum System Requirements

Install Type	RAM (minimum)	RAM (recommended)	Hard Drive
No desktop	512MB	1GB	4GB
With Desktop	1GB	2GB	10GB

The actual minimum memory requirements are a lot less than the numbers listed in this table. With swap enabled, it is possible to install Debian with as little as 350MB. The same goes for the disk space requirements, especially if you pick and choose which applications to install; see Section D.2, “Disk Space Needed for Tasks” for additional information on disk space requirements.

The installer normally automatically enables memory-saving tricks to be able to run on such low-memory system, but on architectures that are less tested it may miss doing so. It can however be enabled manually by appending the lowmem=1 or even lowmem=2 boot parameter (see also Section 6.3.1.1, “Check available memory / low memory mode” and Section 5.3.2, “Debian Installer Parameters”).

Installation on systems with less memory[2] or disk space available may be possible but is only advised for experienced users.

It is possible to run a graphical desktop environment on older or low-end systems, but in that case it is recommended to install a window manager that is less resource-hungry than those of the GNOME or KDE Plasma desktop environments; alternatives include xfce4, icewm and wmaker, but there are others to choose from.

That being said, there are going to be applications that can, based on workload, definitely not work reasonably on such a system. Dunno how Chromium/Firefox would do, as one of the two is kind of essential for most desktops today. The OS can only do so much there, aside from getting other things out of the way and maybe using compressed swap.

EDIT2: Apparently, on low-memory systems, Firefox will unload the content of background tabs, and has a priority list for unloading them; this is visible in about:unloads. That sounds like it’s a substantial part of its low-memory strategy. I suppose in the case of extreme memory pressure, you’d only ever have one tab, the visible one, actually rendered and residing in memory.

endorsement of the prime minister

Technically Starmer didn’t endorse him. IIRC his statement was something like “I don’t think that I’m actually allowed to endorse a member of another party” or something along those lines.

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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/08/clacton-byelection-likely-to-be-two-man-race-between-reform-leader-and-binface

The prime minister, Keir Starmer, even addressed his candidacy on the sidelines of the Nato summit. “I think it’s actually against Labour party rules to endorse another [candidate],” he said.

EDIT: Apparently, amusingly, “Count Binface is the establishment” is apparently the message that Reclaim (harder-right UK party than Farage’s Reform) is taking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Clacton_by-election

On 7 July Laurence Fox, the leader of the Reclaim Party who lives in nearby West Mersea, announced he would be standing. Fox stated that he would “provide a voice on the ‘right’” while also criticising the major parties for not standing a candidate against Farage, saying: “This is meant to be a democracy.”[61][62][63] Fox has also said that Binface “literally is the establishment”.[64]

EDIT2: Starmer did say “put your vote in the bin”, which I suppose could be considered an indirect endorsement:

https://www.rte.ie/news/uk/2026/0715/1583501-starmer-primeminister-questions/

“My advice to everyone is put your vote in the bin,” Mr Starmer told MPs at his final prime minister’s questions in parliament, when the outgoing Labour leader was asked whether Farage and Binface should hold a televised debate.

Liberal Democrats leader Ed Davey also chimed in with a swipe at Farage: “I cannot back joke figures with ridiculous policies, which is why I’m supporting Count Binface.”

I hope it means that AMD is going to be more competitive on the parallel compute front. That’d put pressure on Nvidia to bring their prices down.

Righr now, Nvidia is able to charge an awful lot, because there’s little by way of alternatives.

When California overhauled its wage laws for agricultural workers in 2016, it recognized this reality. The changes ultimately culminated in the Department of Industrial Relations enacting an alternative minimum monthly wage of $4,820 a month for herders. But in 2022, the department clarified that the underlying legislation only applied to sheep herders, leaving goat herders subject to normal wage and overtime rules.

State lawmakers intervened by passing legislation to allow goat herders to be paid the same alternative minimum as sheep herders until July 1, 2026. Now that the exemption has expired, goat herders must be paid according to traditional overtime rules. Given the 24/7 availability required for herding, this means that Golden State goat herders are now set to be paid $20,000 per month, which works out to $240,000 annually. (For comparison, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s salary currently sits at $245,000).

Hmmm.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep

Sheep and goats are closely related: both are in the subfamily Caprinae. However, they are separate species, so hybrids rarely occur and are always infertile. A hybrid of a ewe and a buck (a male goat) is called a sheep-goat hybrid, known as geep.

I wonder what the Department’s position on hybrids is.

Huh. That’s an interesting other aspect that I hadn’t thought of, where people might inadvertently make themselves hard to find with standard survival gear.

I think that this was just ordinary old cloth blankets that didn’t rely on reflection of radiated energy, but just had low thermal conductivity. It was talking about people sniping and such, sticking something above a foxhole. I can’t remember which military conflict I was reading about, but I’m pretty sure that it predated the Russo-Ukrainian War, since I remember reading about it early on, how this was going to be a conflict with a lot of drones all over looking into the non-visible-light spectrum, and how it was going to be a lot harder to hide from sensors now, and talking about existing tactics developed to mitigate some of the challenges.

I distinctly remember reading about past use of of blankets to hide from infrared drone cameras.

I’d suggest a different approach. Instead of trying to lock down the loaner, which probably is going to be difficult to do against someone with physical possession anyway, just make a drive image of the loaner before giving it to them. When you get it back, just restore the image.

https://www.neighborhoodarchive.com/mrn/episodes/1521/index.html

Episode 1521

In the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, King Friday plans to purchase a record player for the Neighborhood school but he becomes distracted when a curious delivery is made to Corney’s factory.

King Friday learns that Corney is manufacturing some “things” for Southwood and orders Handyman Negri to buy one of the parts from Corney for further inspection. Handyman Negri questions the high cost of the item but Corney says that the people of Southwood have been willing to pay that price.

Prince Tuesday returns from school where he has been learning about countries and wars. When he asks King Friday if there has ever been a war in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, his father assures him that for generations there has been nothing but peace in the Neighborhood. King Friday recalls a song which his forefathers had taught him about solving problems and sings a small portion of the song (the song is exactly the same as Many Ways to Say I Love You but the words have been changed to “many ways to solve a problem”). With war fresh on their minds, King Friday and Prince Tuesday begin to wonder if the pieces being made for Southwood are bomb parts.

Back at the house, Mister Rogers sings a line from King Friday’s song before he plays a game by dropping coins onto a piece of paper with shapes drawn on it. Lastly, Mister Rogers shows a film called “Food Drop” which shows food being dropped from a military aircraft.

https://www.neighborhoodarchive.com/mrn/episodes/1522/index.html

Episode 1522

In the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, King Friday and Miss Paulificate are making phone calls to ask others what the King should do about the possibility that Southwood is making bombs. When Corney is asked if his piece might be part of a bomb, he replies, “Well, of course it might be. But I doubt that it is. I mean why would anybody want to order that many bombs? I’m making a million of those parts.”

Alarmed at the possibility that Southwood is making a million bombs, King Friday orders Handyman Negri to have Corney make a million of the same parts for the Neighborhood of Make-Believe and to enlist everyone in the Neighborhood to help put the bombs together. Although uncomfortable with the idea of bombs himself, Handyman Negri follows the King’s orders.

Everyone assembles at the castle to put the bombs together and Henrietta Pussycat becomes upset at the idea of fighting.

https://www.neighborhoodarchive.com/mrn/episodes/1523/index.html

Episode 1523

In the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, Lady Elaine and Lady Aberlin resist King Friday’s bomb-building efforts as they seek to prove that Southwood is a peaceful place. Bob Dog has been appointed as a spy for the “war” with Southwood.

In the school, the children learn about using gas masks and air-raid shelters.

At the castle, the appointed generals have been armed with the recently-constructed “bombs.”

https://www.neighborhoodarchive.com/mrn/episodes/1524/index.html

Episode 1524

In the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, Lady Elaine and Lady Aberlin take Bob Dog with them to Southwood to find out what exactly is going on.

Upon their arrival, they learn that the parts Corney made have been used to build a bridge, not for building bombs.

While they are there, Keith, the Southwood carpenter, sings What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel. King Friday is embarrassed when he learns that there are no bombs in Southwood and declares that his generals are not “generals of peace.”

Mister Rogers concludes this episode with a few interesting comments about rules: “Rules are very, very important. Not just for games but for all things. Even big things like countries. Countries have to have rules to protect people, too. And someday you’ll be helping to make the rules for your country. I trust that you’ll make the best kind you know how.”

By the popularity of type inference in variable declarations, a feature that’s included in most languages now: var in C# and Java, := in Go, auto in C++, and so on.

I don’t really like type inference, because I think that it makes it more-obnoxious to read code. That being said, I will concede that if you want a lot of static type information — and compilers can do things with more information — it does make for more concise code.

EDIT: Hmm. I was trying to think what would make it better. Maybe I’d be more okay with it if all compilers for languages that did this had a trivial way to just run the type inference step and output code with inferred types present.

I’m increasingly trying to use my (GNU/Linux) laptop where I can, and just tether the phone to it when I need mobile data connectivity.

It’s not a complete drop-in solution. You can’t just use a laptop with one hand while waiting in a line (well, there used to be palmtops, but those seem to be a mostly-dead class of PCs today). It consumes more power. Desktop OS software doesn’t really natively have a concept of “being on WiFi versus being on mobile data”, which is nice to have in phone software.

But where you can sit down and use one…man, it eliminates a ton of my irritations with phones. The locked-down stuff in most phone OSes. Those fiddly, limited onscreen keyboards. The tradeoffs that the systems make to try to minimize power use and simplify memory management from an end user standpoint (because a lot of users don’t get the concept of closing programs) like the one you mention go away. Hardware is more capable and expandable, and the manufacturers have way more physical space to work with, so you don’t have manufacturers throwing out things like physical headphones jacks to try to get a bit more space. The limited cooling on phones goes away. Better in terms of repairability — I just replaced a laptop battery. If my phone’s battery died, I’d throw out the phone. Using multiple programs at once, as you were doing, is much better; phone OSes just aren’t really optimal for that.

I’m honestly impressed with what smartphone vendors have done within the constraints of what they have to work with, especially in how much better touchscreens have gotten over the decades — they used to be far, far worse. But they still just face a ton of limitations imposed by the form factor.

There are so many surfaces in this world that suffer from wasted potential, are not yet displaying advertisements.