Yes it does, it's just dressed up in corporate speak:

> Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management.

We think we can be bigger (more customers, more sales, more money) than all existing players.

> We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and automation/AI to serve them profitably.

We're looking to eclipse the population of any one country and we're going to use something like Bitcoin to side-step national currencies (and maybe also to avoid existing regulatory structure, not clear from the ambiguous language).

> We plan to do with 100 people what Allianz and others do with 100,000.

We believe we can automate or use AI to eliminate the need for people to actually support these billion customers.

All three of those are very bold statements/goals.

Unless they are planning on sending AI powered robots to attend court cases and prepare submissions they're going to need to hire or retain at least 100 lawyers for an insurance company serving that many customers.

The harm I imagine would be the reputation damage from people believing that "they are intentionally trying to mislead people into thinking that they are the developers of VLC." NoahKAndrews, having been informed that these really are the devs of VLC, is hoping his earlier, uninformed statement did not cause too many people to think poorly of VideoLabs.

I hit 40 this year. I have definitely noticed a slowdown even in the last few years. Before 30 I could pull 2-3 all-nighters a week without really feeling any ill effects.

Then, maybe early-to-mid 30's I could only handle one per week, assuming I'd slept well otherwise. The sleep debt would be too high still and the next day I'd get headaches, feel extremely tired and unmotivated. Or I could sustain 2-4hrs of sleep a night for like 3-4 days, but again I'd pay for it if I didn't catch up (pretty sure I'm paying for it long-term anyways).

Here at the end of my 30's I can't really do a full 40-hours straight without sleep anymore (16hr day, 8hr night, 16hr day, then sleep). If I don't get at least 2hrs overnight then that second day is mostly wasted, maybe I get 4hrs out of the 16.

I've always known that sufficient sleep is important for your health, and I've tried to balance times of all-nighters with crashes to catch-up, but the allure of using the night as uninterrupted focus time is so strong when you work in modern corporate "open-plan" environments where always-on Slack/Teams presence is expected during business hours.

> >parents have a duty to feed, clothe, house etc them.

> But this duty is not because their children don't have money. The duty is because they are family.

I'd like to live in a society where we extend this duty to the society. It is the parent's duty foremost, but we as a society should see this as our duty as well, at the very least for our children (and let's think of it that way, we are in this together, at least when it comes to our children).

> A kid could have figured out how to get 3 proper meals a day if they had to figure out how to get food themselves instead of sustaining themselves on a single daily handout.

I'm with you as far as the principle of personal responsibility is concerned, we are all better when everyone contributes, and I agree that we should teach our children this principle. However, the whole reason that, even legally, we don't treat kids as adults is that they are not adults, cannot and should not be held to the same standards. Withholding the basic necessities of life is not the way to teach this principle.

It doesn't even work consistently. I'd argue that many of the people that are fraudulently taking advantage of welfare programs are doing so because they were taught, as kids, that society doesn't care about them. So why should they care about us? Why shouldn't they take advantage of whatever they can? I'm not justifying this position, or even saying it is logically sound, but kids are not adults. If withholding school lunches is your method for "teaching responsibility" it is really ineffective.

Just feed the kids. We're not giving them free Xboxes. We're keeping them healthy and alive so that they can learn.

This is the thing to me. I'm sympathetic to the concern of people taking advantage of others, but if the government is forcing children to be there (which we are), and already having to bear the cost of funding these schools generally, we really should include the cost of basic nutrition for all students as an operating cost, just like the electric bill and teacher's salaries.

Their experience is not universal as I also went to High School in Texas in the early 2000's and not only were we allowed to eat on school grounds, if you were old enough to have a license you could drive off campus for lunch as long as you were back before the next period.

I've been a Caps -> Escape-er for years now. Recently, as I've moved to Walyand and KDE Plasma, I saw that their advanced settings support Caps -> Esc / Ctrl: Esc when pressed, Ctl when held. I've been considering it, especially since I recently broke and replaced my Ctrl key. Inertia holds me back, but I had the same concern before Caps -> Esc.

Lol what. We can't even define "true intelligence" and you're telling me the "mechanics" are already solved? What do you even mean by that statement?

They can build androids with the strength/dexterity/agility equal to / surpassing that of any human. Sight, vision and vestibular (sense of balance) were of course solved last century. Not sure about tactile feedback and taste/smell.

The control systems/software is different problem, and then there is power (current gen lasts a few hours at most, depending on application this may be a problem or it may not be)

I misread your original comment. I read "true AGI" where you said "true androids."

I agree. Other than the control system, everything else is already there, or at least understood. But I think we are much farther away from "true intelligence" than AI boosters claim. We don't even know the path to it. We have guesses, but no hard evidence that those guesses will actually pan out.

The problem with using fiction as a discourse about possibilities is that fiction is governed by the rules of the author's mind, not the rules of reality. So the fidelity of the model being used to drive the discourse is directly dependent on the congruence between the author's internal model of the world and reality, which can often be deceptively far apart. This is especially bad when the subject is entertaining, because most of us read fiction for entertainment, not logical discourse. So we create scenarios that are entertaining rather than realistic. And the better the author is the more subtle the differences are, but that doesn't mean they go away. It feels like a somewhat common experience in my life that I'm discussing some topic with somebody, and I have subject matter expertise based on actual lived experience, and as the conversation goes on I discover that all of my conversation partner's thinking about the subject was done in the context of a fictional world which misses key elements of the real world that lead to very different conclusions and outcomes.

This is not to totally discard fiction as a way of reasoning. With regard to hypotheticals beyond our current reach it is often the only way to reason. So it's valuable, but we have to keep in mind that a story is just a story. Hard experience trumps fictional logic any day. And I can't assume that the same events in real life will lead to the same outcomes from a story.

Lol, Georgetown isn't really a suburb of Austin. It's a separate city that is almost as old as Austin, home to the oldest college in Texas, and is the seat of an entirely different county. So yeah, there are a few places to gather and get groceries. ;)