Slop Terrifies Me

If that was the case then TOTP would be available as an alternative but often enough it isn't even though SMS are less secure and more costly to implement.

I wouldn't say that founding companies satisfies the conditions of the Singularity, the relevance there is that companies are superhuman and sociopathic, therefore the dream of superintelligences to be empathic, cooperative, and aligned with human interests doesn't seem likely.

> The version I described is the only one I've ever heard anyone else referring to.

In 2008 the IEEE magazine Spectrum did a series on the Singularity and one article [0] says "Like paradise, technological singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting." Another article had this "Who's Who"[1] cheat-sheet of famous Singularity discussers for and against; one of the columns is "Kind of Singularity", and there's more than one kind. Kevin Kelly has "singularities are pervasive changes in the state of the world that are often recognizable only in retrospect. As a result, the singularity is always near". Bill Joy was a more general "computer science, biotech and nanotechnology event horizon". Marvin Minsky had mind uploading as well as machine intelligence.

Vernor Vinge named 'The Singularity' in 1983 and popularised the ida, and here are talk slides from him in 2005 after he had twenty years of thinking about it[2]:

    Why call this transition the "Technological Singularity"?

    By analogy with the use of "singularity" in Math
        A place where some regularity property is lost
        Not necessarily a place where anything becomes infinite 
    By analogy with the use of "singularity" in Physics
        A place where the rules profoundly change
        What comes beyond is intrinsically less knowable/predictable than before 
    The apocalyptic endpoint of radical optimism :-) 

and

    Singularity futures
    Possible paths to the Singularity

    What if: AI (Artificial intelligence) research succeeds?
        I.J. Good, "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine"
        Hannes Alfv�n, The End of Man? 
    What if: The internet itself attains unquestioned life and intelligence?
        Gregory Stock, Metaman
        Bruce Sterling, "Maneki Neko" 
    What if: Fine-grained distributed systems are aggressively successful?
        Karl Schroeder, Ventus
        Vernor Vinge, "Fast Times at Fairmont High" 
    What if: IA (Intelligence Amplification) occurs
        As the radical endpoint of Human/computer interface research?
            Poul Anderson, "Kings Who Die"
            Vernor Vinge, "Bookworm, Run!" 
        As the outcome of bioscience research?
            Vernor Vinge, "Fast Times at Fairmont High"
            Vernor Vinge, "Win a Nobel Prize!" 

A place where the rules profoundly change because of bioscience research, human/computer cyborging, or distributed systems emergent complexity, is compatible with Vingean Singularity ideas, or at least used to be before the current LLM/AGI hype cycle.

The 'attractor at the end of history' is from Terence McKenna: "[he] saw the universe, in relation to novelty theory, as having a teleological attractor at the end of time, which increases interconnectedness and would eventually reach a singularity of infinite complexity. ... The universe is not being pushed from behind. The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal ... our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor."[3]

> "doesn't mean it's reasonable to say that must, or even could, have been the definition the person I was replying to was using."

Okay, but your "LLMs are not a path to AGI and tech bros are dumb" doesn't lead to anything interesting, it's just a mic-drop end of discussion.

[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-consciousness-conundrum

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/who-is-who-in-the-singularity

[2] https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/ac2005/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#Novelty_theory...

If you got a random cancer in 1970, your chances of survival would be only somewhat better than during the Roman Empire, so slightly better than zero, but not very much so. Even Hodgkin's lymphoma, nowadays a very manageable disease, was reliably deadly.

In 2026, unless you are really lucky your chances of being treated into remission are much better. That is a meaningful improvement.

Medical science made a HUGE progress in the last 50 years alone. The oldest IVF baby is not even fifty yet.

Also good for the environmental cleanup companies and waste management ones (/s)

>* I'm not sure what "the way of AAA games" means.*

The rush to get things out NowNowNowNowNOWNOWNOW has resulted in massive crunches at the end (or even from the very start) or many big projects, and an apparent “sod it, it'll do, we can patch it later” attitude. Over the last decade or more this problem has become worse, with only a few exceptions to the rule.

With “vibe coding” and “vibe designing” taking more load, I expect that “sod it, it'll do, we can patch it later” will become more common everywhere¹, and that is among those that do have an understanding of the potential security and stability issues that things going out without sufficient review can cause.

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[1] Once management are convinced LLM tools will increase throughput by, say, 50% in ideal cases, they'll expect output to increase by 50+% in all cases, and like the gaming industry “if you can't put the hours in, someone else will” when problems in LLM output cause delays or production issues, is likely to become a key driver, more so than it might be already.