Bandera is a national hero, fighting for Ukrainian freedom from occupiers, the ruzzians spout nonsense. Ukrainians are actually proud that Bandera was a Ukrainian. If the ruzzians went to war against the USA they would call George Washington a nazi, whatever.

I just landed in Warsaw, taking a ride to Ukraine right now. There are dirt poor people living in Ukraine, I am sure, probably some older folks are. That said, I work with over 950 people from Ukraine, vast majority of them living in Ukraine, over 200 people in software development, over 600 in support, many sales and other roles. Half of them own their homes, half of them have their own cars, everyone owns a computer, power banks, generators, satellite communication equipment, most also have fiber at home. They dine in nice restaurants, food is not worse than anywhere.

Here is a link to one of many restaurants I frequent when in Odessa for example. https://maps.app.goo.gl/GvHDHh...

Here is one in Kiev https://maps.app.goo.gl/JSnpEW...

one in Mykolaiv https://maps.app.goo.gl/Sd72r6...

here is a shopping mall in Harkiv https://maps.app.goo.gl/3osPzi...

You should maybe find out a few things before typing something, though we know that paper tolerates everything.

I run a few companies, more than 950 people are working with me, I have a few system administrator, it is a serious matter. Eventually there are people in any company that have access and control that really allows them to do damage that is massive enough that the very survival of a company is in question. This immediately has an effect on all of the clients, all of the people working for the company, partners, families, infrastructure contractors, quite a few things really. This type of behavior really compromises what people think about IT professionals everywhere.

schooling is used to control how kids think and act so they follow 'society values'. Governments who do this want to make sure that their political and religious beliefs are instilled in the next generation of voters for the rest of their lives.

It's adorable how they pretend that the 'well being' gap between the people who matter and the ones who don't is some sort of surprise that calls for urgent action; rather than a deliberate outcome carefully achieved.

It's the pandemic-period numbers that are the anomaly, from a period when at times downright existential issues forced people's hands(at least for white collar workers; if you are 'essential' good luck and back to dealing with the public in person); and a lot of work has been put into rectifying that period.

What's next; a comparative analysis of the labor markets of the 1950s and the 1980s that studiously pretends that it's not exactly as Milton Friedman and Neutron Jack intended?

In a sense his puzzlement is justified; when the tech demo works an LLM is probably the most obvious candidate for 'just this side of sci-fi'; and, while may of the capabilities offered are actually somewhat hollow (realistically, most of the 'take these 3 bullet points and create a document that looks like I cared/take that document that looks like my colleague cared and give me 3 bullet points' are really just enticements to even more dysfunctional communication) some of them are fairly hard to see duplicating by conventional means.

However, I suspect that his perspective is fundamentally unhelpful in understanding the skepticism: when you are building stuff it's easy to get caught up in the cool novelty and lose sight of both the pain points(especially when you are deep C-Level; rather than the actual engineer fighting chatGPT's tendency to em-dash despite all attempts to control it); and overestimate how well your new-hotness stacks up against both existing alternatives and how forgiving people will or won't be about its deficiencies.

Something like Windows trying to 'conversational'/'agentic' OS settings, for instance, probably looks pretty cool if you are an optimism focused ML dude: "hey, it's not perfect but it's a natural language interface to adjusting settings that confuse users!"; but it looks like absolute garbage from an outside perspective both because it's badly unreliable; and humans tend not to respond well to clearly unreliable 'people'(if it can't even find dark mode; why waste my time with it?); and because it looks a lot like abdication of a technically simpler, less exciting, job in favor of chasing the new hotness.

"Settings are impenetrable to a nontechnical user" is a UI/UX problem(along with a certain amount of lower level 'maybe if bluetooth was less fucked people wouldn't care where the settings were because it would just work); so throwing an LLM at the problem is basically throwing up your hands and calling it unsolvable by your UI/UX people; which is the an abject concession of failure; not a mark of progress.

I think it may be that that he really isn't understanding: MS has spent years squandering the perception that they would at least try to provide an OS that allowed you to do your stuff; in favor of faffing with various attempts to be your cool app buddy and relentless upsell pal; so every further move in that direction is basically confirmation that no fucks are given about just trying to keep the fundamentals in good order rather than getting distracted by shiny things.

I do consider taxation theft, there is no purpose to it except for controlling the population. The fact that people accept different *levels* of theft depending on how much money they make just proves how much of theft it is, because they more money someone makes, the fewer people there are in that category of people, given that, it is easier to structure theft in such a way as to convince the majority that they don't suffer as much as the other people, who are hit with a much bigger crime.

I suspect that a more fundamental problem is what you would need to preserve.

Embryos are clearly the easier case, being small and impressively good at using some sort of contextual cue system to elaborate an entire body plan from a little cell glob(including more or less graceful handling of cases like identical twins, where physical separation of the cell blob changes requirements dramatically and abruptly); but they are also the case that faces looser constraints. If an embryo manages to grow a brain that falls within expectations for humans it's mission successful. People may have preferences; but a fairly wide range of outcomes counts as normal. If you discard or damage too much the embryo simply won't work anymore; or you'll get ghastly malformations; but there are uncounted billions of hypothetical babies that would count as 'correct' results if you perturb the embryo just slightly.

If you are freezing an adult; you presumably want more. You want the rebuilt result to fall within the realm of being them. That appears to not require an exact copy(people have at least limited ability to handle cell death and replacement or knock a few synapses around without radical personality change most of the time; and a certain amount of forgetting is considered normal); but it is going to require some amount of fidelity that quite possibly wont' be available(depending on what killed them and how, and how quickly and successfully you froze them); and which cannot, in principle, be reconstructed if lost.

Essentially the (much harder because it's all fiddly biotech) equivalent of getting someone to go out and paint a landscape for you vs. getting someone to paint the picture that was damaged when your house burned down. The first task isn't trivial; but it's without theoretical issues and getting someone who can do it to do it is easy enough. The second isn't possible, full stop, in principle, even if you are building the thing atom by atom the information regarding what you want has been partially lost; though it is, potentially, something you could more or less convincingly/inoffensively fake; the way people do photoshop 'restoration' of damaged photos where the result is a lie; but a plausible one that looks better than the damage does.

The fraught ethics of neurally engineering someone until your client says that their personality, memories, and behavior 'seem right' is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader; along with the requisite neuropsychology.

If you are a programmer and you are given clear instructions on what is expected, then yes. If you are a programmer and you are not given clear instructions, then no. However if you are technical lead/architect then you really should be responsible for it.

OTOH if you are a programmer and you raise these concerns then you are on your way to become a technical lead/architect.

In my systems I insist we keep a database table of various common passwords (tens of thousands of these) and we do not allow people using them as well.

Is this the same Klarna that has already been through one cycle of being super bullish about AI and then having to re-hire some actual customer support?

It is like saying: someone will do some work for free, because they like it, lets then make sure that we take away the product of their work, they don't need it anyway. How is that a moral stance, how is it good economically? People feel a certain way if someone tries to steal from them. One thing is to work, even if you don't have to, but to understand that the result of your work is yours. It is a completely different proposition to enslave someone just because they can survive without keeping the results of their work. Practically speaking, if someone sees this type of attitude, they choose a different jurisdiction to do their work, where there won't be such blatant abuse.

I disagree with this approach because I am against theft. Whatever an individual can create for himself is his to do with as he desires, not anyone else. I don't understand this sentiment, is there anything in it except for envy?

I am talking about Bezos in the exact sense, that as any developed human individual, he needs to feel useful, which is what motivates him, because clearly it is not money that is his motivation. You added the 'virtuous' part, which is why you started on the path of class division. I did not prescribe a moral aspect to his behavior, only the fact that he is moved to do more than just enjoy his leisure, this has no relation to him being virtuous, this has to do with him losing himself without work.

That's only very partially true. The uptick in unpaid mortgages gave the house of cards a little tap; but it was the giant pile of increasingly exotic leverage constructed on top of the relatively boring retail debt that actually gave the situation enough punch to be systemically dangerous; along with the elaborate securitizing, slicing, and trading making it comparatively cumbersome for people to just renegotiate a mortgage headed toward delinquency and take a relatively controlled writedown; rather than just triggering a repossession that left them with a bunch of real estate they weren't well equipped to sell.

AI is some sort of technology, whoever develops this technology better wins something supposedly. Governments have nothing to do with this, technology doesn't belong to the governments.