The tool doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your scenario is eliminating too many relevant variables.

For example, most software development companies are in competition against each other AND have more features they want to develop than they have time to develop. They must constantly choose which features/bugfixes to skip in order to make room for the most important ones, and they must choose wisely in order to maintain their competitive position.

So when the tool suddenly increases the productivity of their employees, they don't necessarily cut staff to get back down to where they were. They can now complete more of the work they want, without hiring new people. That's a total win that doesn't involve any job loss at all.

Furthermore, when companies DO cut down to get back to their prior level of productivity, their competitors (who didn't cut staff) now run circles around them, and they must re-hire in order to catch up.

Of course, the scenarios I just gave ALSO glance over many relevant variables. Nothing that happens on the economic stage is this "pure." There are far too many inter-permeating effects. But my point is that you are seeing only one tiny little possibility among many, with real incentives that prevent yours from being the only story.

We get headlines listing layoffs all the time, in part because such headlines are marketing signals and help drive stock prices up. We don't get headlines about the hiring that is also happening. There is constant churn going on, so the numbers we see are skewed and our perception of the economic consequences is equally skewed.

So, things might not be as bad as they seem when you focus ONLY on the reported layoffs and ONLY on the "lay off staff and stay the same" possibility that AI presents businesses. The big picture is, simply put, bigger than that.

The idea that ancient dietary laws were essentially early public health measures disguised as religious commandments is popular, but lacking in evidence. And there is some evidence to the contrary. For example: some dangerous foods that frequently made people sick were still allowed. Some foods were banned even though neighboring cultures had been eating them safely for centuries.

Apparently some historians have claimed that the prohibitions originated from ancient world-views that saw these animals as anomalous (sea creatures that don't look like fish, or land creatures that don't have both the cud-chewing and cloven hooves) and forbade them for that reason.

I for sure don't know the reasons; I wasn't there. And I don't remember who wrote about any of this so I don't have citations to present. I just remember the take-away that the claim you made is popular but unsupported.

Well no, actually, bread is a processed junk food. Even whole wheat bread is just "ok" in moderation. What you are missing from your list is fresh fruit, vegetables, and other whole grains (brown rice, oats, wheat in other forms).

But even more than that, the advice here is not "NO meat, NO cooking" (though it is NO liquor). The advice is just to moderate. There is a world of difference between small game a couple times a week vs steak three times a day. And also, there are kinds of cooking (especially cooking vegetables) that don't cause the formation of carcinogens.

Dairy is controversial, but, if you have the metabolism for it, it is very healthy (in moderation). Yogurt especially, thanks to the symbiotic bacteria that also helps reduce cancer risk, so long as you don't get yogurt that is full of added sugar.

It may be worth pointing out that some people find red meat to be irresistibly delicious, while others find it to be "meh" and have stronger flavor experiences from fruits and vegetables. This is a genetic predisposition and will have a huge impact on how one feels about the advice being given here.

You are a left-side extremist and you are pointing at the right-side extremists and saying "see how terrible they are!"

Yes, the extremists on the right side are terrible. But most people on the right are not extremists. And the extremists on the left side are terrible too, in complementary ways, but most people on the left are not extremists.

Extremists like you are shouting down all the moderate voices that would be interested in having an actual conversation. This gets mod points, but it is not helpful.

You are missing the big picture.

Living in the stone age, or even the middle ages, was awful by all these metrics. The rise of tech in general has put food in the mouths of more people than ever before, cured and treated more diseases than ever before, created a world with greater equality than ever before.

Were women more or less equal to men during the stone age? Back when tribes traded women for pigs and fish-nets, and women never held positions of leadership, nor did women bring providence to a family. Men did all that. Now, women can get the same education, jobs, positions of leadership men can. Technology has overwhelmingly equalized us in this regard.

I could go on but I shouldn't need to. You are using the Internet, probably from an air conditioned building, with immediate access to fresh fruit all year round, probably own a car, probably take showers every day, probably have medical insurance. You live better than the wealthiest kings in the world lived just a few centuries ago. And here you are taking an antitech position about a new means of labor automation.

I realize that AI threatens our sense of job security and that can be frightening. But if we can find our courage we can see it as another link in a very long chain that has done tremendous good for our species and promises to do even more.

Banning powerful tech just ensures that your competitors have it and you don't.

Humans are fraudulent, immoral, and dangerous. The AI industry is no different than any other industry in that regard. As Alfred Whitehead famously wrote (paraphrased) "All great ideas enter into the world with disgusting alliances."

AI is just a new tool for us to use. How we use it is up to us. The fact that some will misuse it does not negate the benefits that others could bring by using it well.

Interesting. So, would you be happy to join a community of savages living only on stone-age tech, for the rest of your life and your children's lives?

Or do the problems solved by tech justify the ones it creates?

We KNOW what will happen if we stop creating new technologies: nothing. All the problems of our day just stagnate and us along with it, and nothing gets better. World poverty? Stays. Inequality? Stays. War and famine and disease and etc? Keeps right on chuggin. Everything we hate about our existence and our species continues to dominate our lives which remain short. And then we drive ourselves into extinction.

New technologies are the only game-changers we have. Literally everything else has been attempted before and failed. It's new tech, or bust.

We "boo" AI because we fear that it will eliminate our jobs, and thus leave us poor and unemployable. I can certainly understand why we don't want to be poor and unemployable. So, that just means we are all going to have to figure out how to build a better world using this new tech.

This happened before, and it WAS hard, and there were Luddites. But we left the Luddites behind and built a better world. Now, we can do that again.

The cat is out of the bag. AI will not go away no matter how much we boo it. The wise will stop wasting their breath and start adapting. And that includes adapting our political climate through the application of political pressure (not to halt progress, but to find equitable ways to utilize AI).

You can buy a lot of e-books DRM free, legally, on ebooks.com. They even have a filter so you can search only for DRM-free ebooks.

I have seen something similar doing interviews to hire new software developers before and during the pandemic. Some of the applicants had very high GPA but still couldn't solve relatively simple problems. They could answer questions about coding and algorithms make easy modifications to existing code, and they could even write new code so long as it was at "script kiddy" level of difficulty. But they couldn't think through a novel problem (even problems that don't require specialized API knowledge or advanced math or anything like that).

My belief is that, at that time, software engineering was being billed out as a lucrative career and there was a lot of "push" from the industry to get more kids interested. So colleges dumbed down the curriculum and just lowered the bar all-around, to scoop up all that student loan money. And the result was a whole generation of debt-ridden young adults with degrees but no skills.

If the situation is still like that, I can see why nobody wants to hire these kids. I wouldn't know, since my employer hasn't hired anyone since the pandemic either. And with the possibility that the existing team can use AI to be just as effective without hiring those kids, nobody wants to do it. Not, at least, until something forces their hand.

Could you elaborate on what specific parts of the constitution this bill violates?

Take a breath. You seem really worked up over this. It's not healthy to get that invested (so to speak).

The economy always oscillates between boom and bust periods. Government intervention aims to smooth that out, and sometimes it doesn't work well, but this cycle is natural and eternal. Trump is temporary. Political winds shift. These are the waves that we ride.

The notion that "low information voters make critical decisions" is a bit more contentious though. It IS true that the vast majority of voters are not political scientists, and spend most of their time working and engaging with family/entertainment. So, their voting decisions are mostly motivated by party loyalty and/or sales pitches. This is a foundational weakness of democracy, so, it's just something we accept when we choose to operate like one.

In the case of the USA, we are only a democracy at the surface level. Officially we are a "constitutional republic" which keeps the complicated decisions out of the hands of voters who are ill-equipped to understand them, let alone vote on them. Unofficially we are an oligarchy, with all the really important decisions being made by a tight group of super-rich elites. They are neither elected nor appointed and are patriotic only inasmuch as it benefits them to be so. Their value system is starkly amoral, but the self-interest angle is what keeps things going forward. They, unlike everyone else, have the education necessary to make the important decisions, and they know that their wealth evaporates if the economy collapses. That isn't a very noble arrangement, but it IS functional. For the most part.

So relax, these low-information voters are just playing tug-of-war over social issues while the real business of managing the national economy is in the hands of our version of royalty. No amount of rage or awareness-raising on your part will change this, so you may as well just accept it, and figure out your best strategy for adapting to it.

Agree. Gemini and Claude are both super useful, so long as they are used properly. I haven't had as much luck with other models, so I stick with these two.

But how you use them, and how much you use them, depends greatly on the nature of your project. It still requires intelligence and skill to use them well, and if you use them poorly the results will burn you. And for some specific parts of a total solution, you simply can't use them, and will need to do those parts yourself. And it is on you to recognize which parts those are.

If you fall into the trap of just letting some tool like Cursor or Claude Code "do it all" for you, you will end up like the people in this article. Both of these are useful tools, but there is no other way to say it: you have to use them wisely. And you have to know what you are doing. If you are using them to solve problems that are too hard for you to solve, you (and your codebase) will drown.

Gamestop charges way too much for used games. I can buy one much cheaper on ebay. Similarly, gamestop pays way too little for used games, and I can sell one for more on ebay. I guess that makes their interest in buying ebay kind of make sense.

The last time I walked into a gamestop I saw walls covered in toys. And trading cards too. The market is clearly shifting.