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.

New tech has never and will never benefit workers in-and-of itself.

The only way for workers to reap the benefits of new tech is to force the issue through law and/or unionization.

I am well aware of the problematic nature of unions, and of the problematic nature of over regulation of business. That doesn't change the fact that they are the only two tools we have to improve our working conditions. If we don't use what we have to push for what we want, then we won't get what we want. It's that simple.

Ageism is illegal. But that isn't stopping Fidelity from ditching the senior level staff to replace them with a bunch of greenies.

I think maybe you are joking. But in any case, I will offer some clarity:

There are rival interpretations that equally account for the experimental data, and some of them include randomness while others are purely deterministic.

For example, the Copenhagen interpretation includes randomness in the vector state collapse (the moment when a particle is "measured" by some interaction with another). Whereas pilot wave theory posits the existence of a zero-volume particle that had a specific position prior to this interaction (giving determinism back). These models differ in other ways of course, but the math DOES work and it covers the experimental data.

So the bottom line is that "quantum mechanics" does not automatically tell us whether or not the universe is deterministic at the "bottom layer." Plenty of scientists have all picked their favorite interpretation, but there is as of yet no experimental data that definitively eliminates the popular rival interpretations.

Most people have an above-average number of limbs.