It is all IBM's fault.

a solution for the homeless problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

You're making a faulty assumption a lot of public transit advocates make which is that a person travels on, paths and times with lots of other people and they have plenty of time to waste.

It's always instructive to compare different options. For example my partner commutes into the major Boston University from out on the second ring road (495) non-rush-hour, 35 minute drive, 90 minute to 120 minute public transit depending on when you start.. Moderate rush-hour, 50 minutes driving, closer to the 120 minute public transit route. Heavy rush-hour, 90 minutes driving, 2 1/2 hours public transit. To add further insult to injury, she needs to change modes five times on public transit whereas she can just drive them door-to-door, not worried about being hassled by uncouth train riders.

I would be happy with a 1:1 replacement of an ICE with an EV. Having cars gives us a greater range of opportunities. We are not constrained to employers that are on or near public transit. When either of us change jobs, we don't need to move. We just set a different destination GPS and learn traffic patterns. We are not constrained to retailers close by. If we don't like how they do business, what products they offer, or the price they're selling it for, we can go somewhere else.

My main complaint about the EV market is that they are building them to big or ordinary use and not flexible enough for the exceptional use. Battery mass is an engineering problem and there are solutions in the queue. But I'm quite fine with the car this half the size of what I currently have. I just need to be able to carry sheets of plywood occasionally, haul a couple hundred pounds of bulky telescope kit and kit for a long weekend of car camping with my partner.

Just as you can't tell the difference between electrons for home use versus your car, you can't tell the difference between home heating oil and diesel fuel. The state cares because they tax diesel fuel but not home heating oil.

As a result, we are long overdue for converting from a fuel based road use tax to a miles, mass, and axles road use tax.

yes I do. One of the problems with speech recognition is remembering what you said causes you not to see the words generated, and so you miss errors when you proofread. Should the F something is uninteresting It should be if something is uninteresting. This is another reason why I like chat GPT for code creation. I can dictate text far easier than I can ever dictate code. also, Grammarly helps find and fix errors in recognition.

FWIW, I'm already using chatGPT to delay hiring another person in my solo practice. When I do hire, I will expect the person to use chatgpt to handle the noise level work like simple coding and business emails.

----

The future arrives too soon and in the wrong order. Capitalism has been shedding workers through technology, Financial engineering and exploiting cost differentials around the globe. LLM systems are only accelerating the rate at which capitalism sheds workers.

The natural outcome is that we will have more people than jobs much sooner than we expected. We only have a few options. Cities are only six meals or 12 hours without power from a major riot. The most peaceful solution would be just enough of a Ubi with guaranteed shelter and food to keep people from rioting. By riffing off of the current Republican / conservative chatter that "high taxes are bad because they hurt rich people and you know, you could be a rich person someday", you could further increase compliance and docile behavior in the masses.

The best solution would be a Ubi with enough of us technologists acting in concert to develop software and machine learning systems that can be used to exploit weaknesses in the oligarchy. I'm hopeful. Smart people interpret censorship is damage and route around it.

An alternative best solution would be to tax the revenue generated by LLMs and put the money into a sovereign fund which is used to pay for society's needs. While we're at it should probably also require public corporations to deposit shares in a sovereign fund to help pay for some of what they use.

Here are four ways I use ChatGPT successfully.

1. Summarizing articles: I don't have time to read. If the some reason interesting, I move on. If it is, I go to the original material. Saves me a lot of time.
2. Generating a skeleton for writing: There is an awful lot of boilerplate in writing and chat GPT can crank it out like nobody's business and I can tell what to keep, what to toss, and what to change. ChatGPT is more consistent than I am through a body of work but it also lets me capture my thoughts, and my logical structure about what I'm trying to express. In the end, it's my work.
3. Writing code: I treat chat GPT like it was a junior programmer. I give it a fairly detailed set of instructions of what the data looks like, the structure, the input and output of the software, arguments Etc and see what I get. Like with the junior programmer, I tell it to make corrections but I don't give it code. I use a more natural language expression to change the approach or add functionality through the entire body of work. Eventually, I get something that looks like code I would have written myself.
4. Translating code from one language to another: Just like with the writing code example above, I start with an existing piece of code, translate it to another coding language, and then start modifying the new code by commands to chatGPT

I don't worry about taking somebody else's work because I learned how to write, code, draw, and analyze by reading and mimicking the source materials. I know enough about the creative process to know that nobody ever creates something truly original except in very very rare circumstances. Everything is built on something else.

it may be time for regulation requiring that all products be repairable by the end user. Look at the fair phone for an example. repairing doesn't eliminate the waste stream but it does greatly reduce it.

Non-negotiable license agreements can fix that. Never underestimate the ability of a corporate lawyer to fuck up a free market

A free market is a market with government regulation sufficient to prevent cheating. Otherwise, how can you consider a market free if your opponents engage in dirty tricks to drive you out of the market?

Introduction. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes published a short essay entitled 'Economic possibilities for our grandchildren'. It is famous (notorious?) for its prediction that a hundred years hence, people would work for only 15 hours per week

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13...

A friend of mine, a general aviation pilot, showed me her copy of FAR 101. She pointed out that if she had an accident, there is some regulation in there that would be used to justify the ruling that she is at fault. She also pointed out that every regulation is traceable to accidents. Many rules we have, especially in pharmaceuticals, food, vehicle design, roadway design, bridge engineering, etc., are all because something failed, people died, or someone cheated and stole money from people.

Any time a CEO, billionaire, or business celebrity speaks out against regulations, I ask the question, how do they want to cheat? Why do they fight back against regulations that keep them from cheating?

Now, answering your question more directly, all of the things you've listed are very close to or are monopolies. In education, Harvard has a monopoly. There is nothing that offers the same reputation. As soon as somebody says, "It's as good as Harvard," you've just been told that the speaker knows a Harvard education is a top-notch and desirable commodity only available from Harvard.

in energy, the power lines are a natural monopoly. You will not have 20 competitive power companies going to the expense of laying our ten kVA lines within a city or across the countryside. Given that powerlines (and phone lines and fiber) are natural monopolies, regulation is needed to prevent consumer harm and keep the cable owner from competitive access to the infrastructure.

energy is also regulated to ensure that all the power companies interoperate and can't use their market position to create monopolies. We wouldn't have the wind and solar production we do today without a power company monopoly on the generating side.

healthcare is an interesting case. Medical services are a market if you assume medical service providers are fungible. One primary care doctor in a white coat is the same as another. But they're not. They have different prices, success rates, and availability. I asked the question if you are walking down the street and have a heart attack, what you do? Call 911 and go to the nearest hospital, ask to be taken to your primary care's hospital or start a search for the medical centers that have the best outcome of cardiac events and the best cardiologists. If you choose the first one, you are acknowledging that the medical market can be a market and is price insensitive, second is that it's a non-competitive market, and third, you are clearly treating it as a competitive market but you run a high risk of being dead or severely crippled..

in addition to the Muslim faith, also include practices of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, Satanism, Gnosticism, and a host of other religions. If you do it right, you can take up almost an entire month on ceremonies by the top 20 faiths.

in part. But software is also dysfunctional because too much code is pulled out of the developer's ass and then they try to polish the turd. the situation is not helped any by management shoving laxatives down the developer's throat to get more turds that can be polished or at least covered in resin to keep the stink down.

it was not a legal advice but an opinion in the context of generative AI. He also expressed the opinion that the modifications you mentioned were poorly thought out and should not have happened. sorry I didn't make that clearer.