Billionaires are not workers; they may once have done work, but at the point where they're billionaires, their money is predominantly from OWNERSHIP not from INCOME. They aren't paid a salary (famously, some CEOs take $1 as their salary) that's meaningful, they aren't compensated by the hour. They're 'paid' in ownership and the ownership is what generates income. They make money off the work of other people.

Some CEOs are workers, no doubt, especially at smaller companies. They do some organizational and planning work. But once your wealth comes from owning rather than labouring, you're not a worker anymore. (Landlords aren't labourers either; by and large they do no work. To the extent that they work on upkeep, the actual JOB is being a maintenance worker, not a landlord. Landlords can and often do hire workers to maintain the property.)

Maybe you've seen this paper, maybe not:

"Recent math benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) such as MathArena indicate that state-of-the-art reasoning models achieve impressive performance on mathematical competitions like AIME, with the leading model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieving scores comparable to top human competitors. However, these benchmarks evaluate models solely based on final numerical answers, neglecting rigorous reasoning and proof generation which are essential for real-world mathematical tasks. To address this, we introduce the first comprehensive evaluation of full-solution reasoning for challenging mathematical problems. Using expert human annotators, we evaluated several state-of-the-art reasoning models on the six problems from the 2025 USAMO within hours of their release. Our results reveal that all tested models struggled significantly: only Gemini-2.5-Pro achieves a non-trivial score of 25%, while all other models achieve less than 5%. Through detailed analysis of reasoning traces, we identify the most common failure modes and find several unwanted artifacts arising from the optimization strategies employed during model training. Overall, our results suggest that current LLMs are inadequate for rigorous mathematical reasoning tasks, highlighting the need for substantial improvements in reasoning and proof generation capabilities."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.219...

But you do make it clear that you think that regurgitation is sufficient in this case, and I won't argue with you; I'm no mathematician. Certainly, I believe that LLMs can be useful as long as we're not fooled into thinking that THEY'RE thinking.

Yeah, I think every generation thinks this.

But honestly, if you haven't found anything full of human spirit and culture, that's probably on you. There's still tonnes of original music made by indie bands out there. Go looking for modern punk/reggae/ska bands that are writing protest songs. Maybe explore some of the culture of other continents--I've heard that French African music is undergoing a bit of a renaissance (and there are plenty of European french people lowkey mad about it because they never like slang coming in from outside the country).

But even the pop stuff--yeah, it's generic. It always has been. That's what makes it pop music. But they've still picked up on the last 20 or 30 years of musical trends and integrated them into their songs. The tone and musicality of the songs has shifted slightly. It's not for me either, but it's not meaningfully better or worse than the pop of the past, tbh, it's just not MY music.

AI slop is so much worse, because in general, it's ONLY copying music from a single genre. Remember that musicians today probably listened to a bunch of stuff when they were young. If they're kids of GenX, they would've heard their parents' music growing up and then integrated some of that into their own work. You get weird crossings over of genres and sometimes something interesting pops out.

Anyway, AI slop can only ever be as interesting as the average of the current corpus of human music. It has no feelings, no experiences, no struggles. It will probably never write anything as hilariously bad as 'Friday' by Rebecca Black, which came back around and accidentally became the zeitgeist for a brief period, and now is actually weirdly nostalgic for a lot of people that experienced it at the time.

C++ is also largely changed by a committee. Honestly, the best thing that's happened to C++ in its whole lifetime is that the committee started ripping features off from other languages.

Gone are the days where a language can be designed, written and MAINTAINED by a single person. I don't know why we'd even want that, to be honest. Committees are fine as long as they get the job done.

On the one hand, this isn't in the job description, so...no.

On the other hand, I actually think it's useful for people that are programming systems that other people use to actually use the systems themselves in a production environment to see how they function. If you're a programmer writing software that people at the warehouse have to use, it SHOULD be part of your description to do that job for a few days a year to understand what the biggest problems are.

And also: no volunteering. If you spend any time doing this, they pay you whatever your hourly wage is + overtime. If you're a high-paid programmer and you do this, they pay you your programmer wage and compensate you for your time. It's such a drop in the bucket for them, there's literally no reason but greed not to.

Lastly: fuck Amazon and their shitty labour practices and horrendous (reportedly) work environment. I wouldn't work there on a bet.

In Canada, literally everything with a tap-to-pay terminal supports Apple Pay. I pay with my watch at the farmer's market if they're set up to take credit cards.

So I did my CS degree 25 years ago now.

Programming was always a means to an end. I had a couple programming courses, but almost all my classes were things like graph theory or compiler fundamentals or graphics or similar things. We learned algorithms and complexity and the history of computing that brought us to the point where we were at. I did a class on hardware where we used and/or/not/etc. gates with physical wires and solved simple logic problems. I learned the optimal rasterization of a line. I learned how lisp was designed and what left-hand recursion was. I've forgotten most of it and much of it was not useful to my career, but that's fine. When I left university, I had a deeper understanding of how computers and computing worked, the class of problems that were or weren't solvable and so many other things.

So if CS has been about teaching people how to program since I left university, it should stop being that. University is not a trade school (not that there's anything wrong with trade schools--we need more people doing those things).

Programming is a tool--a means to an end, and usually that end is learning computing science and understanding the problems that exist in the space. You're expected to learn how to use your tools almost entirely on your own time, you should not spend an entire semester on learning how your hammer works (unless you're also spending the entire semester designing a new hammer).

And look, the PROFESSORS don't need the correct answers that you hand in. Tests and assignments are also just a means to an end--you're not teaching the professor anything, you're merely demonstrating that you've been learning. Plugging things into a chatbot to get the right answer is fundamentally not the point of the class. If you don't want to learn, fine, go do something else.

Stop making university degrees mandatory for every garbage job out there, first of all. If there needs to be 4 more years of education to get a basic job, the state should make public school curricula last 4 years longer.

Second, only let people in that are interested in the topics they're studying. The ultimate goal of university should be to gain knowledge so you can CREATE knowledge yourself one day. Universities are not job training centres, they're institutions of higher learning. I get that capitalism has ruined everything, but this is what you get when it does.

I love this way of putting it. "I subscribed to the dev team."

Rand Paul isn't particularly conservative, like most Republicans. He's for small government except when he's not. But to be fair to him, he's for slightly smaller government than most of his colleagues, and he does actually vote that way. I think he's wrong about most things, but he's MOSTLY honest and up front about what he thinks.

But yeah, that's a pretty dismal headcount for a party that consistently runs on fiscal responsibility. But again, to be fair, they also consistently fail at it.

This isn't cheating. If a fucking journal is garbage enough to let AI review papers, then the whole thing is suspect and this is actually the best thing to happen.

The slop infects everything. Neither journals that allow AI reviews nor those papers should exist at all. One scammer was trying to play another and I don't feel bad for any of them.

That should say, "...so your real CC number is NEVER actually used"

1. The ApplePay system is more secure because you have to initiate the payment. Nobody can just walk up and press a payment terminal up to your card.
2. Additionally, the ApplePay system uses a rotating number in the background, so your real CC number is actually used (from what I understand)
3. In my own personal experience, the tap-to-pay system on my card is much less reliable than my phone or watch. I don't know why or how; it used to be better, but then I got a new card and now it's terrible.

I use my card when making large purchases that require a chip-and-pin. I would actually go so far as to say that NFC should be removed from cards because of point 1, and they should only be used for chip-and-pin transactions, while phones take over all tap-to-pay transactions.

I don't understand QR codes on smartphones, but apparently they're popular in other countries because they can be used by even extremely cheap dumbphones.

Saying fucking asshole things. They're tired of having to pay skilled labour what it's worth, and AI isn't going to actually take the jobs, so they have to make everyone scared by saying things like this and laying off hundreds of people at a time.

Funny how such easy to predict actions aren't being threatened with being replaced. As more than one other person has said here, CEOs are ripe for replacing; nobody would even notice the difference.

I mean, it sounds like you have bad neighbours. I live in a townhouse, and my neighbours (co-owners, really) are great. We help each other out. I can ride my bike for a few minutes in any direction and be out on a beautiful trail or out by the lake. Don't get me wrong, I've very deliberately selected a city to live in where access to nature is trivial. That was a priority. But I'd be happy enough to live in an apartment here if I needed to, the only thing that stopped me in the first place is the rules/laws surrounding pet ownership (I had 3 cats at the time, 4 now).

I'm much more in favour of being communally rich. Whole forests and lakes are available to me, not just a yard and a backyard pool or whatever. There are lots of ways to have peace and quiet and beauty, and only a few of them are living out in a field, isolated from everyone else. I'm a pretty introverted person, but when the park is big enough, you don't have to talk to anyone to enjoy it.

I think to be fair, it has both a problem with not enough taxes and bad priorities. Unless one of the priorities you're talking about is corporate welfare and low taxes on the rich. Certainly it is the case that they (and Canada) could raise enough money if they would actually just enforce their tax laws and implement wealth taxes on the ultra-rich.