On one hand? I think there's considerable evidence this AI bubble is going to pop; maybe in 1-2 years from now? If that's the case, the tech workers who manage to get paid training AI models still walk away with that money when it gets shuttered due to lack of funds.

On the other? I also get how distasteful it is to "train your replacement", especially when the replacement is just computer software.

I think much of this depends on how things *really* pan out. I'm not seeing big I.T. job losses due to AI implementations, so much as the regular economic pressures that drive companies to work with less staff. There's a lot of high-level/upper management talk about AI replacing workers. But it's more hypothetical than reality right now. People are still needed to put the right queries into the AI engines to get the desired results back out -- and that's often kind of an art or skill in and of itself.

Is it more or less degrading to train your replacement when it's not even human compared to when it's some third-worlder that barely understands you?

I'm personally not inclined to trust anything (human or otherwise) trained by a person with an axe to grind or resentful of their replacement. Someone will have trained the replacement poorly out of spite. I suspect most people have heard stories of this happening when IT started getting offshored or otherwise outsourced in decades past.

For the average human being in modern society, nature is a hellish nightmare. Wild animals have no qualms with gorging on your entrails while you scream and flail helplessly as you die. The plants that will poison you will not label themselves as such and food will not deliver itself to you. Humans can absolutely live there. Our ancestors all did at some point and some groups still do to this day, but for the average person being thrown into that nature is a death sentence and one that likely involves a lot of suffering.

If your idea of nature is a quant hiking trail or a forested park where you can watch the birds those only exist because humans made them that way and keep all of the dangerous flora and fauna out. Nature is incredibly beautiful, but many deadly things are.

I'll take 'Cover storied invented by the CIA" for $500, Ken.

I don't believe this for a second. It's even less plausible than that mining manganese nodules on the ocean floor was the real purpose of the Glomar Explorer.

I have no idea what they're hiding but really doubt anything like a quantum heartbeat detector exists. To make wild guess, we had some human assets in the country who told us where the officer was and we needed a story so we didn't compromise that person. Maybe we'll find out the truth over the next 30 years.

I've never owned a laptop that needed a display panel, keyboard, or motherboard replaced.

I don't think I've attempted to repair a laptop in 20 years. Few laptops these days are very serviceable. They are also sufficiently reliable that it's pretty rare for anything to break unless they are physically dropped.

It's every year.

Earlier foldable (flip) phones were only preferable because the "candy bar" alternatives weren't as pocketable until a few generations had gone by and designs like the BlackBerry came along and added sliding keyboards that brought a lot of advantages over flip phones. Modern smartphones are slim enough to be kept in a front pocket for most men's pants even if they are wider than most devices before the advent of the smartphone. Women carry their phones in purses for the most part so they're even less concerned about device size. Anecdotally, women I know tend to have larger sized phones on average because they don't have to worry about whether it fits in a pocket or not.

Foldable smartphones seem to me like a solution in need of a problem. I can't imagine using a device that requires physically opening to use and even if it has a way to operate when closed, I'm not sure what utility unfolding it would bring. If I want or need a bigger screen I'll use a tablet, monitor, or whatever is appropriate for the task. I used to exclusively use flip phones back in the day (mostly Motorola ones) and preferred them over the Nokia bricks, but with touchscreen smartphones there's almost no benefit that I can see to the approach.

Gates should definitely be investigated and it does seem likely that he's guilty of being a dirtbag even if he didn't sleep with any underage girls or commit any other crimes. Putting that aside, the court of public option, at least at Stanford has spoken. California in general has recently been going through a similar process with Cesar Chavez who has been accused of similar crimes to what some allege Gates has committed. Chavez is dead and cannot face any kind of actual judicial process, but he's certainly recovered a similar treatment. Plenty of others have had their names removed from buildings, etc. for the crime of having opinions or beliefs that were entirely common at the time but no longer align with present day attitudes.

Personally I think trying to rewrite the past in any form is utterly stupid and that society benefits far more from painful reminders than rose-colored portrayals, but most people aren't of that belief. The cynic in me thinks it's just the university finding creative ways to get more money. Thiel may be used as hyperbole as he's ahead of the curve in terms of offending modern sensibilities, but for enough money they'd slap his name on the building. If they do rename it, given enough time any person they use will hold a belief abhorred by the future mainstream and get their name removed as well, just in time for another donation.

Sovereign wealth fund: Have you seen the current administration? What in the world makes anyone think any giant slush fund will be invested wisely? No, a different administration won't be any better. It's cronies and ideologs all the way down.

Four day work week: Actions speak louder than words. Start a four day work week at OpenAI right now. Nothing is stopping you. Until then, talk is cheap.

Many of these road usage fees assessed on EVs greatly exceed the equivalent costs gas buyers pay. For example, Texas drivers pay $400 additional fee to register a new EV over what they would pay for a gas car. The gas tax is 20c/gallon. That would require buying 2,000 gallons of gas per year to equalize. That's like driving 60,000 miles in an average sedan getting 30mpg or 30,000 miles in a truck getting 15mpg. That's is absolutely punitive.

These numbers are for two different things. "Upper income" is just a measure of income. "Upper class" includes other factors that may influence a person's place in society. Someone making $170k (at least in 2022 dollars) is upper income in the context of Pew, but they would not necessarily have the indicators of being "upper class" (i.e. being in upper management or other influential position, significant property ownership, being close to political power) in a high cost of living area like Manhattan where that income might represent a blue collar couple. Class is impossible to measure objectively.

Manhattan (and NYC more broadly) is also a heavily distorted housing market due to subsidies and the fact that it was not a very expensive market until relatively recently (things started going up in the 1990s). There are a lot of middle class people living in Manhattan but they usually in rent controlled or public housing and don't pay market rates. There are also people who bought Condos/Co-ops 40+ years ago (or their parents did) who could never buy anything like the places they are living if they had to pay today's market prices.

It's doable above 120th. You can get a decent 2bedroom apartment for ~$3k/month north of 120th. That's doable on $130k.