You're not thinking past first order effects of "rich people become less rich and we get subsidized". What that means on 2nd+ order effects is:

- Wealthy people/businesses do not have the capital to start or expand businesses
- Investors do not have the money to invest and grow businesses
- Businesses shrink and optimize for the new cost structure (no assets)
- Businesses stagnate and become slower as they have larger and larger pools of "owners" and subsidiaries to work around the problem
- Businesses stop producing things, because producing things requires investment and capital - assets.

The worst part: the practice of taxing assets is recursive. In theory, it will continue until everyone has the same exact asset stake. In practicable reality, a select few (which may be the same group of people we have now, or a different powered elite in government) will monopolize and loophole the process and we'll have a universally poor populace with ruling elites (far worse than it is now - and yes, I'm admitting it's a problem today).

Big things are only possible with big money. If living at sharecropper subsistence levels is your objective, where everyone has equal financial means but never enough for enterprise - by all means, insist on redistribution.

This is exactly what was done to the Russian Cossack sharecroppers in Soviet Russia, by the way. It's just communism. Stop pushing failed ideas.

It's fascinating how Ebay is still solvent, having done nothing of meaning for close to 20 years with basically only a slight UI uplift in the past 15. They seem to thrive primarily on the backs of people getting scammed - either sellers being scammed by buyers, or fraudsters relying on what little exists of Ebay's reputation to get a quick fraud sale.

Both of those examples are of equity manipulation: make the companies assume debt and hollow out their core business, and sell their real assets to another company for cheap.

That's not what's happening here, particularly since GameStop is doing well and paypal is increasingly enshitified with scam posts and bad policies which screw sellers when a buyer wants to make a fraudulent claim. I lost thousands due to the latter and have heard of many people recently swindled by the former.

You got it backwards. It was an undervalued, heavily shorted stock (still is) for a viable company that was doing well, financially, and people figured out that the people doing the shorts were intentionally bankrupting companies for profit. So they decided to do something about it, and maintain the stock value.

As for enshitification on Ebay... go try to buy a "big ticket" item on Ebay like a video card or Mac, half to 9/10 of all listings are "great" deals - from new accounts with anywhere from 0 sales to hundreds of sales of $5 baubles to pump up their figures. It's very difficult to find actual items for sale on ebay anymore because of how much fraud goes on. The 'classified' feature is the worst of it. It's at the point that if Ebay is to survive they need to seriously reevaluate how they're doing business.

Adobe would be a good building material in about 30-50% of the US's landmass. That's substantial, when you consider how much of the US landmass is consumed by Alaska (16% total landmass). You could likely bump that up substantially with things like polymer exterior treatment/waterproofing, larger roof overhangs, and ground isolation.

My FIL has an adobe house in Tucson. The walls are about 2.5" thick once you include the interior framing for things like electrical and sheetrock (which they used in that house, for some reason).

Adobe houses are amazing: they're cool in summer, warm in winter. Street noise, nevermind neighbors mowing the lawn, is almost non-existent.

This specific machine looks questionable. It looks like an early attempt at combining rammed earth concepts with 3d printing, but I feel like more specialized machinery is likely going to be required.

You've also got to compare not only the specific strains of plants being grown, but also how they're being grown. Very different farming practices today than even 40 years ago, but 100 years ago they had even odder ones. It wasn't uncommon to burn petroleum fuel in early tractors and have the exhaust go into the soil, under the understanding that it would add carbon back into the ground. And they still have a lot of the same ag practices and strains as the 1800s, then, too.

Thank heavens, it's global warming and carbon increases of less than 0.02% causing a decrease in other, largely unrelated nutrient levels in foods, because it makes plants grow faster.

I thought for sure it was due to the aggressive industrial farming practices employed globally, including:

* literally "salting the earth" (many pesticides and herbicides are salt based) and making once productive regions inhospitable to growth
* excessive use of pesticides/herbicides which deplete soil microbiome
* soil leeching due to an absence of plant cover to prevent erosion
* using pesticides/herbicides which bind to important trace minerals like manganese and iron
* non-rotation of crops or allowing fields to lay fallow for a season to restore the soil
* growing in regions not suitable to farming due to overall low soil nutrient levels

Just imagine it's the one thing that makes plants grow faster and that we happen to be producing a very small amount of and which powerful people profit from substantially by regulating. Who'd have thought. I'm glad they've got our best interests in mind.

For small values of "interesting" perhaps!

Point taken.

I think that's a fair statement. I'm personally not terribly interested in metaphysics. It's one of those topics that strikes me as like Christians arguments on the nature of Christ--is Christ purely divine? Is he both man and divine? Is he just a human? I feel like no matter how much energy I (or anyone!) expends on the metaphysical stuff, there's no answer, and not even a way of proving who is right or wrong. And, if I'm wrong? So what? A bit too ethereal for me!

In general, in the absence of decisive evidence either way, I would lean towards "it's possible" as opposed to "it's impossible."

I have never seen anyone on slashdot claim that "it is all just known" when it comes to human intelligence or the brain. Literally, never. It is also absolutely incorrect to say that we have no clue how the human--we have many clues. I have said repeatedly that we don't know it all. What we do know is that humans exist, and humans have human intelligence.

I posited earlier that if it exists, it can be built.

If you want to change the conversation to a metaphysical conversation about the nature of reality and your spiritual beliefs, then who even cares about your complaints about LLM technology? If you insist that human-type intelligence can never be built or simulated, prove that it can never happen. That's just like, your opinion, man.

I had an interesting exchange with Gweihir recently. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he seems to be of the opinion that it is not proven that the human brain is responsible for human intelligence, that there is something special about human intelligence (that he also believes cannot be simulated or reproduced), and that understanding human intelligence is potentially impossible.

He says "Ah, yes, the deranged claim that we know how the human mind works and it is purely mechanistic. You just excluded yourself from rational discussion by pushing a quasi-religious dogma with no supporting scientifically sound evidence." (Gweihir also often capitalizes "Science".)

I don't know what he believes, but it kind of seems like he believes there is something ineffably unique and special about human intelligence, and he's offended that people ascribe similar "intelligence" words to AI and LLMs. If he wasn't so anti-religious, I would think he was some kind of fundamentalist.

In any case, thank you for the article link to SciAm. It was interesting.

Yes, definitely.

I've been using both Claude and ChatGPT to help me understand a PL/B (a.k.a. DATABUS, similar to COBOL) codebase that I've inherited. It's been great to help with that. The constant gotos, subroutines spread across multiple files, modules, etc., can be really hard to follow across a million+ lines. The company that developed it originally had the same programmers working on it from 1970 to the 2010s. It's dead now, legacy, but still in usage. I have not implemented any LLM generated code, but I did use claude to analyze the compiler and the PL/B source to implement a C program that works with the same file database locking semantics.

I've experienced the same BS in the ER, too.

Got hit in the head (eye) with someone's shoulder. Felt "fine", no concussion, but my eye felt weird. Figured I'd pulled a muscle, and my vision got increasingly fatigued over the course of an hour. Went to the ER. The pain got worse and got to the point where I was just laying down with my eyes shut. Did some imaging. The ER doctor came in, asked me general questions, and left after a couple hours. They kept me there waiting for 5 hours, and were in the process of releasing me with a tylenol prescription, of all things.

I was fortunate in that one of the hospital's ophthalmologist was on rotation and happened to see my chart. He rushed and grabbed us as we were leaving the hospital personally, and said I had to be rushed to surgery. Turns out the orbital bones (itty bitty bones that do cable management for the eye) were exploded and I was one eye movement away from losing my eye.

This was at a Mayo Clinic hospital.

It's fantastic for iterative testing and code observations.

It's great for 'bulking' up development plans, and saves a huge amount of time here. I can read many times faster than I can type, and I can type many times faster than I can type + convert ideas in my head into coherent English or code.

It's also substantially better than most developers at writing code: it mimics working projects, not your average enterprise "just get it done" project. Heck, depending on the model and the instruction, it produces better code than some of the (SunOS) kernel code I've worked on over the years, as well as a great deal of the code written by ex-Sun developers at other shops. A human developer is constrained by their gas tank: mental attention, hunger, sleep. "Just get it done" becomes more of a prerogative with limited attention time. AI doesn't have that problem: a model can be instructed to iterate over an implementation until it meets specification, feed it to another model for verification, and then produce 100+ lines of code in a couple seconds that'd have taken multiple developers multiple days to produce.

The key word here is "architecture". This is something most developers don't have the comprehension desire or ability to address. They just like writing code and understanding new libraries. It's also why most developers won't be successful vibe coders - you'll have devops folks and traditional systems people filling the role more capably.

The 'code monkey' function is more or less dead.

I am concerned for the future, though, as it's becoming increasingly possible to outsource thinking and architecture with AI. I know I've benefited from the capabilities where I just yeet a job at the AI and it gets it done, with no/little "how" consideration on my part. Sometimes, often, this doesn't matter, but that it's as easy to do as it is will, and is, getting a lot of people into trouble. Had to fire a guy for that approach this year already. Supposedly he was once a good developer, but the kinds of things he was doing with AI were extremely problematic because he couldn't "plan" - design, think ahead, consider outcomes, and circle back to verify the instructions were complete. "It builds, it's fine". No, that isn't how this works.