A bunch of people I know (including me) got laid off so my ex-employer could shift jobs to producing AI gear. Does that count?

It doesn't need to be that direct. I'd also expect to see job growth and hiring to slow. It's tough getting a job as an entry level software engineer right now and most people think that's related: an AI is a pretty good replacement for a new college grad.

That's the thing. There are any number of other technological changes which occurred in the past for which you could make the same prediction. You could have quite reasonably predicted that the advent of tractors and mechanized farming would put millions of farmers out of work. In fact, it did. And yet we don't have bands of roving unemployed farmers ravaging the hills.

Same thing with computers. One would have predicted armies of unemployable secretaries, typists, and office clerks and yet we do not. Explain to me why we think AI is different.

Julian Simon was correct to say humans are the ultimate resource. We're also the ultimate consumers. I'm quite confident we'll find new things to want and new jobs to satisfy those wants.

True. The skill is being to articulate what X is.

I was musing on this yesterday. I can write assembly code. I don't now, I use a compiler. I used to double check the assembly on occasion too, now I trust the tooling.

I'm at the point where I'm reasonably confident that if I carefully construct a prompt, I'll get code which is pretty close to what I want. Yes, I still review it. I also trust the AI to do things like "Verify the HOST_IP setting is being carried through from the CLI through these services to this piece of embedded code over here". Yes, I could do that by hand but it's much, much faster and comprehensive having the AI do it.

I haven't dared trying "refactor this code base to separate the GUI, CLI, and logic into a layered set of reusable components", which this code base desperately needs. A hardware engineer (who I greatly respect) didn't do such a great job when writing this.

The other big advantage of a truly universal UBI, universal meaning literally everyone gets paid, is it avoids disincentives to find work. If you lose your unemployment by getting a job, that's a big disincentive, particularly if the new wage is close to the unemployment benefit.

IIRC, there was research showing that a large number of people found jobs right as their unemployment was ending. I would be surprised if this wasn't the case.

...and robots and the Internet and personal computers and the Green revolution and shipping containers and mechanization of agriculture and internal combustion engines and railroads and canals and horse collars and on and on and on.

You could use any revolutionary productivity improvement as justification for UBI. But we've been over this ground uncountable times in /. so time to trot out the same timeworn arguments which won't change anyone's minds.

Maybe she was just well preserved or had some work done.

Well, I'm glad they sorted it out. Jack Klugman would be proud. Falls off cliffs do happen so that wasn't a crazy conclusion.

I'm curious though: what exactly did they find to indicate homicide? I wonder what evidence was.

Well, if I understand the argument, the property values are going up because the coffee shop opened. They may have been going up beforehand but the growth continued because of the added flair of having hip coffee joints in walking distance.

I can see their point: I put in the work to open a coffee bar and can only make so much from it (because competition from other coffee stores prevents me from charging over $X for a latte). OTOH, the homeowners and landlords don't have the same constraint so they make much more money out of the deal.

While I'm somewhat sympathetic with the issue, I'm not sure what to do about it. Rising property tax rates in certain hip neighborhoods and giving the extra revenue to shop owners doesn't seem like a great long term plan. I think it's just the nature of operating a business. You'll create a lot of value you can't capture. You have to instead go into the enterprise understanding you can only capture what you can capture and if that's not good enough, don't start.

Businesses are always trying to capture more of the value they create. Problem is, successful businesses virtually always capture only a tiny fraction of it.

There are some studies, for which I do not have citations, which estimate that entrepreneurs capture something in the low single digits of the value they create. Steve Jobs was a zillionaire but a billion people got phones which are way more valuable to them than what they paid. Jobs and Apple only skimmed of a tiny portion of that value.

We often grouse about negative externalities in economies, things like pollution and crowding. We rarely talk about the positive externalities. Raising neighborhood property values is one of them.

On the one hand, I've been told by people who work with politicians and their staffs that the average bear vastly overestimates how competent they are.

But cynicism aside, there's a running gag among programmers. It's very hard from the outside to understand what's easy and what's hard. I am a professional programmer and the product managers I work with frequently suggest five things, three of which are easy, one is a major project, and one involves solving the halting problem. And those are people in the business who in theory have a good understanding of what we're producing.

You could say that about credit reports too. They're just someone's opinion of how credit worthy you are.

Practically speaking, that ship has sailed. We've already collectively decided if someone is collecting data and making a decisions which can have profound effects on someone, that someone has a legal right to see what data went into that decision. However, the law as written may or may not apply to AI because AI wasn't a thing at the time. If it doesn't, IMHO, that's a job for Congress or the California legislature to address. I'd prefer they explicitly added AI and other algorithms to the legislation rather than having a court invent a legal right.

Bear in mind, I am not a lawyer and I haven't read the relevant legislation and case law. I have absolutely no idea how a court will decide. I doubt many of us here do either. Case law especially is very complicated so be cautious with what you think you know.

I didn't read TFA, I just started some back of the envelope math. I was wondering what you build this thing out of and what material has a tensile strength to weigh ratio to hold anything at 2,000 g's. Turns out carbon fiber can easily do it.

Assuming I have a 1m high strength carbon fiber rod with a cross section of 1 cm^2, that's 100 cm^3. According to the Googles, carbon fiber has a density of about 1.6 g/cm^3 so the whole rod has a mass of 160g.

Also according to the Googles, an ultra-strong version of this rod will hold up something like 70,000 kg (!). Even allowing for a hefty safety margin, the rod can hold over 40,000 times it's own weight, well above what this new centrifuge needs.

That's crazy. I knew carbon fiber was strong and light but had no idea it was that strong.

2,000 g's is definitely a ton of gravity.

In the consumer space, I think the vast majority of systems are laptops with less than a TB of local storage. The number of systems which had multi-TB is a small slice of the market, probably just gamers and media creators. That's why I'm surprised: I wouldn't think there were enough of them to buy 150 million units.

Maybe I shouldn't be. How many professional photographers and videographers can there be? Tens of millions? Probably not 100 million.

Right. But how many casual creators keep that locally versus beaming it to a cloud? Not the ones I know, which is admittedly a small slice.

That's the thing. You personally might have an enormous home storage footprint. I'd be hesitant to extrapolate from that. People who hang out in /. and other nerd forums tend to be weird outliers in many ways.

I beg to differ. In the enterprise space, "large" arrays are measured in petabytes and they all use SSDs now. I don't think you can buy a primary storage array which still supports HDD. Even the small enterprise arrays, tens to hundreds of TB, are exclusively SSDs.

That was popular 15 to 5 years ago. Last I looked, SSDs and NVMe devices had gotten large and cheap enough to entirely replace HDDs except for limited applications. Well, maybe not "entirely" but for huge swaths of the market. At least, that was my impression. Given the sales numbers, I wonder if I'm wrong.

All that's in the enterprise/data center space. I have very little insight into the SOHO market and what happens on deskside systems. That was a different part of the company.

That's the thing. My impression was the class of applications where a SSD wasn't appropriate had shrunk to just backup and archive storage.