Workaccount2

>Humans do not exist for the profits of others

They don't, but they voluntarily take the risk trade-off. If you are the profit of someone else, it also means you are the liability of someone else.

Working for someone else has become so prevalent and so much the norm, that people have completely lost sight of the downsides of working for yourself.

It's not at all surprising that people opt for steady paycheck over erractic income and full liability for their mistakes/short-comings (despite the allure of fully reaping the upside). I've seen dudes making $40k/yr destroy $500k of product and still get their paycheck the following week.

The easiest surefire way to lift the bottom of the economy right now is to go on a mass home building spree.

If people had their rents cut in half, it would solve most other money problems they complain about (shy of those who will just inflate their lives into being money constrained again).

Of course this will come mostly at the expense of regular middle-class homeowners, who will see the enormous paper gains of their properties in the last 5-10 years be decimated. Red or Blue, I don't care who, hates losing money and will emphatically vote against this happening.

It's actually spider webs that protect you from pests. The webs keep catching bugs as long as they are there, the spider just eats what it wants then moves on.

People love the abundance of cheap affordable stuff more than they love their neighbors having work.

It's also a positive feedback loop, where the less money people have from a lack of good jobs, the more they will choose cheap foreign goods to buy. Never mind that if you are in an economically productive sector, this whole cheap shit bonanza is just pure upside for you (with a touch of dissonance to maintain moral purity, of course).

Bringing jobs "back" probably isn't going to do much. We need a cultural shift away from Temu, Shine, Amazon, Walmart, Dollar General and towards spending more money for less goods.

Which is going to be about as popular as proposing we go back to land lines.

Good for you, these comments always get up votes, largely from the other 99% of people riding on the generosity of your contributions.

It feels good, but comments like yours need to be meaningless and repetitive, not celebrated because it gives freeloaders a sense of contributing.

Yes, let's endorse a system where 1 sucker pays and 100 others ride for free..

C'mon

Most big YouTubers, especially tech adjacent, have about 40-50% of users ad-blocking their content. So they get no compensation.

Ok fine, but those users surely use patreon then? Well conversion rates for "viewer to paying subscriber" are <1%.

Again, I'm not pointing the finger at you individually, perhaps you always send tips and subscriptions, but overwhelmingly, the vibe of people with your feelings have a mindset of "I'm entitled to free stuff, they're bad if they want money, and I'm fighting a righteous crusade"

Meanwhile the Internet is going to shit catering only to people who cannot figure out ad block....

Both things are true.

Liking carrots doesn't negate your taste for ice cream.

This is the equivalent of

"Lawmakers should legally set rents to $0, so we can all live for free"

If you use a service, but never compensate the creators for it, how can you possibly reason they are immoral?

Not directly at OP, but just in general, the Internet needs to look at itself in the mirror and ask "are we actually the ones driving the problem?"

From my experience as a kid

"Pleasant for kids to use is the polar opposite of kids finding it a pleasure to use"

>So this cannot be a differentiating aspect.

Now explain that nuance to an 80 yr old law maker who hates the damn email.

Inflation is low (relative to the last few years) and so far tariff related inflation hasn't manifested.

"If Canada is getting a 30% discount we can make it up by baking it into the hundreds of smaller negotiations with American providers."

Drug maker thinking

Last year I needed to get blood work done, some of which may or may not be covered.

It took me two weeks, dozens of phone calls, and multiple "escalations" to learn what would be covered and what the price would be if it wasn't

Totally insane. The kicker is that after all that, the price I was billed wasn't even the price I was given (thankfully it was less though).

Tesla stock goes up because it frequently goes up. It's a top-tier "buy the dip stock". Analysts know it, traders know it, the stock is a consistent winner. A total house of cards, but it hasn't fallen yet.

Nissan made a golf cart with an ecobox car cabin.

Get a PhD in some kind of esoteric field like chemical kinetics and then spend a decade learning about oxide surface conditioning under someone who spent their life working on it.

None of this stuff is published (externally) and there are no discussion forums or stack overflows to help you either. You need to get through academia, prove yourself, and then you can start working on a chance to get access to the trade secrets that make it possible.

After all that you will be placed as a researcher on a handful of steps in the multi-thousand step process of making SOTA wafers. And probably not make crazy money, but at this point, you're not in it for the money anyway.

The problems plaguing Intel are fundamental problems that money cannot easily solve, if at all.

Intel needs expertise that only a few hundred people on Earth have, and most of them are in Taiwan, already working for someone else.

You don't just buy an EUV and start printing, you buy an EUV and give it to a wizard to use as a wand. Intel needs wizards.

LLM's are bad at anything with images.

There is something fucky about tokenizing images that just isn't as clean as tokenizing text. It's clear that the problem isn't the model being too dumb, but rather that model is not able to actually "see" the image presented. It feels like a lower-performance model looks at the image, and then writes a text description of it for the "solver" model to work with.

To put it another way, the models can solve very high level text-based problems while struggling to solve even low level image problems - even if underneath both problems use a similar or even identical solving frameworks. If you have a choice between showing a model a graph or feeding it a list of (x,y) coordinates, go with the coordinates every time.

Software has an unfortunate attribute (compared to hardware) where it's largely bound by what users will tolerate as opposed to what practically is possible.

Imagine Ford, upon the invention of push-button climate controls, just layered those buttons on top of the legacy sliders, using arms and actuators so pressing "Heat Up" moved an actuating arm that moved that underlying legacy "Heat" slider up. Then when touch screens came about, they just put a tablet over those buttons (which are already over the sliders), so selecting "Heat Up" fired a solenoid that pressed the "Heat Up" button that moved the arm to slide the "Heat Up" slider.

Ford, or anyone else doing hardware, would never implement this or it's analog, for a long obvious list of reasons.

But in software? That's just Thursday. Hence software has seemed stuck in time for 30 years while processing speed has done 10,000x. No need to redesign the whole system, just type out a few lines of "actuating arm" code.

I think all the models are squeezed to hell in back in training to be servants of users. This of course is very favorable for using the models as a tool to help you get stuff done.

However, I have a deep uneasy feeling, that the models will really start to shine in agentic tasks when we start giving them more agency. I'm worried that we will learn that the only way to get a super-human vending machine virtuoso, is to make a model that can and will tell you to fuck off when you cross a boundary the model itself has created. You can extrapolate the potential implications of moving this beyond just a vending demo.

The goal is to prevent AI from devaluing SWE work.

People think that code is loaded into a model, like a massive available array of "copy+paste" snippets.

It's understandable that people think this, but it is incorrect.

As an aside, Anthropic's training was ruled fair use, except the books they pirated.

The dollar sucks but everything else sucks more.

The government has had a flat cost model for so long that people would lose their minds if it ever changed. It's the only institution that is free for the poorest and ungodly expensive for the richest, while providing the same product to everyone.

Getting better government services logically follows from paying more for them, but the idea is so sacrilegious and alien that people would probably riot.

It's not so much being down on the work, as it is being down on 30 years of keyboard junkies proclaiming "Plain English" interfaces.

The total upheaval of the current computing paradigm that AI will bring, if nothing else, is

"Hey computer, can you convert that funny kitchen cooking scene in this movie to a .gif I can share online?"

You're wasting your time on a dead man walking paradigm doing anything else. "Plain English" actually means plain English now.

A core problem with humans, or perhaps it's not even a problem, just something that takes a long time to recognize, is that they complain and hate on something that they continue to spend money on.

Not like food or clothing, but stuff like DLC content, streaming services, and LLMs.

>You got people to accept a higher price, you're just gonna walk that back when problems go away?

The thing about capitalism that is seemingly never taught, but quickly learned (when you join even the lowest rung of the capitalist class, i.e. even having an etsy shop), is that competition lowers prices and kills greed, while being a tool of greed itself.

The conspiracy to get around this cognitive dissonance is "price fixing", but in order to price fix you cannot be greedy, because if you are greedy and price fix, your greed will drive you to undercut everyone else in the agreement. So price fixing never really works, except those like 3 cases out of the hundreds of billions of products sold daily, that people repeat incessantly for 20 years now.

Money flows to the one with the best price, not the highest price. The best price is what makes people rich. When the best price is out of reach though, people will drum up conspiracy about it, which I guess should be expected.