adrianN

"You need experienced grown ups" has been true for a lot of problems that we've very successfully automated.

If home owners are paying then it might be less efficient for the overall economy but better for the utility company. It is often easier to find a million people willing to spend a thousand dollars than finding one person willing to spend a billion.

Arguably it’s worse.

I optimize the things where I get the most benefit per hour of work. Banning alcohol is so difficult politically that it’s not obvious that this is the best thing to work on to improve public health.

Alcohol is indeed dangerous, but I think it is misleading to compare the number of lives ended by alcohol to the number of lives ended by other recreational drugs just because there is a much larger number of people consuming alcohol. Almost everybody who consumes alcohol is not an alcoholic.

Linked lists are great data structures for the use cases where you need their properties. It’s just that you don’t encounter those scenarios very often in most kinds of software.

Well if you realized that the profession will not return to the form that you enjoy you should try to accept that and find something different to enjoy. Being bitter is not a good method of coping with change.

Reminds me of this skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM

That is kind of my point.

There is plenty of historical precedent for machines replacing professions. You could read what those people did and how well it worked.

That will either lead to students becoming frustrated after spending inordinate amounts of time on the unsolvable problem or students giving up too early on the solvable problems.

Teaching is imo mostly about techniques that battle laziness. Teaching intrinsically motivated intelligent students has always been trivial. All progress in education is about scaling it to work for people who only reluctantly engage with the material.

Runtimes are usually pretty well applicable at scale, it’s just that most people don’t have a good intuition about asymptomatic notation. Constants and lower order terms matter a lot in practice but are hidden in asymptotic notation.

Even a billionaire doesn’t have many _good_ years left after 80.

Recent political discourse has all but proved that a majority of the populace in many countries is quite removed from facts in general. I don’t think that there is much hope for critical thinking.

There is no reason to assume that quantum computers would benefit LLMs in particular. Perhaps we could implement LLMs as analog circuits to save energy.

It takes five years to build a wind turbine in Germany. There is a snowball's chance in hell that you can build a nuclear power plant in that time.

There is no reason to assume that fusion will be a particularly cheap power source.

Only a tiny fraction of the Federation's population is part of Star Fleet. There are only a few thousand star ships scattered over thousands of light years. Crew complements are rather small, so at most a single-digit million people are on Star Fleet ships. That's comparable to the size of just the current US military personnel but the Federation has hundreds of planets and many billions of people.

To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.

I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.

Cost and time seem like a pretty important con to me.

It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.

I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar. I wouldn’t be surprised if they legally allow the building of new reactors but then fail to find investors. But perhaps they plan on using them as some sort of strategic assets and will just run them at a loss?

Your comment would be much better without the last sentence.

I'd like not to have to wait for three months to see a doctor to prescribe me the routine treatment for my routine illness, so yes, more mediocre doctors would be good for me. It would also unburden the doctors who are "really into medicine" so that they could spend their time on more difficult cases.

It’s hard to retrofit that on existing buildings for reasons of structural integrity.

Changing permitting laws can take ages if it works at all.

Product discoverability has some value, but marketing is largely a zero sum game.

Software stacks are infrastructure. It makes sense to pay for infrastructure via taxes. That's why "Public Money, Public Code" is imho a great initiative. We should redirect the public money that we currently hand over to proprietary software vendors towards open source.

They expect to retire with a decent amount of money before things go down hill.

You prevent abuse of the API by models the same way you prevent abuse by humans: you have server side checks.