agent_turtle

the actual answer to this is accreditation. you will see safety standards rise across the board if engineers risk losing their license for shipping unsafe features.

one only needs to open a history book to see that this country used to be much, much more corrupt. while this country has problems, we are far from the first generation to face them.

i'm not sure why this is surprising. the socialist left, the coalition who care about equal access to good and services, is leading the charge against surveillance pricing.

> the socialist left would like nothing better than to have surveillance pricing, so long as it is deployed in the aid of poor people

nothing about this makes sense. i think you're making an argument that the socialist left wants poor people to afford more, and yes that's true. but comparing that to price gouging is where logic left the station.

literally all these things you've listed that you're working on would not be needed if AI didn't exist. which goes back to OP's point about spinning in circles.

what exactly here advances the project?

this overly cynical take is bad and wrong. c-suite does in fact care about customer satisfaction; it's why you get asked about it in surveys all the time. it's why a game will live or die by the review scores.

while it is true that c-suite behavior does not always align with improving customer satisfaction, that's usually because c-suite is dumb and bad at their jobs.

the enshittification we experience on social media, on the other hand, is due to the fact that we are not their customers. we are the product.

i used to be in charge of these sorts of decisions for my team. the thing most people don't think about when it comes to rolling your own software is the upkeep. in other words, you don't _just_ pay for the software. you pay for someone to keep it running so you don't have to wake up at 2am to deal with angry customers.

agreed. i have to assume dead internet theory is at play here with all these comments talking about exponential improvement.

if anything we've slowed down. i have no clue what the acceleration folks are talking about. we've been getting diminishing returns on models; the growth has been in usage and tools.

I don't know how you use search but I often find incredible information that I didn't explicitly search for.

How do you quantify such things? How can you say with a straight face that this magic box gives you more relevant information (which may be wrong!) and that will revolutionize the workforce?

My partner works at MSFT and I can confirm this.

OpenAI is currently being evaluated in terms of hundreds of billions. That’s an insane number for creating a product that “speeds up searching a bit”.

One of the major reasons there’s such a shortage of homes in the US is the extensive permit process required. Pivoting from data centers to home construction is not a straightforward process.

Regarding the economics, the reason it’s a big deal that AI is powering growth numbers is because if the bubble pops, jobs go poof and stock prices with it as everyone tries to salvage their positions. While we still create jobs, on net we’ll be losing them. This has many secondary and tertiary effects, such as less money in the economy, less consumer confidence, less investment, fewer businesses causing fewer jobs, and so on. A resilient economy has multiple growth areas; an unstable one has one or two.

While you could certainly argue that we may already be in rough shape even without the bubble popping, it would undoubtedly get worse for the reasons I listed above,

The article you gave is derived from a poll, not a study.

As for the quote, I can’t find it in the article. Can you point me to it? I did click on one of the studies and it indicated productivity gains specifically on writing tasks. Which reminded me of this recent BBC article about a copywriter making bank fixing expensive mistakes caused by AI: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyvm1dyp9v2o

There’s no evidence of AI causing layoffs. There’s lots of evidence of CEOs using AI as a scapegoat to entice investors: https://apnews.com/article/ai-layoffs-tech-industry-jobs-ece...

Some of the variables that made the Great Depression what it was included very high tariff rates and lack of quality federal oversight.

Today, we have the highest tariffs since right before the Great Depression, with the added bonus of economic uncertainty because our current tariff rates change on a near daily basis.

Add in meme stocks, AI bubble, crypto, attacks on the Federal Reserve’s independence, and a decreasing trust in federal economic data, and you can make the case that things could get pretty ugly.

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There was a study recently that showed how not only did devs overestimate the time saved using AI, but that they were net negative compared to the control group.

Anyway, that about sums up my experience with AI. It may save some time here and there, but on net, you’re better off without it.

Long before I was born. If you're trying to suss out which came first, the addiction or the slot machines, I don't have a definitive answer for you.

I'll throw some anecdotal data down. I'm a military brat who grew up on bases around the country and in Germany. My dad was a gambling addict. It was not uncommon for us to spend all day at the bowling alley on base, which was where the slot machines were.

At the time, I didn't know better and just played arcade games all day. Eventually, I started to put together just how much money my dad must have put into those slot machines. Thousands, maybe most of his salary. It certainly explained why we generally had no furniture in our house compared to my friends.

So am I against slot machines on base? No. I have no doubt that if they weren't readily available in a safe/controlled environment, my dad would have still found a way to gamble. If anything, it was a forcing mechanism for him not to go overboard given the limitations of what was offered on site.

I do however wish there were programs that existed to provide offramps for people with addiction, similar to supervised injection sites for drug users. Seems to me that this could be easily funded with the proceeds.

"Yeah the house may be on fire but we can't even begin to put it out until we make sure every other house in the city is not also on fire."

> I do not have enough information to definitely say whether it’s good or bad.

Usually when I don't have enough information on an issue, I take it upon myself to learn more about it before stating an opinion.

> Most of the things in life are neither because they have good side effects, and bad side effects to them.

You don't have to be a doctor to understand that the downside of cancer probably outweighs the upside of not having to save for retirement. Economic instability is the cancer in this metaphor, and the cause of it is Trump changing his mind on tariff rates every other day. Economists, like doctors, are trained on how to treat this illness, and all of them are saying "stop doing that". Trump can either listen to the experts or continue on his path, destroying the American economy in the process.

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” - H.L. Mencken

"I can get the drug prices down… 1000% 600% 500% 1500%. Numbers that are not even thought to be achievable." - Donald J. Trump, POTUS

7.26 is technically more than 7.25. Further, a low floor acts as a weight, depressing wages generally.

"Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would lift wages for over 33 million workers": https://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-15-by-2025/

(For the record, 33 million is ~6 million more than the population of Australia)

Trump just fired the BLS chief because the economic data from liberation day onward was terrible..

yeah, actually. If the worst thing you can find when paying living wages for workers is a small drop of 2.7% employment among fast food chains, that sounds like a great trade off.

Seriously, do some introspection here.

You view this as zero sum. How many new business owners would be created if people had enough to save? How many new businesses would exist if more money was flowing in the economy? Should businesses exist if they can't pay livable wages?

These aren't hypothetical questions. We have an answer for them all over the country where state minimum wages are rising in Democratic states.

> Decades of worsening conditions for the commoner is Ron Wyden's idea of a booming economy. Democrats are useful idiots.

I can't anymore, folks. Republicans passed the largest tax cuts for billionaires, increased the deficit by trillions, and kicked millions of people of medicaid. Meanwhile, Trump is out there creating the most regressive tax system via tariffs we've ever seen which affect the poorest the most.

Yet Democrats are the useful idiots. Incredible.

I got my first job as a grocer in 2010 which paid a minimum wage of $7.25/hr. That was 15 years ago and the minimum wage is still $7.25/hr.

Current unemployment is a very low 4%, which completely contradicts your baseless theory.

You can do that without creating a single unaccountable entity housing everyone's data. In fact, it is a weakness to have a single point of failure.