ang_cire

I agree about what happened, but I think the timescale is different.

Railroads were the tools of robber-barons even in the 1800s. Electricity was captured by the major electric companies before most millennials were born. Finance was a stodgy-suit-wearing-white-guy's game when my dad got into it in the 1970s.

I knew that's what "finance jobs" meant back when I was a kid building fan pages on GeoCities. But GeoCities and Limewire and Napster and Gaia Online never led me to think that's were I'd end up if I worked in tech.

If our boomer parents had warned us about crapitalism as kids, we might have seen it coming before we had already sunk decades into it as an interest and career path.

Translation is an art form that is rapidly becoming lost, not because AI is doing it, but because there are too many translators who have apparently been trained (or likely, were never trained in it as a formal study at all) that it should be written in a way that emphasizes the translation as a standalone work more than anything else.

A good translation should attempt to communicate what the author meant, as closely as possible, even if there is no equivalent in the target language.

A good translation should be beautiful all on its own.

It's the balance of the 2 that makes a translation successful.

If you erase the author's true meaning just because you don't want to slow the reader down in having to take a moment to read an explanatory footnote if they're confused, you have failed to translate it, and have likely editorialized it.

Why do many English-speaking people know 'wabisabi' as a concept? Because someone bothered to explain it to them, and they bothered to listen. That act enriches the reader.

And don't even get me started on "localization".

The problem isn't that WFO-preferenced people don't exist, it's that it aligns with the narratives of the extroverted management (who approve their own PTO) that it's better, and people who aren't extroverts dread being forced back. No one who prefers WFH is actually against people who prefer offices being allowed to go there, they're opposed to people publicly claiming they prefer that- unqualified- because they see it as a threat; a statement that will be weaponized to support management's RTO initiatives.

Or, as any respectable farmer does it, it's though heavy subsidies and crop insurance fraud!

Yes and no.

There were really 2 sides to the original 'tech' industry: military and consumer. The military side was always about profit, because it was just an extension of the already extant WW2 military industrial complex (and frankly, IBM falls here despite their mainframes being largely used in civilian businesses).

But the consumer side that really grew out of universities into early gaming, internet, and consumer electronics tech, was very heavily driven by design and garage-start tinkerers. That's not to say no one wanted to make money, but it wasn't MBA-bro-driven back then.

Exactly. It's insane how we've come to just accept corporate profit as a valid reason for allowing people to die, or for shifting responsibility for the outcome away from the corporation.

The Joker's monologue to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight about how one group of killings is just normal and "part of the plan", while another is shocking and appalling (specifically when it's a societal 'elite'), was supposed to be at least somewhat outlandish and overly pessimistic as an interpretation of society, but damn these people are trying to prove him right.

The article isn't only about AI, and neither was my comment.

Is discussing offshoring that takes away American jobs and has driven much poverty in the heartland equally political and unacceptable, or is it just the political discussions you don't like having that shouldn't be allowed?

The "no politics" rule is about not posting constant "x politician said this about tech" articles, not about banning all discussion of real-world consequences of the tech industry.

Everyone makes decisions in life and lives with the consequences. Your question, as it's stated now, is simply "should we have free will?"

I never made any statement about which actions should be legal. And the facile assertion that endorsing one action is either tantamount to, or requiring of, endorsement of any action that shares an arbitrary attribute you identify is sloppy argumentation; somehow I don't think you would argue that someone supporting police having the authority to use force means they are supporting every instance including illegal uses of force.

I don't know where you got the idea my comment is about AI from.

That's only okay if they're a politician or business exec, right? It's fine to hold those murderers up as role models, apparently.

Because we see what's coming?

Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost?

Because Snow Crash wasn't supposed to be the goal?

Because our daily complicity in what's happening is also a daily reminder that we're not brave enough to be a Mangione?

Take your pick.

These are bad examples.

Warranty status is tied to hardware* serials. It's not like there are third-party Framework sellers.

Sending a recall notice via email doesn't require name, address, dob, etc.

Companies are in a bad habit of not actually clearing customer data they don't need.

Perhaps I'm uncommon in that I make diagrams and even sometimes pseudo-code (mostly in the form of mapping out function names, because they serve as a proxy for program flow paths) before I write actual code, but I don't find myself really going off gut feeling. I have a pretty good idea of what the program is going to look like and do before I start, and with e.g. Claude I give those to it, so it mostly looks like what I envisioned, unless it suggests changes.

It's funny, because I would consider myself a tinkerer (and I have a large backlog of pre-LLM programs), but the coding itself isn't the main thing that brings me joy, it's the phase 2 and phase 4 combo: figure out how to solve it, see whether your solution was correct (and actually use the program for its purpose). The actual implementation is extraneous to that.

To carry forward the sudoku analogy, I care about figuring out which numbers go where, and whether I was correct, I don't care about the mechanical part of actually penciling-in the answers (coding).

This is a false dichotomy.

University impact on careers in the 1980s was materially different than now, and that is still "modern education".

Opposing the AI impact on universities is not equivalent to opposing modern water infrastructure, it's more akin to being opposed to a new water pipe material that is shown to improve flow but have adverse health effects.

> If all laws were prosecuted to the exact letter of the law we would not need juries. The DA will prosecute any case that they feel has enough evidence to secure a conviction, as this case had. It is the juries that determine if prosecution in each case is "just".

I think you're think of grand juries. They decide if there is enough evidence to go to trial, I.e. if the prosecution is just.

Even without grand juries, we'd still have juries that decide the verdicts. They decide if a conviction is just.

The bail jumping charge was actually dropped in the end, so weed possession was the only charge.

We (meaning the US) won't ever fix this ourselves, because we systematically refuse to hold businesses to any kind of standards.

Make it illegal to discriminate based on degree status in hiring (it's not like anyone is hiring an SWE without doing technical interviews anyways, so if you prove out their skills why does the paper matter?), and you remove both the backdoor socioeconomic discrimination route (which is itself a backdoor route to discriminate against protected attributes), and solve the degree 'inflation' incentive.

Yep, there were multiple dog whistles in this article, including framing the very intentional attack on science funding by Trump, as a tool for political leverage against universities, as being just some kind of benign priority shift.

That is either a logistics issue, or a mismatch in what is being purchased. It doesn't specify that they're the same GPUs. Given the way the author structures the article, I'm suspicious that this is a meaningful or even truthful metric.

wont to do*

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wont

Yes, but that's not something universities can solve.

Universities predate capitalism (despite the author's absurd assertion that they were founded to serve the interests of businesses), and will exist after it, if any humans survive it.

I'm fairly certain that you do in fact have a duct that moves aqua (water) into your house, bro.

And gravity-feed systems are the best way to move large amounts of water. That's even how nature works, and nature moves much more water than humans do.

Which is why the real answer to this is actually an older paradigm: apprenticeship.

Companies should be doing their own training for their jobs, and university can be freed up to actually be about intellectual pursuit rather than economic pursuit.

It was companies themselves who created this issue anyways, by demanding degrees for every damn job, regardless of whether a degree could prepare you in the first place, and slashing entry level jobs to almost nothing. Then they started using degrees as a proxy for work experience (and I mean that in the literal sense; "bachelor or 4 years of experience" is common to see in job reqs, despite no bachelor degree actually being equivalent to 4 years of full-time job experience), which just further pushed incoming students to expect that to be the purpose of their time at University.

As someone who's managed bug bounty programs, I'm fine with this?

I've had at least 2 times where a researcher did something to get themselves removed from a program, and came back with alt accounts.

I don't know what issues they run into with their backend systems when it comes to payment, but I can also imagine that it's important for tax and compliance purposes for H1 or BC to know who they are facilitating money to be transferred to? Probably don't want to find out they're a sanctioned entity using a VPN.

I'm kind of struggling to think of a job/ do-work-get-money system that doesn't require identity verification.

I've gone the opposite route with my recent project, using IRC-style nick + pass, with no email. I prefer this to associating everything with a unique identifier about myself.

How would they stop? Are you insinuating they're going to have reviewed all code at some point, and that new code for them to review will just cease to exist? Or that they'll just decide to stop finding bugs they're finding now in new code when they review it? All the previous model checkers didn't stop giving us bugs to fix, which is why his premise is wrong; every big company is still running SonarQube because it still gives you bug findings. So will AI.

If the argument were instead that it will cease to find new classes of vulnerabilities and bugs, that may very well be true, because that is a question of the limitations of programming and at a lower level computer architecture, but that's not the argument the author made.

Which is such a crazy assertion, given that not even Mythos was trained explicitly as an exploit finder. Even if the US's profit-driven capital for AI dev dries up, China's state funding for results-driven AI isn't drying up, and they're going to keep building better models as long as the results are there (which they are), for better or worse.

Any system used to surveil is a surveillance system, QED.

There's no minimum fidelity required, you could use potentially any sensor to surveil. It's a question of use.