dualvariable

> an authoritarian regime, with no respect for human rights

I mean Alex Pretti was murdered because he was exercising his 2nd amendment rights and was getting beaten after having been disarmed and never displaying his firearm.

Headlines are full of people who are dying without medical care because they're being incarcerated and shipped overseas due to legal technicalities.

Yeah, AI-enabled surveillance capitalism is likely to be every bit as bad as what people imagine China is doing with their social credit scores.

And the scary thing is that you can probably easily sell it to Democratic voters if you track racism scores for people, so you can filter people out of your dating pool or job/rental applications. Most people don't care about privacy as a fundamental right, and they'll roll over and compromise if you give them a way to track what they hate. You just need to make sure it is "bipartisan" and it'll be wildly popular.

I've written my own toy git implementation before, I know how the underlying design works.

You're assuming that I have trouble understanding and using git, when I actually have 16+ years of experience with it, and I can use it just fine.

It is horrible to try to teach to new people. Those operations sort of make sense one you already know how it all works, and can see how the coders wrote it. But that is backwards, since it actively makes it more difficult for neophytes to understand it. "It gets easy once you're an expert" isn't actually good design.

> Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git...

Git has horrible design and ergonomics.

It is an excellent example of engineers designing interfaces for engineers without a good feedback loop.

Ironically, you just proved your point that engineers need to better understand how users are actually using their product, because their mental visualizations of how their product gets used is usually poor.

I always felt like humans that were good at writing that way were often doing exactly what the LLM is doing. Making it sound good so that the human reader would draw all those same inferences.

You've just had it exposed that it is easy to write very good-sounding slop. I really don't think the LLMs invented that.

No, I'm saying we had that in the Gulf War, and we're sliding back to Vietnam.

Yeah, a friend of mine is a teacher and is using it to generate material for the classroom all the time, and it dramatically increases her productivity. The school administrators have also been pretty impressed by it, and told her to keep it up more or less.

> I think you could argue the draft forced the war to be real for more families (and the expansion of TV), intensifying the resistance to it.

Yeah, it did, all the young men of draft age had to live knowing that they might get drafted and be forced to fight and die. Even if they were never called, or in retrospect were too old at the time.

We seem to have largely forgotten that now, along with the "Vietnam Syndrome" that the US military "suffered" through until we were successful in applying military force in 1991 with the Gulf War.

I almost hope they're successful in doing this. We've also lost the focus on clearly defined objectives for war.

It seems like we need a horrible mess to learn all the hard lessons all over again.

It isn't the number that were drafted that matters. It is the number who were enrolled who might have been drafted that matters.

I don't even use cruise control. I like to be actively switched on all the time constantly making little decisions, including speed, so that I actually am instantly ready if I need to make some big decision.

People these days letting the car drive, thinking they can spring into action I think are underestimating just how cold their cache lines are getting and the major page fault they're going to take when they try to take over.

And I've seen comments by people that they were letting the car drive itself into a bad situation they could see developing, but didn't jump in to take over right away in anticipation (effectively betting on the car over their own skill but still realizing they had to jump in if the car got it wrong--which is just so incredibly confused).

Half of cellphone users hold onto phone for 3+ years and experience battery degradation, and cell phone battery life is the #1 complain/concern about cellphone users. They might not immediately demand swappable batteries (particularly if they're too young to have ever owned a cellphone with swappable batteries) but I suspect if you prompted them, that the response rate would be very high, and that this isn't just an echo chamber concern.

> a low-res 28” color TV with 5 channels cost a fortune.

Uh, back in 2000 (okay not quite 30 years ago, but getting close) I had a 36" Sony Wega which cost around $1500 with DirectTV and hundreds of channels. A 25" to 27" TV was more of a 1988 kind of thing (which is almost 40 years ago now). Being limited to 5 OTA channels was more of a 1980 thing.

But again you can't really buy that Sony Wega anymore, even though the CPI probably prices it at $20 these days.

Back 50 years ago, average household spend on the Internet was also $0, so it was very cheap, we weirdly didn't spend anything on it when I was growing up. Now I spend $80/month on it, and have trouble finding anything cheaper around here.

If you want to consider "communications spend", back in 1988, you might have spent $50/month on your landline, cable tv and newspaper subscription. Today households tend to spend $280/month on internet, wireless and streaming/cable services. That is actually double the CPI. They get lots more for that, but the cost of being an average middle class household has grown at double the CPI. And these days you need the internet in order to keep up with Joneses, it isn't really a choice.

But if you used to be able to afford steak and now all you can afford is ground turkey, readjusting the basket of goods for that shift in "preference" is just hiding the fact that nobody can afford steak anymore.

And similarly, the hedonic adjustments to smartphones sort of implicitly claim that the $100 cheap smartphone you can buy today is worth $8000 back in 2009 because of how much better processors and memory have gotten. But you can't buy an iPhone 1.0 for $1 to satisfy the need to have a phone that you can install apps onto (and the upgrade cost every few years as cheap phones can no longer run an O/S version that your banking app requires).

> There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist.

Yeah, but the US seems to me to be one of the worst places for individual responsibility. Everyone expects their environment to be perfect safe, and they can behave with a large degree of personal negligence, and if anything goes wrong they want to sue anyone they can think of. And then corporations take defensive actions against that, and you wind up with "do not take Flumitrol if you are allergic to Flumitrol" kinds of warnings everywhere. It is "individualistic" in the most narrowly narcissistic sense, which I don't think is what the founders envisioned either.

penalti para el real madrid!

LLMs don't "think" or "understand" in any way. They aren't AGI. They're still just stochastic parrots.

Putting them in control of making decisions without humans in the loop is still pretty crazy.

27% German, 31% Autistic. I think I'm old enough to have an awful lot of IDGAF which I think greatly suppresses those numbers. If I took this test back when I was 16, I think the numbers would be very different.

I hope this was just some over the top sarcasm.