hax0ron3

But the pleasurable sensation of seeing those numbers next to the up arrow!

ChatGPT could be wrong, but according to it Germany has had an unusually strong anti-nuclear movement since the 1970s.

German post-WW2 distrust of anything seen as related to war, plus the fact that Germany has large coal reserves and so less need for nuclear than many other countries, are likely to have contributed to the phenomenon.

>Can modern human life be sustained in a world where internet services become much more expensive?

Probably yes. The world of 1990 was not much less modern than the world of today. So it would all come down to the question of, how disruptive the de-Internetification of the world would be. A pre-Internet world is recognizably modern in most ways. But since we have come to rely on the Internet, the process of losing it could be very damaging.

I don't think the beautiful ornate hand carved furniture era of software engineering has existed for many decades now.

What's happening right now is more like, we're moving from a hyper-optimized era of just-in-time manufacturing (in software, this is called "Agile", "scrum", "sprints", etc.) to getting our manufacturing outsourced to another country. In software, the "other country" is AI.

What's untrustworthy about them? I enjoy using Discord, so I should probably learn about that.

I don't see any celebrating in the article. The article makes it pretty clear that the author sees many problems coming from teleoperated humans.

The author of the article isn't advocating for teleoperated humans.

What things that you thought were true did you discover were lies?

I should clarify. I don't think it's unhealthy to cry every 5 days. I think it might be unhealthy to have the sort of mental state that makes you want to cry every 5 days. It's the underlying psychological situation that might be unhealthy, not the outlet of crying.

I do get some cult-like vibes from the Yudkowsky part of the rationalist community, but I think calling it a "sex cult" is going way too far unless there's some hard evidence. It's a community that has many polyamorous and kinky people in it, and many people who have been or are doing communal living, whether because they want to or because of Bay Area rents. That doesn't make it a sex cult. I've never seen any evidence that Yudkowsky, for example, is exploiting his status in the community and his minor degree of fame in order to obtain sex any more than the average person who has a bit of status and fame uses it to obtain sex. I'm not aware of any evidence of coercion or brainwashing. There have been some allegations of sexual abuse in that community, but from what I can tell no more than would be expected for any community of that size.

Having a crying session every 5 days doesn't seem very healthy to me, but showering once every 2 weeks might be fine. I've gone many days without showering many times in my life and nothing bad ever happened to me as a result. I'd usually shower before going out and interacting with people, but when sitting at home there just never seemed to be any point to it. And Aella's showering habits haven't stopped her from reaching her goals, so it doesn't really matter.

It's cooled down a lot in the last few years, since peak woke passed. But I think that a few years ago, there would have been serious danger of being fired at many companies in the US if you refused to use a trans person's chosen pronouns. Now, one might say, this is just a matter of basic politeness... why wouldn't you use them? However, consider the situation if a white coworker started insisting that people refer to him as black, and you could get fired for not referring to him as black. For the sake of a better comparison, let's say that the white coworker was doing medical treatments to increase skin melanin, hair curliness, and so on.

As for trans genocide, I mean sure, you can make an argument that there is a trans genocide by really really stretching the meaning of the word "genocide" or by using certain parts of highly technical definitions of "genocide". But when trans activists speak of "trans genocide", they are trying to appeal to the emotional resonance of more popularly central examples of genocides, ones with mass killings. If we use the common meaning of the word "genocide", the one that is intended the vast majority of the time the word is used, there is no trans genocide.

As for washrooms, note that I never said that I'm against trans people using their chosen genders' washrooms. What I said is that many trans activists pushed to do this long before the American public had become ready for something of that nature, which contributed to a backlash against the trans movement in general.

One of the trans acceptance movement's main problems comes, as is often the case in politics, from some of its most militant and passionate activists. To put it simply, those extreme activists overreached and annoyed people. That's not the fault of trans people in general, but it explains some of the backlash and the focus on niche cases.

Basically, the activists I'm talking about overreached by:

- Pushing for speech control around preferred pronouns

- Being overrepresented among Reddit mods, thus becoming to some extent the "face of censorship" for many highly online people

- Equating the mere act of disbelieving trans people's chosen gender identities with out-and-out bigotry of the KKK kind

- Talking about a mythical "trans genocide" and getting angry when people questioned its existence

- Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that

Etc.

So what we have now in the highly online discourse is essentially a battle between niche militant trans activists who seem to illogically believe that they are on the brink of being put into extermination camps, on the one hand, and niche militant anti-trans fanatics who exaggerate the relatively rare cases of trans people doing bad things for the sake of pushing an overall anti-left agenda.

The militant trans activists I speak of seemingly just can't stop themselves from continuously providing people who actually hate trans people and people who just hate the left with more and more ammunition by having a prominent online presence while saying a mix of untrue and highly questionable things.

Before anyone jumps in with an angry reaction... yes, if it's not already clear from what I wrote, I also think that the right has a problem with insane deluded militant people.

That is extremely unlikely. There are definitely some people in Trump's camp who would love to do that, including probably Trump himself. However, Trump does not have enough public or institutional support for him to risk doing something that blatant.

I think that a chance of getting things like material post-scarcity, age reversal, possibly even biological immortality... might be worth a 10% chance of human extinction.

I mean, we already know more or less how things are going to go without super-intelligence. Disease, pain, suffering, everyone dying by age 120 or so, more struggle for bread, more wars about things that seem very important in the moment but won't be interesting to anyone other than history buffs 100 years from now, more love affairs that feel intensely personal but are basically the same as billions of other love affairs that people have had, etc.

Maybe it makes sense to take a risk.

I coded for fun before I ever coded for money. However, at this point I've been a professional software engineer for enough years that the interest in software that I once had has almost entirely drained out of me. I find professional software engineering to be very very different from, and much less fun than, coding passion projects. And at this point, the interest in coding passion projects has drained out of me as well. I just don't find coding to be that interesting any more. I feel like I've already spent more of my life coding than I should have, more than coding ever really deserved. I think that if I found a different way to make money, I could be perfectly happy going the rest of my life without ever looking at another piece of code.

I am considering trying to move to some kind of non-coding role in tech. Maybe some kind of management role.

Interesting idea. Only problems for me are: it sounds dangerous and physically straining for someone like me who hasn't done manual labor in many years and has no experience relevant to oil rigs. And also, there are almost no women. I guess oil rig workers probably pack in their women time hardcore when they're on their months off.

I lost interest in writing elegant code many years before AI. Professional software development doesn't reward it much. Most customers don't care about it. And I don't have much emotional attachment to or ego investment in stuff that I make for an employer, so I don't really care if it's elegant or not as long as it puts money in my bank account.

I used to have more emotional attachment to and ego investment in stuff I made for employers, but professional software development is pretty good at making one stop caring about that stuff. Probably for good reason, since software development is not actually the most important craft at a tech company. Business is more important.

It's more like calling the restaurant and giving them a description of a custom meal that you want them to prepare for you.

> AI generated creative works have zero value.

Then how have I gotten value from some of them?

I like using my mind too, just usually not on software engineering.

>It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens.

For me the more interesting and productive thinking happens when I'm trying to understand what I want the code to do, not when I'm thinking about the implementation details.

If I could get paid a Bay Area software engineering salary to clean the bathroom instead, I think I would actually prefer to clean the bathroom. Software engineering requires me to actually use a large part of my mind. Cleaning the bathroom, on the other hand, would leave my mind largely free to think whatever I feel like. The physical movement is probably better for the body, too.

Wait. I didn't say anything about making people miserable. And I'm not talking about some weird kind of pressure like yelling at people.

I just mean the normal, almost inevitable kind of pressure that comes from the business situation. Management has to somehow figure out strategies to handle the pressure and it has to communicate these strategies and the reasoning for them to the engineers in a constructive way.

Generally, this is the pressure to be competitive and make money. It does the developers no good if they spend so much time writing great code that the company goes out of business.

The existence of the websites that use 100% CPU probably has more to do with the fact that humans spent years building software ecosystems and business practices that make websites that use 100% CPU than it does with any inherent limitations in AI. AI is just following the practices that it sees in existing codebases and that have wide adoption.

I enjoy working on personal projects, but I have never enjoyed coding in professional contexts, so AI doesn't actually reduce my level of enjoyment at work at all. It actually increases my level of enjoyment, since it does a good job of handling what to me are the most boring aspects of professional coding: writing boilerplate, remembering nuances of language syntax and APIs, etc... and allows me to focus on what to me is more interesting: architecture, ideas, business strategy, etc.

I code to make money, and the kind of stuff I work on doesn't kill people or lose massive amounts of money if it has bugs, so to me velocity to a solution is much more important than velocity to understanding.

The pressures from management and the company environment are not always a bad thing. It really depends on whether the pressures are coming from a logical business perspective or whether they are just coming from stupidity or ignorance. In a business environment, taking a long time to ship great code can mean that the company goes out of business, and then the software developers have a lot of great code and no income.

It isn't necessarily the more expensive choice in the long run. Let's say that companies A and B are direct competitors who start from the same point. Company A quickly codes a bunch of buggy software and ships it in a month. Company B takes its time and ships good, clean, well-organized, mostly bug-free code in five months. Company A makes money. Company B goes out of business and its code is useless, its nice qualities irrelevant.

This is just a hypothetical example, I'm not saying that this is how it would necessarily go in all cases.

I mean, it's not surprising. I think that most people on here are software developers.

AI is fundamentally transformative to the software development industry and threatens to put large numbers of software developers out of a job. Fable regularly does things in 20 minutes that would have taken me 2 weeks before. AI is probably the biggest revolution in software development since the development of operating systems and high-level languages. It's also potentially a fundamental turning point in the entirety of human history.

So it's no wonder that AI gets a lot of attention.