munificent

All I said was a statement of moral values: that all children deserve the best opportunity we as a species can provide for them.

There are many possible mechanisms and social institutions that can participate in that process. Parents are one, the state is another, but there are certainly many more.

So many people who are excited about AI making them more productive are, I think, drastically overestimating how much value they are adding to that process.

Given the current state of US federal politics, it's not looking good then.

One way to look at this is that we have already created a giant artificially intelligent system that is profoundly misaligned with the goals of humanity. It is running rampant and has so much power now that there are no well-aligned humans with enough power to stop it.

That artificial intelligence is the stock market.

You may say, "but the stock market is made up of people". That's essentially an implementation detail. The emergent behavior of the market itself has its own sort of agency distinct from the wills of all of the people in it. In the same way that the pheromone signals of an anthill will lead individual ants to their death while benefiting the colony, the market may choose to do things that harm its participants.

Even though it is made of people, do not anthropomorphize the stock market.

I am strongly sympathetic of this point. But, also, children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.

This is an extremely difficult balancing act. Various laws and organizations get it wrong all the time, but it does require balance because there is no simple solution here that just works. There is a fundamental, unsolvable tension between:

* In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.

* In a free society, parents should be able to support their children as they see fit.

(Stephen Pinker was the first one I've seen to point out this problem.)

This line is so perfectly on the nose it could be in a McSweeney's article and yet here it is in reality. We are truly on the weirdest timeline.

You really think it makes sense for you to be higher on the "solving complex problems ladder" than the machines that solved fucking Navier-Stokes?

I envy your self-confidence.

Floating point math is 100% deterministic, but different hardware/OS have different but deterministic behavior in some corners. The same code run on the same hardware with the same inputs (including access to timers, peripherals, etc.) will behave the same way, unless you're talking about cosmic rays flipping bits or something.

It's doesn't matter whether enough is enough. If we don't have effective power structures that let humanity take large coordinated action that in accordance with the will of the masses, then nothing will be done.

In the past 20-30 years, those power structures have been eroding significantly and much of the large scale action humanity does today is in service of a small number of elites. If AI horror shows are not a problem for them, then it won't be solved. (The flip side is that if somehow AI becomes a problem for Musk/Trump/Bezos/etc. you can be damn sure something will be done at that point.)

Here are two plausible paths that provide the viral failure mode the parent comment talks about but don't require agents literally copying themselves onto hardware:

1. Local models become affordable and widely available. Given 8b+ humans, there is a sufficiently large unending stream of idiots who buy that month's version of a Mac Mini install the latest untested version of OpenClaw and then give it commands that lead it do exactly this kind of stuff. It's like if every convenience store sold dynamite. Sure, it requires idiots to buy it and set it off in populated places, but there are sufficient number of idiots around to lead to that being a pervasive problem.

2. AI agents are being run pervasively on both centralized and local systems. Many agents, everywhere. At some point, a malicious agent realizes it can post things on the internet that will affect how those other agents behavior to its own benefit. Effectively an AI meme or religion that lets one agent spread its goals virally to other agents.

So as a producer of quality content, your audience has shrunk because a minute spend consuming crap is a minute not available for your thing. And as a consumer, the average total quality being consumed has likely gone down.

20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day.

>* NYT is now 10x as thick?*

One random site I checked says there are 600 million active blogs right now.

> Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x?

I made no claims about quality. If you spend two hours watching Citizen Kane, or two hours watching loot boxed unboxing videos, the fraction of your life that's spent is the same. The attentional cost is equivalent even if the value someone derived from it is not.

> I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future.

Almost no one can make a living writing poetry any more. That means the hypothetically world's best poet probably doesn't exist because that requires a time investment that simply isn't available except among the idle rich. The trend is going that way for photography, music, and fiction.

In order to be truly gifted, you need a massive amount of time to hone your craft and it's very hard to find that in an economy that doesn't pay you to do that.

> Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met.

I agree. Hand-made stuff is good. But imagine a world where every fast food restaurant charged five cents for an entire meal. Home-cooked meals would still be superior, but how often would the average person summon the time and willpower to make them? And in that world, how good do you think the average home cook would get?

2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever.

3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media.

You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually.

Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone.

Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.

> This last point is crucial: it’s not that capitalist CEOs are just evil people—well, some definitely are—no, the structural logic is coercing them to do something destructive in order to survive. They can’t help themselves.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how much of the world going sideways is from bad actors and how much is from emergent behavior of complex systems. The answer is both.

In particular, there is a level above this that I want to draw attention to. The structure of corporate competition coerces executives into choices that are bad for the world. This is true even for entirely well-meaning executives.

However, executives are not stupid or unaware. So over time, it becomes known that being in an executive position will require you to make choices that are perhaps "economically rational" for the firm but otherwise require compromised morals. And once that awareness gets out, the system selects CEOs that are OK with that moral compromise.

So it's less a question of "is it bad actors or bad systems" and more "it's a bad system that produces bad actors".

What I think is going on here is:

* You have some app developers working on an app and caring about its particular user experience.

* Then you have framework UX designers/developers working on new design systems and rolling them out across hundreds of apps.

Those two have limited coordination with each other. So when a new design system like Material drops into every app, unconsidered interactions between the design system and the app's specific UI go sideways and no one is in a good position to notice or address it.

Google certainly takes the blame in this case, but I don't think it's a problem unique to Google either. There is always a tension between wanting a consistent user experience across many products and features and wanting a user experience that makes the most sense for one particular product or feature.

Yes, it's annoying that you can't get to stuff under the plus button. But users really do learn that "oh, the plus button will always be on the bottom right" and that provides real value to them for that to be consistently true across many apps. It makes each app easier to be productive in.

User experience design is hard and I don't think there's a silver bullet, though obviously this case is particularly annoying.

* In the anecdote, the problem is that the web version works better and the app is missing functionality.

* The title pays reference to an annoying observation about many products where the web version lacks functionality the app has.

Both are frustrating. If a company is going to bother to have both an app and a website, users deserve an experience where both are fully featured. It should be an professional embarrassment for a company to have to route users from the app to the site or vice versa because one is half-baked.

Have some God-damned professional pride and do it right.

Whatever other personal attributes might have, he has earned some goodwill and respect.

Go doesn't have overloading by parameter list signature. But you can have methods with the same name defined on different types, so there is a sort of overloading or namespacing based on the receiver type. Methods give you that.

They also give you a limited form of overloading. Without methods or overloading, you end up in the situation that C and Scheme are in where every operation on a data structure has to redundantly have the data structure in its name like:

    list_clear(my_list);
    queue_clear(my_queue);
    map_clear(my_map);

> If making references that are outside someone’s context, do so only if they signal themselves as a curious person, and make them come from a place of genuine interest in informing, rather than bragging.

This is something I struggle with when talking to new people. How much to lean towards introducing them to things they don't know but may find interesting versus not wanting them to feel like an outsider or dumb by bringing up stuff they don't know.

Paying attention to how they signal their curiosity and sense of safety is a good way to gauge that.

When I wake from sleeping, I have a distinct sense of time passing and can usually tell you what time it is when I first wake up. But under anesthesia, absolutely no sense of any time passing at all.

So do lawnmowers and chainsaws.

>Fuel storage is complicated (you will need 30+ gallons a day, or about 2 sedan tank’s worth.

You put it in containers and put them in your garage.

>Connecting to your panel is expensive at least $2k+.

You don't have to do that. Just run some extension cords through your house.

> They are smelly and noisy.

So is everyone after a couple of days in the South without air conditioning!

> And if it’s a real emergency, everyone will know you have one , and eventually come knocking.

This is a feature, not a bug. It's how communities take care of each other.

Have you been anesthetized before? Different forms are very different, but none of them feel like sleep, at all. General anesthesia feels like a time simply skipped forward. Like a chunk of your memory tape was cut out completely. Twilight sedation feels like you temporarily inhabited someone else's body but the experience was so strange that you blocked out almost all of the memory.

Sleeping and dreaming is totally different.

My point is just that a cheap battery backup does not have a significant effect in the resiliency strategy for most people.

I am certainly not a prepper, but even viewing that scene from the outside, it is absolutely rife with what I would call "preparedness theater". Things you can buy (it's always about buying stuff) that would save you in some imagined horrific scenario but where the odds of the scenario happening in just the right arrangement where that object helped are infintesimal.

Like, yes, if your car drives into a freezing cold deep lake and you are somehow too incapacitated to open your seatbelt but not too incapacitated to use a knife, then keeping a dive knife in your glove box next to the ceramic "break windshield" thingy might be worth it, but you're more likely to win the lottery than have that happen.

There is a set of people whose brains are wired such that they are easily nerd sniped into obsessing about these sorts of things. When they do, they are also compelled to share it and spread it like some kind of mind virus. It takes a certain amount of mental discipline to not fall down every one of those rabbitholes. I believe the author telling the world to arrange joint battery buying parties for friends is well along that path of crazy.

Don't waste time and money organizing a joint battery purchase for your friends. Keep some non-perishables and a few gallons of water in your house. Fill your gas tank before it gets all the way to empty. Learn how to cook and some basic first aid.