munificent

People need jobs in order to pay for food, shelter, and healthcare.

Many executives feel zero moral obligation to provides jobs to people and instead treat that as a necessary evil that gets in the way of profit. As soon as that evil becomes unnecessary, they will happily lay off as many people as they can.

In aggregate, when enough executives do that, then people will not be able to find jobs.

When they can't find jobs, they are unable to pay for food, shelter, and healthcare.

I also believe we underestimate how much that costs us too. Yes, it is good that fewer people are breaking their bodies on brutal physical jobs.

But there are many people in the world for whom their physical strength and dexterity are perhaps their most valuable asset. With the loss of those jobs came a loss of an avenue of meaning for them.

I could be wrong, but I have a hunch that the whole manosphere alt-right conservative thing going on in the US is driven in part by a generation of young men who don't find intellectual work to be appealing but don't see many alternatives out there either. It's telling how closely Gamergate is tangled up in that world and how many games are basically simulations of heavily physical prestigious roles.

A recent Onion headline really hits the nail on the head: "'This Here Is Probably Our Bestselling Love Seat,' Says Man Who Would Have Been Powerful, Revered Warrior 4,000 Years Ago"

He works at Best Buy now.

This is exactly the perspective many executives have of their employees.

I suspect that for many, if they had less social anxiety, they would actually prefer to socialize more. But the most successful way to reduce an anxiety is through exposure therapy: forcing yourself to do the thing. And in today's world it is much too easy to simply avoid exposing yourself to any socialization.

I see a lot of people who claim to be very introverted. But, also, a lot of those people are unhappy. They may be comfortable, but that's not the same as happy.

There are a lot of horrible potential scenarios that are really scary to contemplate. There are also a lot of really delightful ones where AI does the drudge work, invents a million incredible medicines, and frees us up to hang out and make art all day. And there are even more scenarios somewhere in the middle where AI changes a lot of stuff but we all still more or less end up going to work and doing jobs.

I've basically had a background thread in my skull running at high priority for the past two years trying to predict which of those scenarios I think are most likely so that I can plan for them. It is utterly exhausting spending that many mental resources on a question like that.

It finally clicked for me a couple of weeks ago that no one is going to be able to accurately predict all the thousands of ways AI will affect the world. Certainly not me. We are living in unprecedented times. No one has a map for the future.

So I am trying to loosen my hold on the future some and focus more on the present. I have a great job and a great family now. I have most of my health. I'll try to live my life right now to the fullest and in accordance with my values. The future is going to have to be future me's problem. That's OK.

It is saying that savoring a life fully means savoring all of its varied moments, even the bad ones. Enjoy the highs, but also pay attention to your suffering in the lows because those moments are also meaningful pages in your story.

Cured meats are entire world unto themselves. I have had bacon that tasted like a salty strip of cardboard, and bacon that is a peppery, savory, chewy/crispy revelation.

In many ways the BLT is sort of the perfect example food for showing how non-commoditized ingredients actually are. It's only five ingredients: bread, bacon, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise. But each of those ingredients can vary extremely widely.

Take some generic white bread, thin cheap bacon, old iceberg lettuce, out of season grocery store tomatoes, and Miracle Whip and you'll have a result that you wouldn't understand why anyone on Earth would eat.

Then get some good bakery sourdough, thick cut heavily peppered bacon from a small farm that treats their pigs well, fresh butter or Bibb lettuce, late summer tomatoes from your own garden (the best tomatoes simply don't ship), and whip up a batch of mayo yourself without any preservatives using good eggs and oil. It will likely be one of the best meals you've ever eaten.

Perhaps you do want those experiences, actually. Would your memory of this sandwich be as sweet if you were able to replicate whenever you want? How much of the seasoning here comes from its rarity?

I try to be as charitable as possible when reading and commenting online, but we don't have infinite attention and thanks to AI, it's easier than ever to end up wasting it on things that aren't worth reading.

(I'm not claiming that the article here is or is not an example of that.)

You can be effective at using C# and F# to solve other problems specifically because they are very well designed at the goal of abstracting over the lower level hardware. But if your goal is to build an intuition of how programming languages themselves are implemented and how computer hardware works, then, using those languages will be counter productive.

If you're trying to use math to solve arithmetical problems, then by all means using AI to help. But if you're trying to advance the math field itself, then actually knowing how math works is probably essential.

Put in more concrete terms: if someone wants to be a working mathematician without learning the fundamentals of math, then how do they even know what prompts to the AI are worth writing? In what way are they adding any value to the process at all?

Even if my setup was taller, garages here are pretty good at having the height listed when you enter and anyone with a tall truck really should know exactly how tall it is.

I don't think a sunroof would help me. If I was ever in a situation where it did, I would already be taking too much of a risk of damaging something.

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.)