nathan_compton

When I was a kid there was a strong "nerd/jock" dichotomy. But now, according to my own kid, there isn't any such thing. I view this as good.

Is this the most charitable interpretation?

You could, for instance, require people who own habitations to actually live in that location. You could tax people who own property they do not actually live in very aggressively until they would be willing to sell for less to avoid the tax burden. You could have a system which taxes aggressively and builds lots of houses and gives it to people who own it as long as they live there.

There are quite a lot of ideas between "government owns everything" and "let vampire landlords do unlimited rent seeking."

As it happens, I think there is quite a lot to be said for the free market solution of just letting supply meet demand more or less freely, but I think your interpretation really is not the most generous one.

Merch has to move for them to earn a percentage. If prices are systematically too high I would guess liquidity goes down.

It took decades if not hundreds of years for the social disruption of industrialization to clear.

I literally do not give a fuck about some hypothetical more productive activity I might be able to do in 150 years if it destroys my very real present ability to take care of my family today.

I've recently switched to grapheneos. I have a high tolerance for shit not working, but its been fine.

There are pittances and then there are pittances. I make a bit more than a typical adjunct or whatever because I have very specialized skills, but its ok not to make a lot of money.

I mean this is a place where the founder just wrote a blog post about being a billionaire. I'll never be a billionaire, thats for sure.

But I genuinely believe that pursuing that goal is vanity, bad for people mentally and "spiritually" and bad for the world.

I'm not tenured and I doubt I will ever be and I'm not even interested in it. I have a support role in academia, get to teach, and am pretty well compensated (though I make 2-3x less than I could in the private sector. But its enough.)

> Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.

I'm in academy and I'm mostly quiet and seek to contribute honestly and I've been managed into obscurity but I'm also quite happy, pay the bills, and more or less enjoy the work. If you want glory you have to deal with bullshit. If you don't want glory, life provides many opportunities to live a modest but productive life.

I would happily, delightedly, see the entire internet disappear in a puff of smoke, to remove ads from the world. Honestly, I'd be happy to see everything on the internet except the wikipedia vanish regardless, at this point.

I don't know, it seems like being a pacifist is harder, since it exposes you to violence to which you cannot retaliate while alienating you from your peers with less stringent moral opinions. Doesn't seem like it really makes anything easier. You don't have to look hard to find that history is replete with pacifists who paid social and legal penalties for their moral stance.

Worker owned cooperatives have a variety of ways of doing this. Voting directly, electing people, etc. The main difference is that the cooperative typically doesn't buy the myth that the person making the high level decision needs to be paid 1000x the workers.

I have to second this. I find the AI written documentation extremely loathsome, hard to read, and somehow both pretentious and lazy.

Please, I beg everyone, stop posting AI slop.

I'm kind of curious as to how you justify this. I personally think its ok for people to have arms, but I don't personally believe in basic human rights. Where would such things even come from? Rights are just conventions which ought to serve whatever goods you are interested in. Unless you believe in god or some other thing like that, there really is no way to justify rights except relative to some other stated goal.

I don't own a gun, but I live in a very rural area. It might take police 20 minutes to reach us in an emergency, even if we managed to make a call (as we might not in a home invasion, for example). From this point of view I can see the utility of owning a gun, at least in principal.

Also, imagine a scenario where a foreign power attempted to occupy a country? There is probably an optimal number of armed citizens to deter that kind of activity. As we have seen in recent years, foreign powers often do want to capture and hold foreign territory. The chance of this is small, but clearly non-zero.

I don't know - this is a highly specific interpretation of both what science is and why people choose to do it.

I'm a scientist. Believe it or not, I believe in substantially more than prediction and I think its rather trivial to come up with examples where mere prediction is insufficient to meet a normal person's notion of an account of a thing (eg, pre-copernican planetary motion). I'm not saying you are wrong, per se, just that the idea that "it was prediction all along" is a very specific idea of what human beings are interested in and what we are up to.

> that we glean insights into nature of the simulated phenomena

That is right - most people believe that there is a simulated phenomenon "out there" that we learn about. I think there are strong reasons to believe this having to do with how models are related to predictions. The wrong ontology can make prediction very hard and the right one can make prediction substantially easier. Arguably, we are in that situation right now with language models - we just threw a lot of parameters at the problem and now we are able to predict but we still don't really understand. This is perhaps inevitable in the case of language, but I don't think we should look at models with tons of degrees of freedom and the ability to predict things as a death knell for the very idea of deeper understanding.

It is in the nature of capital to ruin it - if users feel great about a product it implies that there is more to wring out of them. The ideal product leaves the user with nothing but the utility the product provides with no extra pleasure. If your employee loves to work for you, you're paying them too much. They can't hate to work for you (unless they have no other choice) but if they feel really good about it, that is a sign of a problem.

Smart phones should absolutely allow you to lie to apps about what permissions they have, to feed apps fake data, and to basically control every single thing the app sees about the phone and the user.

The fact that they do not do this reveals that phone makers are sort of market makers between app makers and customers, creating an environment which, in a certain sense, is a neutral ground between these two types of "users."

I don't think anyone with a lazy disposition would get into teaching. There are so many other jobs that pay better and involve less work.

I friend of mine once made an observation that really stuck with me: a kindle is not a book: it is simultaneously all books at once. If you lock it to a single book, its still all books at once, but with a lock on all the others. Also, why not use paper?

For awhile I tried all sorts of digital notetaking devices. Eventually I realized that pen + paper notebook was vastly superior to all of them for retention, ease of use, and cost. I am sure that, for some people, the calculation is different (for example, I have a pretty good memory and thus writing something down once is sufficient for me to recall it later) but for me, the idea of a digital letter pad eventually seemed utterly wasteful and absurd to me.

I have this issue with students a lot and I'd rather get broken english than AI slop.

But there was also a lot of hard work to push legal reforms and protections to ensure quality and a good living for people displaced by or pressed into work by the new models. It isn't just an "adapt or die" situation on a personal level. Society itself must adapt to produce a healthy human condition.

Who cares? It isn't like bad people can't have good ideas and vice versa. From where I'm sitting Luciferians, Theosophists, etc are just as suspect as Catholics because they believe in imaginary stuff.

You got downvoted, but I'm a bit curious - can you elaborate on these critiques?

I don't think its really feasible - there just isn't enough training data before calculus. I would guess all the mathematical and philosophical texts available to Newton and Leibniz would fit on a CD-ROM with loads of space to spare.

Weird thing to say about a report which literally has the attached mathematical proof.

You could make it prohibitively problematic to use for most things.

In the current system technology is meant to serve the shareholders. That might end up serving us, if you believe the standard narrative. But maybe the shareholders will just carve out a few nature reserves for themselves and just wait for the rest of us to die off.

The best time to be anywhere is when the value of something is obvious but rich people don't yet understand it so they can't micromanage it towards pure productivity and ROI. Money flows in with very little oversight.

Nobody's perfect, friend. You're totally right.