nomat

how much did it cost to rebuild germany? and how many trillions did we flush down the drain attempting to put together a functioning government in iraq and afghanistan?

where is DOGE when you actually need them?

networking is important for sure, but i think software more than most other industries (say, finance) has a much lower barrier of entry for an individual with no/low resources.

a data point for your second paragraph: i play D&D weekly with a woman that got hired at google straight out of high school and worked there for 10 years.

well for one they're targeting ukrainian soldiers..

the idea that propaganda doesn't work is certainly an interesting one.

the authors of this paper[0] were able to use AI to figure out if a block of text was written by AI, so hopefully this becomes a tool available to educators very soon.

[0] https://arxiv.org/html/2410.16107v1

> It was not part of his economic agenda at all.

Then why did he make the IRS reprint COVID relief checks so he could add his name to them?

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/inside-the-disaster-trumps-si...

Well, it wasn't biden that posted record profits was it? It was the grocery stores.

> And the record profits Professor Weber mentions? Groundwork Collaborative recently found that corporate profits accounted for 53% of 2023 inflation. EPI likewise concluded that over 51% of the drastically higher inflationary pressures of 2020 and 2021 were also direct results of profits. The Kansas City Federal Reserve even pegged this around 40%, indicating that sellers’ inflation is now a pretty mainstream idea.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2024/02/07/why-y...

Look at this picture:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-us/www/static/media/files/Beh...

Then this one:

https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/0.1-v.png

The green line is the top 0.01%, the red line is the average american.

if you aren't considering the fact that your data is what enabled these companies to become such massive giants in the first place, you may be living outside of the EU.

> allowing smaller brands to compete

to name a few: LISEN, Qifutan, Loncaster, YKYI, Holikme and SXhyf. And who could forget VWMYQ?

This is incredibly enlightening. Thank you.

have seen this at many house parties. The young people gravitate towards the noise while the older ones clump up around the periphery

There are a number of valid criticisms about IBM

our current economic model kind of depends on the idea that we can always disrupt the status quo with american free market ingenuity once it begins to stagnate but maybe we have reached the limits of what friedman's system can do or accounted for.

this kind of stuff + VR in the next 5 years is going to result in some really interesting stuff.

It would be cool to map the relationship between a book getting linked on HN and its checkout rate at the local public library. That's usually the first place I head when I see something I want to read on here.

Absolutely not. Even a facebook group of < 100k is too much work for a single person to manage especially if it is discussion based.

quantifying technical achievements is a lot easier than qualifying policy changes.

X amount of views, X amount of subs, etc.

vs

Removing problem people.

apparently corruption runs rampant throughout all of europe. from the banks that facilitate the laundering of funds, to the port authorities that allow boatloads of cocaine from Colombian cartels, to the criminal states like albania. DW has a video called "The cartels of Marseille" that goes into the drug side of it. but of course there is art, human trafficking, weapons dealing, etc.

The concept of living in a society where people contribute to it for the benefit of the society instead of themselves is not a lamentable one. Regardless of whether or not nationalist propaganda is good or bad in your morality system, there's no civilization that lasts when the culture no longer believes in itself.

The idea of america is how this country can keep going. Yes the reality is that we often fall short. But defeatist naysayers who decry any attempt at making things better are worse than turncoats.

because it's quite clear that this is your default attitude towards things and its absolutely toxic. you don't recognize it, and that is the issue. I don't think that everyone or even most people are evil. You're reading into the things i'm saying because you want me to be a certain type of person, but i am not.

You are exactly the person i'm describing. the glee you feel from acting like this is the only time of the day you actually feel like your existence means anything, because you imagine it making someone else feel bad, which makes you feel good.

The values system we have is very different compared to the 30s or 40s or even the 60s. The idea of a society where we all contribute and all benefit is dead and gone. The media has given up all pretense of caring and now preaches consumerism over god and country. Compromise is a sign of weakness. As is empathy for fellow citizens. In short, a big enough percentage of the people today don't want to improve the lives of their fellow americans, and they elect politicians to actively make this place worse.

Many of our "intractable" issues are policy issues and are completely fixable within 1 or 2 generations and honestly have always been fixable.

I'm talking about the quality of the food here.

as for the rest of the post, the application is not limited to consumer products. Imagine the 2016 election season in 2056. or another covid pandemic.

Imagine like an LLM trained on everything you've ever done since birth included as part of the data set. and then one of those for each other person in the world. they could slice and dice you into a thousand different groups.

at some point technology is going to stop being something that we interact with through a screen and a keyboard. Google maps will be there, where ever you go, all the time. No more getting lost or wondering where anything is located. You will just know. or at least, be told.

Something else to consider is the fallibility of human memory. As we generate more information we're gonna have to start abstracting and delegating some of those storage and retrieval tasks to the computer, trusting it completely. Today maybe you can remember things but what about your parents?

Free speech should only apply to verified humans. We could use the blockchain to assign keys to babies as they are born.

Only half kidding, about both statements. Corporations also have rights. How terrible it will be when we have "companies" that are just AI programs. All human weakness, eliminated.

South Korea requires you to register with your national id if you want to access the internet there, which sounds like the wrong direction but might be necessary if we want to maintain some semblance of sanity on the internet or whatever it is going to become in the future.

did you use this handle on slashnet?

I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show them a bunch of made up products generated by an AI and they'll get the product drop shipped from china and it'll be a shitty counterfeit just like the $5 256GB USB drives.

But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be generated just for you, filled with AI-made reviews and users. The entire internet will just be a computer that guesses what you want and shows you its best guess as the truth. a little matrix-y.

Reading back I sound like T*d K but the next 100 years is going to be unimaginable in terms of what silicon is going to be able to do. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough most of the time. Like a mcdonalds drive thru.

it works for duckduckgo as well.

I mean, what are you gonna do about it? Companies have so many customers and so much capital these days that they don't have to pretend anymore.

There's this saying: A picture is worth a thousand words. It may apply here.