robinhoode

If we lived in a sane society, AI would actually be used for good.

AI is literally trained on by humans, used by humans. If humans are doing awful things with it, then it's because humans are awful right now.

I strongly feel this is related to the rise of fascism and wealth inequality.

We need a great conflict like WW2 to release this tension.

> This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less.

Why should workers care about being more productive if they do not reap the rewards in terms of wages?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ...

Railroads need repair too? Not sure if it's every 4 years. Also, the trains I take to/from work are super slow because there is no money to upgrade.

I think we may not upgrade every 4 years, but instead upgrade when the AI models are not meeting our needs AND we have the funding & political will to do the upgrade.

Perhaps the singularity is just a sigmoid with the top of the curve being the level of capex the economy can withstand.

Of course they can. Republicans (well MAGA in particular) don't are about hypocracy. They make exceptions for Trump on everything.

This is the thing with AI: We can always come up with a new architecture with different inputs & outputs to solve lots of problems that couldn't be solved before.

People equating AI with other single-problem-solving technologies are clearly not seeing the bigger picture.

> Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come from?

Almost every time I hear this argument, I realize that people are not actually complaining about AI, but about how modern capitalism is going to use AI.

Don't get me wrong, it will take huge social upheaval to replace the current economic system.

But at least it's an honest assessment -- criticizing the humans that are using AI to replace workers, instead of criticizing AI itself -- even if you fear biting the hands that feed you.

> In this world people become more like pests. They offer no economic value yet demand that AGI owners (wherever publicly or privately owned) share resources with them. If people revolted any AGI owner would be far better off just deploying a bioweapon to humanely kill the protestors rather than sharing resources with them.

This is a very doomer take. The threats are real, and I'm certain some people feel this way, but eliminating large swaths of humanity is something dicatorships have tried in the past.

Waking up every morning means believing there are others who will cooperate with you.

Most of humanity has empathy for others. I would prefer to have hope that we will make it through, rather than drown in fear.

It's a hypothetical deployment but it's reasonable to expect. These robots will be very valuable, and everyone will want one. It's not going to become a housemaid in a few years. But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly. Moravec's paradox is still in play, but advancement in AI chips will slowly overcome it.

> You could self-publish and use it as an "in" to working for a PI over the summer

This. Publishing is not an end onto itself. Think of it as a chance to get your foot in the door of the research community.

That sounds awesome!

However, I don't quite see how the volunteering is connected to your startup.

Reading that line made me cringe. Memorizing APIs come in handy for interviews or perhaps fixing bugs in production but not so much for day-to-day work.

Now, math equations or the minute details of data structures and algorithms.. Those can be hard to internalize and knowing them well is very helpful when reading papers or other diving into open source projects which make critical use of advanced, specialized knowledge.

This seems really cool!

Unfortunately I can't seem to get the live compiler to work properly. I get this message when I check the JS console:

Failed to execute 'postMessage' on 'DedicatedWorkerGlobalScope': DOMException object could not be cloned.

Nice to see someone name drop Bigger Pockets! That was my first big project as a Rails developer.

Is anyone doing old-fashion landlording these days? I'm trying to break into that space, but I have no idea what I'm doing and could use some advice from someone who's done it before.

> An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur.

Even when this regression is finite, it has a name: anxiety.

In my experience I've found that you can automate a lot of white collar work if the rest of the business will become organized enough to make that happen. If they aren't collecting or ingesting the right data already, then the hard part is changing their behavior, not writing the code.

What books can I read to, at the very least, attempt address the questions in your 3rd paragraph, given how unique every business is? Isn't anything you find a book on sales or marketing so abstract that it's 2 or 3 layers of assumptions before you can talk about projections? How does one begin a career in SaaS sales / marketing? What makes for a good "portfolio piece" in that domain?

Reposting is one thing. It's another when it's been reposted dozens of times and it somehow gets voted to the top.

> Agreed, and it's shocking that this Washington Post article does not raise these points at all

Dude, the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Of course he's going to attack Apple and Google for their phones, while his phone kind of flopped.

> The statistics from places with lax drug laws, decriminalization, partial legalization, etc suggests that everyone who actually wants to do drugs long term already does, and that most (if not all) of the rise in drug use you see at a law change is just people experimenting and then deciding against routine use.

All the people I've met who took drugs and then became violent or addicted had problems well before the drugs were there.

All the people I've met who could handle drugs were well adjusted, or were on their way to becoming well adjusted.

In my mind, this is a feature and not a bug. The greatest cybermancy spells technologists can create are inherently safer than an AI with potential to go rogue. Why do we want to create a god when we can become gods ourselves?

And if you notice, they aren't ignoring Bitcoin's role, they're attacking it! So in a sense, they are helping crypto by admitting Bitcoin's faults and attempting their own solution.

If you're getting bored after 6 months, you might be better off chasing contracts than settling on a full-time job. It can be stressful sometimes, but it beats being a cog in the machine.

Perhaps if the company you were working for belonged to you, you might take more interest in the problems, no?

> This is said to be the world's most expensive Starbucks coffee featuring 60 espresso shots and costing $55 (£33).

That's a lot of shots! How many espresso shots is enough to kill someone?

What exactly is meant by this? Is there a source behind it?

> The fate of reddit may have been very different if Comcast had discriminated against our little two-person-startup in favor of the NBC.com news portal and the sites of other news giants.

Seems like a good idea. How do they plan to do it?

I'm curious if this is comparable to Rails rates.

Do you have any more information on this? I'm definitely curious what the problem looks like when stated in specific algorithmic terms (big-O and all that).

You are correct that "functionally" there may be no advantage. The value is not the functionality but the architecture. It is resilient to some very powerful attackers, both actual and theoretical. _That_ is where it derives it's power, not necessarily from functionality.

If Bitcoin operated on a centralized database, as E-Gold did, it would have gotten shut down quickly (as E-Gold did).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold

> So the trust issue reverts into trusting that the creators + early adopters to not abuse the system. This is the exact argument used against single-authority systems that the authority may abuse the system.

This is not exactly true. Look at Napster vs BitTorrent. Napster failed because it was a single-authority system. BitTorrent has succeeded because it is (mostly) decentralized. Trackers might go the way of the block chain in the not-too-distant future.

As far as abuse: It is up to early adopters to sniff out the scams. Unfortunately that is how free markets work. If those adopters stay and continue to promote the new system, it may have a chance with the populace at large. The small localization of failure is a feature not a bug.