schwartzworld

In America there used to be a 90% marginal tax rate the wealthiest members had to pay. They used their influence to do away with it.

I’m just saying, I know where the money is. One man’s “right” to own a billion dollars doesn’t outweigh providing the base needs of living to everybody.

> It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.

Brought to you by the same people who oppose healthy free school lunches.

It saves a lot of work and therefore money. But there’s another layer to consider for many people. Someone getting benefits who doesn’t deserve it is less important than someone who needs help not getting it. You can’t scam a system that’s free to everybody, and there’s no incentive to.

This is even worse. I'd call it Angular syndrome.

Or a magic Jack. Cheap as hell

If you’re in the US just get a magic jack

The problem with verbosity isn’t writing the boilerplate. It’s adding to the mental overhead of reading it

When has anybody ever been charged for cooking a chicken?

The best human poker players are able to calculate pot odds in their heads. Much of gambling is understanding when the risk of any given bet is actually worth it. Reading people and playing the other players is less important than understanding the likelihood of drawing the card you want and how that compares to the percentage of profit you’ll make on a bet.

React won’t topple for a while, because of none of the alternatives are different enough. React solved a real problem many developers faced by giving them a state management system with a rendering engine, whereas you were likely to make surgical cuts before in response to state change, you can now just write your ui assuming the whole thing rerenders in response to changes to that state. The component system also allowed for an easy way of sharing code as dependencies. Vue, Svelte, Solid and the rest have their individual pros and cons when compared to react, but they are essentially different attempts to do the same thing.

You want to topple react, you need to solve a problem that’s as big as state management used to be in a way that react can’t also just copy/absorb, and you have to do it so well that developers will push to use it at work. You need to have a ux as clean as what React offers to its devs, and you probably need to come close enough in benchmarks to not get instantly shot down.

> I’ve set a race pace at work that I can’t reasonably retract from without raising eyebrows

Why do this to yourself? Do you get paid more if you work faster?

I often say that “nit” comments on prs are bad. It’s either important enough to make a linter rule, or not important enough to mention.

> But if you write a comprehensive test suite for a problem, you've effectively done the hard development work to solve the problem in the first place. How did the AI help?

By making you not write the implementation?

Also, the AI writing anything bad isn’t an excuse. You’re the one piloting that ship, and if not, you’re probably the one reviewing the code. It’s your job to review your own and others’ code with a critical eye, and that goes double in the LLM age.

> incredibly impressive and completely unreliable.

There have been methods of protecting against this since before AI, and they still apply. LLMs work great with test driven development, for example.

I would say that high-level knowledge and good engineering practices more important than ever, but they were always important.

I'd love to see those references. Particularly the line "But that's not as bad as people who'll get in trouble with medical or legal issues". I'm pretty sure that there are plenty of intelligent people with legal and/or medical issues, so I'm curious where that comes from.

Maybe, or maybe adhd is the term for what happens when you take somebody who is best at learning on their own and force them to sit in a classroom and listen to boring shit all day.

If the art is wholly ai, I agree with you, you are no artist. Similarly, if you outsourced 100% of the creative act to hired help, I would say the same.

But most people can’t do everything. How would you view art where the artist relies on AI for the pieces they can’t do? If I play guitar but an ai wrote the drum part, is that art? What if I write the book but ai made the illustrations?

This is a great way of describing it. I recently read an interview with Herbie Hancock where he basically blamed “YouTube rabbit holes” for his not producing a new album in 15 years.

ADHD and autodidactism seem to go hand in hand.

Interested is the wrong word. Motivated is a better one, with interest being a subcategory of motivation.

The kind of intrinsic practice is even easier today than it was back then because we carry powerful computers in our pocket. If, like Orwell, you want to be a writer, you can literally work on it anywhere at any time. If you want to learn a language, you can spend time practicing it. If you want to learn music or art, the tools for explicitly practicing those things are in your actual pocket.

“Talent” is a myth. We all have our aptitudes, but in most subjects that only gets you a small advantage. Maybe you can remember Spanish vocab better than me, but if I practice every day and you don’t, you’ll reach the limits of “talent” quickly. Putting in the reps is the most important part of learning anything. The irony is that when you DO get good at something people forget that you were ever bad at it, and they will quickly dismiss your hard work as talent.

In high school, I had an ongoing argument with my dad about this. I got really into music and practiced daily for hours, wanting to be good enough to play in a band. By the time I graduated, I wasn’t bad. My dad would pontificate about which relative I had inherited this talent from, and I would get annoyed because it undermined the 100s of hours I spent locked in a music room. It did NOT come easy; I wanted to be able to do something and worked my ass off to get there.

I actually make a lot of sample based music, and it’s as much an art as you make it. Downloading a couple of loops from splice and layering them is lame, actually chopping and repurposing samples is not.

I never said Suno wasn’t “art”. The opposite is true. If you want to put your name on something that took no effort or skill and call it art, more power to you. You could do the same in other areas, and lame, low effort “art” proceeds AI by millennia. You are as welcome as anybody to call yourself a creator, however lame that effort may be.

But man the chutzpah of comparing that low effort drivel with people pushing genre boundaries.

> learning suno is no different than learning guitar

It most definitely is different and you’ve proven it with your own post. Guitar takes a long time to get to a place where you can produce the sounds you hear in your head. Suno gives you instant gratification.

Look, if it gives you pleasure to make Suno music then you should do it, but if you think having an ai steal a melody and add it to your songs counts is the same as creating something, you’re kiddo by yourself. At best you are a lyricist relying on a robocomposer to do the hard part. You could have achieved the same thing years ago by collaborating with a musician like Bernie Taupin did with Elton John.

Reminds me of the urban legend that KFC couldn't legally call itself Kentucky Fried Chicken because they were using genetically modified hens that had no heads, hence the name change to just initials.

Sounds like a reasonable assumption given the length and danger of the trip. I’d assume the first colonists to sail across the Atlantic operated under a similar set of assumptions.

Or whatever man. The post I responded to said they wanted a robot that could do 80% of human tasks. It's easy to start naming things that a human can't do, but actually think about the tasks humans perform on a day to day basis and the environments they perform them in. Could it ride in a car? Anything that can fit on a car seat can. Dogs, grocery bags and even human babies all fit very comfortably in any car. Could it take the stairs? Maybe, but at my work we don't have to take the stairs.

The conversation is a little reminiscent of "before the car was invented, if you asked what people wanted they would have said a faster horse". If robots became popular in day-to-day, it's not hard to imagine that we would make space for them in our lives anyway. Cars can't traverse the kinds of terrain a horse can, and they require fuel so we have roads and gas stations. If you made a robot that was actually helpful and couldn't take the stairs, you'd start installing dumbwaiters in buildings.

They called us latchkey kids and it was amazing.

OP mentioned a standard of being able to do 80% of human activities. You might need human legs to climb stairs, but then again, if you work in a building with elevators, that might be a pretty simple tradeoff to make.

> Or operate existing power tools? Or get teleoperated by a human with mocap gloves?

Requires grippers that can hold in a similar way to human hands.

> Or get into a generic car to get transported to a new workplace?

My dog can do this and traverse a flight of stairs, and she is decidedly not humanoid.

> If you can have one robot do multiple tasks at 80% of the capability of a special-purpose robot

What does them being humanoid have to do with this? There are other form factors that could get to 80% but might be simpler to implement.

The museum of science here in Boston got a lot less interactive and a lot more screens after Covid. I get that it’s cheaper to develop new exhibits when they are all digital, but my kids aren’t even interested in it. They want to get their hands on stuff.

Not only does it cycle through a ton of keys, but wind instruments like the sax require unique fingerings and embouchure changes in each key. It’s not nearly as hard on a guitar.