skulk

> You seem to think raising productivity is a bad thing?

Higher productivity means very little to people whose labor plummets in value over the course of a couple of years. One day they won't be needed anymore, maybe that's good for you.

the right model for the task is the one that transfers the maximum amount of USD from your pocket to the provider's bank account.

> why can't Israel retaliate

No, I totally agree. I think for the October 7th attack, all of Gaza had to be razed. How will those terrorists learn otherwise?

I think you're not getting it. If an ethnic cleansing has happened to your direct ancestors, you're allowed to do one back. Just one though.

ah, hacker news. the place I go to see people saying disabled people should starve.

the wikipedia article for ray ban meta has "pervert glasses" bolded

doesn't really matter now, does it? Someone's gonna do the job, whatever it looks like.

> First of all, because not everyone starts with inherited wealth.

So then you need an investment; you're going to have to return a multiple of the deflation rate since the risk of your supermarket shutting down is probably higher than the currency changing course.

if all of humanity's knowledge was redistributed to AI labs to sell back to us, it's only fair that some of the profits get redistributed back.

in the real world if the speed of light was 5 km, we'd probably be a lot smaller!

I've seen how people work in manual labor type jobs (all that will be left, right?). They're worked to the bone and paid peanuts. It's a wretched existence for someone soft like me.

it will only self-replicate if instructed to do so. It has no desires of its own beyond what its context window contains. The tool calls it executes and initial prompt are all the work of humans. Someone could give a launch_nukes tool to a LLM and it might choose to end the world but it's pretty clear who messed up here.

If labor loses its entire share of the pie and that causes things to go to hell though, yeah sure I could see bad things happening.

For me, the end of the world is no more cushy software job. A fundamental shift in how I trade labor for capital might as well be the cataclysm, so bring it on.

ASI doesn't doom mankind, the actions of people do. This has been the case since world-destroying weapons were invented close to a century ago. If you're not worried about how you're going to make money in the post-ASI world then I really can't see what you're so worried about.

you can still do it, but it may not be your ticket into a secure (upper?)middle class existence like it used to be.

Why post this thought-terminating cliche when the the great-grandparent comment already addresses it?

Overall, I do agree with the thesis but:

> Now… how does Sal Khan want my kid to learn?

> Watch a video.

I find this a little uncharitable. I learned a lot of math at a young age from Sal Khan's early videos (back when he used to erase by switching to a black pen and scribbling across the entire screen) and, to put it in the author's terms, it served as an easy-to-digest scaffolding on top of which to build a deeper understanding. I don't think Khanacademy ever sold itself as a magic learning resource that removes the need to work out problems yourself.

I always imagined that the application layer had some kind of extra overhead that would be unacceptable for general purpose use.

Not really. Nebula creates a layer-3 network[1]. Rayfish is built upon Iroh which is a layer-7 network.

[1]: https://nebula.defined.net/docs/#technical-details

Probably some mixture of better statutory labor protections and more class solidarity (collective bargaining), but generally I don't know. It just boils my blood that Walmart can publish a document explaining to its employees how to apply for government food assistance (to buy food from Walmart itself) and this is business-as-usual in the USA.

You're fixating on the word deserve in my post, but that's got nothing to do with my point. I'm saying that the market has decided that it doesn't have to pay a living wage since the government picks up the bill to keep things going. I think that's perverse.

Well, I do agree that the redistribution system is absolutely broken. Most welfare recipients do in fact work (and benefit others) but our capitalist redistribution system has decided that they don't deserve to live with dignity, leaving the centrally planned redistribution system to pick up the slack.

I'm asking you, is this really such a big problem that it requires getting rid of welfare? Is the US financially in trouble because it pays out welfare to undeserving layabouts? I seriously doubt it.

> congress during some fluke period when the filabuster can be overcome.

If the clouds part and Jesus himself descended from the heavens, you'd ask him to ... discourage anchor babies? Surely there are better and more pressing uses of his power.

Not even this. The USA has a labor shortage that is filled by workers who used to migrate seasonally until it was no longer allowed, thus creating a perverse system that encouraged business owners to look the other way and immigrants to stay instead of leave.

A long time ago, the southwestern part of the USA was Mexico, but a certain destiny manifested itself and changed that. It seems like this didn't affect day-to-day life due to a generous treaty for a while until some Americans decided they deserved the land there more than the people who were there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation#Cession_o... -- see the part about 1930 removals.

Obviously, the people who were kicked out were performing some useful economic function, so the USA decided to have it both ways: The Bracero program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracero_Program

This program of importing cheap labor had an expiration date, and it was allowed to expire in the 60s. Guess what happened then?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9017686/

> Despite the forced removal of Mexicans during the 1930s, as soon as the United States entered the Second World War, authorities approached Mexico to negotiate a binational treaty that arranged for the annual entry of legal workers for seasonal labor in U.S. agriculture (Galarza 1964; Calavita 1992). The resulting Bracero Program lasted from 1942 through 1964, and its effect on the likelihood of migration is readily apparent in Figure 3. Between 1940 and 1945 the probability of U.S. migration rose nearly seven times, going from 0.003 to 0.020 before leveling off briefly and then rising to new plateau of 0.029 from 1956 to 1959. In 1960 Congress began to phase out the Bracero Program, finally letting it expire at the end of 1964, bringing the probability of migration down to 0.017.

Why did they let it expire? presumably to increase demand for American labor. A laudable goal to be sure, but is that really what happened? Surely people stopped crossing the border to do labor here and Americans started getting hired more.

This whole thing is beyond messed up and the fact that this history is essentially erased (I wasn't taught this in school) absolutely boils my blood.

> Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.

There is a pretty clear down-trend post-COVID here.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...

Immigration in the US is a completely different problem with its own crazy complex history of cause and effect. Using one as a lens to study the other seems foolish at best.

re: questionable legality https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

> Moreover it's not hard to think of vaguely similar objections to fertilizers.

It's completely different. If LLM companies pulled this out of thin air it would be also different, but no; they've effectively plundered the commons and locked up all the profit for themselves. If intellectual labor goes the way of agricultural labor, I think humanity will have lost something valuable.

And don't come back with the "farmers would have said the same thing about the industrial revolution!" thing again if you're just going to terminate your thought there. Automating agricultural labor brings vast material benefits for all since it lowers the cost of tangible goods needed for life. I'd challenge you take this one step further and explain why automating intellectual labor will provide similar fruits and is therefore something to cheer for.

tractor manufacturers or fertilizer companies didn't suck down the work of generations of predecessors in a questionably-legal fashion only to turn around and sell a heavily discounted version of that back to them. I'm not sure where "parasite" becomes appropriate, but your analogy is poor.

there probably never was any there for a meaningful amount of time, but it's incredibly hard to prove a negative.