srj

The period after leaded gasoline was eliminated and before modern tech may go down as the peak of human intellect.

More specifically I wonder if the birth of social media in the form of short videos is the real culprit. Most other single causes don't line up even if I can believe they are a factor.

It seems like we should be able to adapt, but the dopamine hit of short videos may prove as difficult to manage as healthy eating and exercise in terms of self-discipline.

Why are the companies legally required to shred the books? That's the most surprising part about this to me. Surely if they bought them second hand they could donate or resell after scanning. I'm wondering if the scanning machines are damaging the books.

Carmen Ortiz should have been disbarred over this, it was a shameful episode. Instead she retained her position for years and now is presumably quite wealthy as partner in a prominent Boston law firm.

I still have my foam gateway cow!

At some point UPS / FedEx became much faster. I recall ordering things in the mid 90s and it taking weeks or months to arrive. That definitely tilted shopping toward retail brick & mortar.

I find it totally implausible that the president or any subordinates intentionally targeted a school. As I recall it was located next to a military base. A mistake seems more likely.

The bombing of the school was horrible, but it was a mistake. I could see essentially the opposite argument: Anthropic should be more involved as to prevent mistakes in the future with better technology. Imagine Claude asking the decision makers at CENTCOM "this looks like a school, are you sure you want this added as a target?"

For US SWE labor, off-shoring was and still is a big contributor. I do think AI is a factor too though. You almost get laughed at asking for headcount now. For junior positions in particular, there are close to zero openings.

AI has grown dramatically in capability since last year as well so I'm not sure 2025 data holds today.

For me it's mostly dealing with humans and bureaucracy now that takes the most time. Actually kicking off an LLM will often (though not always) get me in the ballpark of the right solution, and then iterating with the LLM from there gets me the rest of the way.

To me it's more about how real the financial strength of the company is versus being propped up on some shady accounting. Not sure if that was the case with Carvana or any of these new IPOs, but personally I have my nest egg in the S&P and don't want sharks abusing the index for their pump and dump exit strategy.

Probably many legally protected professions such as medicine and law will continue to be okay. There's a cap imposed on the number of residency positions that will keep those jobs scarce.

One way it seems different today is that wealth inequality is already quite high in the US. Even if AI delivers massive productivity gains the windfall is only likely to be more concentrated. When manufacturing was outsourced at least median housing wasn't 7x median income.

I'm curious what you mean by prepare, to have savings?

On the contrary, I find reading your own confused spin on morality here an interesting window into the effectiveness of propaganda. You're taking two oppressive authoritarian governments and elevating them above the US.

I love iTerm2, thank you!

We have the prospect of AI destroying humanity and living life underground. It's more like The Matrix every day.

Sure but in a less broken society thieves would be apprehended and theft risk would be low. Instead the police do nothing and honest people live like a school of fish trying not to stick out for fear of the nearly-authorized property theft rampant in SF.

In many parts of the world, including major cities, it would be okay to leave your belongings in a locked car.

It was the same at google. If I'm remembering right we couldn't export any vector type data (raster only) and the tiles themselves had to be served out of South Korea.

Yes I'm talking about LLMs in particular. I'm in the stochastic parrot camp. Though I could be convinced humans are no more than stochastic parrots, in which case it does have a path for development of AGI.

If I'm right the breakthroughs will plateau even while applications of the technology continue to advance for the next several years.

FWIW I didn't downvote you. I don't work on AI personally, and while I have no way of proving it to you I certainly am not trying to shill for my employer.

My skepticism of AI safety is just because of skepticism of AI generally. These are amazing things, but I don't believe the technology is even a road to AGI. There's a reason it can give a chess move when prompted and explain all the rules and notation, but can't actually play chess: it's not in the training data. I simply think the hype and anxiety is unnecessary, is my issue. Now this is most definitely just my opinion and has nothing to do with that company I work for who I'd bet would disagree with me on all of this anyway. If I did believe this was a road to AGI I actually would be in favor of AI safety regulation.

I've seen zero job loss from AI but substantial job loss to off-shoring. What you said about over-hiring I think is also true, but if you look at headcount numbers they have dropped only marginally. The geographic distribution of that headcount however has shifted in a big way to India, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. The reason is obvious, people in those countries are paid far less (often 1/3 or 1/4) compared to their US counterparts.

It seems this rarely gets discussed in the media though. As you said, AI gets more readership attention. I also get the impression people feel there's something culturally offensive about discussing off-shoring.

Reading the text it feels like a giveaway to an "AI safety" industry who will be paid well to certify compliance.

The article cites no evidence except for anonymous accounts. There's no video evidence even though people would widely have smart phones there. The association distributing aid as well as Israel's government have denied any of this happened.

I'd be upset if this happened too, but there's no evidence of that. My guess is that warning shots were fired.

Did I miss something from the article? I did read it.

As an austinite I'm nervous about these things. My son and his classmates play along the street and I'm 90% sure I saw one of these driving by our house last week, presumably for testing. The street is legally at a higher speed than most people will drive because there's a lot of activity and no sidewalks which I'm about to argue for changing. Normal people will slow when they see kids around but autonomous cars still drive their normal speed.

>> There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.

I'm not sure this is true. I buy olive oil specifically from California. It's niche but could be larger if they weren't competing with lower overseas labor costs.

It's surprising to me that the prosecutor is allowed to essentially insinuate crimes to influence the jury, without the need to prove them. That seems to undermine the process because it creates a "there's smoke so there must be fire" mentality for the jury.

It's a next token predictor capable of some impressive stuff, but there's no intelligence behind it. You will never find a novel idea from an LLM.

Like so many successful applications of computers it's a new way of taking a monotonous task and grinding through it quickly. In this way I think it's different from some previous fads (e.g. block chain) and there is real utility.

I agree though that it's exhausting to read people anthropomorphize and hype it up.

> I think people seriously overestimate the difference engineer quality makes. Most products can be built with mediocre talent. I'm sorry, that's the truth. We all love to have strong opinions on who we should hire and I say "almost anyone, just throw meat at the problem". Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.

I'm surprised that your experience here is so different from mine. The best engineers I've had are capable of things that the average to below average ones could likely have never achieved, even with an order of magnitude more time.

I don't think it comes down to cleverness as it does inventiveness. There are dots that great engineers can connect that often nobody else could spot. They also need less process, and a large number of people with all of the coordination overhead does not linearly scale.

ATF approvals for individuals are much faster now. Last week I got a Form 4 approval in just 2-3 days.

I think the animosity is some indication people feel justice was not being served.

Am I the only one who loves writing C++? I've used some newer languages like Kotlin, and that's good too, but I always come back to C++. I think a lot of the criticism is from the old way it was written, before C++11/17.