That’s the opposite of my experience. Weird. But I’m also not the kind of person who gets hung up on whether someone used a loop or recursion or if their methods are five times as long as what I would’ve done myself unless there is a performance impact that matters to me as a user. But I’m also the kind of person who doesn’t get paid by the hour to write programs. I use programs in the service of other paid work.
The tariffs are a bit of a new phenomenon so I think that may be motivated reasoning. Construction productivity has also been stagnant for about 60 years. I think the most important factor is that housing prices, in the United States at least, are governed by how much a bank will lend. Very small but affordable houses will never be built because a bank will not finance a $10,000 loan over 30 years. In the same vein, it’s technically feasible for automobiles to be built for just a few thousand dollars, but, again, they will not finance $2500 over five years. So cars and houses are just built to the price point which will satisfy the lenders. You may not hate financialization nearly as much as it deserves.
OK, let me fall less short. It has replaced the freelancer for me. I communicate product requirements. It builds the product immediately at trivial cost. It’s better than a human. There are jobs I would have considered hiring out that I don’t because the machine is better. Nothing you said about labor effects in the large even logically follow. Have you even used one of these systems?
I really don’t agree with the author here. Perplexity has, for me, largely replaced Cal Newport’s job (read other journalists work and synthesize celebrity and pundit takes on topic X). I think the take that Claude isn’t literally a human so agents failed is silly and a sign of motivated reasoning. Business processes are going to lag the cutting edge by years in any conditions and by generations if there is no market pressure. But Codex isn’t capable of doing a substantial portion of what I would have had to pay a freelancer/consultant to do? Any LLM can’t replace a writer for a content mill? Nonsense. Newport needs to open his eyes and think harder about how a journalist can deliver value in the emerging market.
There is no simple explanation, but an important issue is that there is no price discovery mechanism or system pressure for efficiency. You also may not know that the US healthcare system is also an elaborate jobs program. Walk into any hospital and you will see 5-10 mostly young women doing basically nothing. I don’t know why the powers that be decided that the US should divest itself from any useful work, but here we are. Now we’re a couple generations into this social experiment by “smart” billionaires and their courtiers, and the military industrial complex is begging the Taiwanese to hold our soft hands and teach a blossoming generation hipsters and resentful immigrants how to build the computers we invented. We had a good run, but we’re Rome circa. 400-500 AD. Don’t let the marketing in Venezuela fool you. I’m just hoping the robots give us a few more decades of working plumbing.
We almost do. Employers must provide insurance. If you’re unemployed you can probably get Medicaid. We have private entities handle the details instead of something that looks like the Post Office. There is nothing anyone in Congress can do which results in all 8 billion people on Earth having instant access to all conceivable treatment in any location the the US. Like socialized medicine, there is no meaningful price discovery mechanism in the US. Unlike socialized medicine, it’s a lot harder for political parties to conduct pogroms by rationing resources and euthanizing demographics that don’t vote the way they like.
Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question.
Hey, can you show me the log files?
Sure here you go. Please help!
Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!
Can he round up the goons in the CIA and FBI while he’s at it? Is being a tributary vassal state of China materially worse than being a tributary vassal state of foreign power? I’d like sovereignty, but that’s not really an option.
I think his removal has a lot more to do with his willingness to cooperate with the “bad guys“ in the Middle East. I think this also has a lot to do with why we suddenly care about Somali fraud rings that have been operating since the 1990s. The stage is getting set for another regime change in the Middle East. It’s pretty amazing what you can buy with a $250 million campaign donation.
I think there were that many immigrants. I don’t believe they are so many living there now. Iran demonstrated pretty conclusively that mass repatriation is completely possible if you have a government that actually wishes to do so.
I think heads of state bearing personal responsibility for misconduct is an excellent precedent that I would love to see applied much, much more widely. Preferably to the superpowers, especially if said leader were to say, for a totally-hypothetical example, recklessly create a massive security risk near our borders for the sole purpose of benefiting a foreign interest group… but I’ll take what I can get. I think the Sword of Damocles is missing all too often from high society. If life and death decisions, don’t come with life and death risks, then I think they become taken too lightly. I think we are too quick to insulate high society from the consequences of their actions.
In this house we believe
Love is love
Black Lives Matter
Science is real
Feminism is for everyone
No human is illegal
Kindness is everything
Signaling your alignment to the public-facing opinions of your social betters is the modern ersatz religion for atheists. The television is the temple, the pundits the priests. Apostates and heretics are not welcome here. Now, my child, you would not want your words to inadvertently cause the faithful to stray. Would you? Just think of what the late night comedians would say if they could hear you cast doubt on their sponsor Pfizer? Perhaps you would rather join our hate session on the pagans in flyover country?
I wish atheist would just stop writing about Christian practices. Particularly screenwriters. It’s better that your audience assumes you are ignorant than to open your mouth and prove them right.
Unrelated to the topic, I’m a bit at a loss as to what to make of this website. There was a link to a really cool analysis of artificial intelligence research. And I guess they are a nonprofit and are raising $2M for “infrastructure“ but I think they mean infrastructure in the sense of software they like, and not the kind of infrastructure normal people think of like plumbing, electricity, and roads. I spent a few minutes browsing, and I can’t even tell what charitable purpose or educational purpose they could be serving. There’s just no clear statement of purpose anywhere other than I suppose being really rational.
I don’t think self-dealing is new. Although it was eye-opening, when I learned that BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity all own 5-10% of every company and competition between the companies they hold is not meaningful. Everyone just has to have nice steady predictable returns and nobody is allowed to innovate too far ahead of anyone else for fear of devaluing the real bosses’ other assets.
I don’t even know what to call the kind of system we have.
Employee headcount is not a good proxy for actually accomplishing the tasks government is expected to do. Your DOT has a huge number of employees, but I can say from first hand knowledge that none of the staff engineers actually design anything. They manage and administer projects, and they attend a lot of meetings and spend a lot of hours in the office, but they probably don’t actually do the things you care about as a taxpayer: deliver infrastructure improvements. Contractors manage the programs, plan the jobs, design the jobs, build the job, and inspect the job. State employees might do maintenance, and they will do it with 3-5X the headcount of the contractors.
I’m not very confident in the strategy of immiserating most people to drive positive change. This has been a Communist talking point for a century and a half that has yet to produce positive results, despite many attempts.
I am pleased to read someone is taking some initiative.
A lot of work in project controls and management are simple enough that any system that can handle data that isn’t reliably structured could do it. Read project team updates each week. Are we on time and on budget? If yes, commend the team and write a glowing report of the AI’s wise and dynamic leadership to operations, if not, encourage the team and recommend operations outsource the employees.
There are a few answers to that but the most obvious reason is quality of work. You can expect a lot more out of a contractor whose billed rate is $250 an hour versus a grad student. The second point is that least in the United States, all government jobs are purely clerical and administrative. The government, as you know it does nothing for itself, except may be law-enforcement. Contractors do everything. Space flight, building the roads, managing construction programs, hauling trash, everything. In this particular case there are “national security“ interests that have inserted themselves into the healthcare domain who want the data and to control treatment. You don’t get to say no to people who with unlimited resources and a “by any means necessary” MO.
I subscribe to the opinion that there are probably some good reasons why people in the US tend to spread out when they have the option. I think the problem of collective human action is complex enough that optimizing at the individual level is probably the best we can do. I would rather spend time thinking about how to serve people in ways that they actually want instead of “big idea” approaches.
It’s probably necessary long term as gasoline taxes are yielding less per mile as total fuel efficiency improves. The dedicated funding source is necessary because if DOT construction budgets (which are huge) were in the general fund, they would be looted by lawmakers to fund patronage programs and the entire surface transportation network would be unfit for service within 20 years. TxDOT loves NTTA because it’s a huge cash cow and hits non-residents hard. If I have to go to Dallas, I expect to spend at least $25 one way. Usually someone else is footing that bill. By extension, I consider myself very lucky that I don’t have to live there.
Publishing findings that amount to an admission that you and others spent a fortune studying a dead end is career suicide and guarantees your excommunication from the realm of study and polite society. If a popular theory is wrong, some unlucky martyr must first introduce incontrovertible proof and then humanity must wait for the entire generation of practitioners whose careers are built on it to die.
I see why people like it, but personally, I find their brand of longer form journalism extremely tiresome. Most often I read articles because I want to know the facts, and not just for the pleasure of reading for its own sake. Ponderous and meandering details of how the journalist interviewed so-and-so at such and such location and what the journalist thought about the food and the ambience and all of that just makes me furiously angry at what a waste of time it feels like. I just want to know the facts. I feel like AI is a godsend for impatient people like me who just want instant information And I have no interest in what a cool experience the journalist had or particular details of how they got paid or who they borrowed money from while they were writing.
I feel like this list says a lot more about what the author wants her kids to be interested in than a real survey of the whole toy market. There are a few stuffed animals that get tons of love, and the magnet blocks were a hit for a couple months but then they got old. This is going to trigger a deluge of unsolicited admonition, but the television and the Nintendo switch have by far the highest entertainment value per dollar spent.