tablespoon

> ...but having seen both systems in action, I believe it can be done.

Are you talking about your time selling cars? Have you actually seen a software engineering organization work by paying commission/piece-rate for the completion of tasks?

> And it would be worth trying IMO, because the potential for productivity improvement is insanely high. Dumber things have been tried (codling tech workers).

It's not worth trying, I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't been tried many times before. It's a bad idea that's easy to think of, and appeals to certain kinds of prejudices and misunderstandings. I've spend enough time talking about it.

By the way, have you ever read the classic software engineering book PeopleWare? If you haven't, you should.

> I don't see why tasks couldn't be devided up and given a value and people get paid for completing it. Some would be easier, and some would be harder and worth more. I might not be a veteran developer, but from what I see this could work.

It would not work because the scenario you describe would amount to seeing "all your productivity evaporate into a never-ending haggle over tasks." Also you presume that you can be good at estimation and assigning "value," but everyone actually sucks at that. That's not to say that no one can accurately estimate anything, it means everyone sucks at estimating when it really matters. Your idea also kneecaps your ability to delegate, and motivates pay-later kinds of corner cutting.

So? Car sales is so different from software development, there are few profitable comparisons to be made. You might as well assume it's nothing like software development.

Piece-rate only makes any sense if you're doing the same thing over and over. If you're developing the same piece of software over and over, something in seriously wrong.

> Drowning is when a living organism is submerged...

...and dies from it, which is a pretty important aspect to the word. If the organism doesn't die, it's swimming or just submerged.

> but it's not going to help a subsistence farmer in Vietnam who finds their rice fields no longer grow enough to live from.

But what if those farmers switch from rice to some other subsistence crop better adapted to the new conditions?

> It's a map.

One that appears to not answer the question I posed, or answer it in the negative (as in, they're not modeling realistic agricultural adaptations).

> It's litterally [sic] showing the changes by areas.

Apparently only "in currently cultivated areas." It's hard to get worked up over the predictions of a model that basically assumes everyone continues to do the exact same stuff while everything else changes, even if that would mean individuals fail to meet their short-term goals.

It wouldn't have been hard to depict the area under cultivation creeping further north (or the area under cultivation receding in other areas).

> Potentially the full volume will include other crops yields and more details that you are hoping for.

Those are not the details I'm looking for. It would be closer to what I'm looking for if they took that data, divided the world into plots, then for each scenario picked the highest yielding crop for that plot, to come up with an overall agricultural productivity estimate. I say that's only closer, because it presumably wouldn't reflect other reasonable and straightforward agricultural adaptations.

> Page 16

> https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/

>> Have they modeled all the different plausible crops and agricultural techniques, which regional environmental conditions they're most suited for, and the transitions between them based on regional climate change effects?

> Seems so.

I'm not seeing it. I'm assuming you mean page 16 of the "Summary for Policymakers," but all that has is a unreadable map of "Maize Yield" projections with the disclaimer:

> Projected regional impacts reflect biophysical responses to changing temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, humidity, wind, and CO2 enhancement of growth and water retention in currently cultivated areas. Models assume that irrigated areas are not water-limited. Models do not represent pests, diseases, future agro-technological changes and some extreme climate responses.

So it sounds like they are not accounting for things like changes between crops or changing which areas are cultivated, which could be pretty significant. For instance: their tiny map shows the cultivated area in Canada remaining unchanged, but if you're looking at total world agricultural yield of a future warmer planet, it seems like you would have account for more Canadian land becoming arable and agriculture spreading further north.

> "Extremely" is a big word. Agricultural yields depend on the weather. A population of 9-10 billion will not be sustained by vertical farms maintained in a synthetic climate.

Which is not the way I (or anyone reasonable) would think people would adapt. Instead of the software-engineer techno-fetishist fantasy of "vertical farms", I would think the adaptations would consist of things like:

1. Creating new farms in areas where the climate is currently too cold for productive agriculture,

2. Switching to different crops or different varieties that are hardier against heat and drought or otherwise yield more calories (per whatever limiting factor),

3. Switching to different irrigation techniques that may be more water-efficient,

4. etc.

(2008)

> ... the changes in ... crop yields...

How would they even predict/model that? Have they modeled all the different plausible crops and agricultural techniques, which regional environmental conditions they're most suited for, and the transitions between them based on regional climate change effects?

It's one thing to model a natural system, but seems quite a bit more complicated to model a system where human technology and decision-making is extremely significant.

> "Upvote THIS if you think Trump should be arrested!"

Oh boy, wouldn't that be a paradise? A 21st century version of ostracism: if enough people upvote something on social media, they can get you arrested.

> Bad manager isn't an excuse you get to use for not working. Coworkers are depending on you.

Correction: Unless you're working in some kind of cooperative, which you almost certainly are not, it's actually the shareholders who are depending on you. Your coworkers only depend on you to the extent that they're also dedicated to serving the shareholders.

> why would they care? just pay them by task/result, not by hour and you don't need to care how much and when they work if they fulfill deadlines

No developer with any sense or dignity is going to work at a piece-rate. And honestly, it doesn't make much sense for an employer, either. Do you want all your productivity evaporating into a never-ending haggle over tasks and what happens when someone can't complete one for reasons outside his control?

And they're also apparently staying in San Francisco, too:

> The online discussion forum, which previously subleased 78,000 square feet of office space at 1455 Market Street, is planning to significantly reduce its footprint when it leaves the Mid-Market neighborhood later this year. The social media platform will soon move to a 47,000-square-foot space at 303 Second St. in SoMa, as the San Francisco Chronicle first reported.

This is even sadder: https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85870&po...

> There is a snack called Bamba that they eat in Israel. It's kind of like a peanut butter Cheeto puff, and it is a nearly-universal snack for young kids in Israel. It melts in your mouth, so a 6-month-old can eat it almost as soon as they eat solid foods. It's about as popular in Israel as Cheerios are in the US, maybe more so. The hypothesis is that Bamba consumption there dramatically lowers the risk of developing peanut allergies.

Target sells these "Lil Mixins" sachets that contain peanut powder. They're designed to mix in to milk or oatmeal, etc. The packaging says you can use them with kids as young as 4 months. They also sell similar sachets of tree nuts and egg powder.

That's only a compelling argument to people who both take sci-fi seriously and believe in it as prophecy. Many, many people don't; and the people that do are mainly computer geeks.

Personally, I think AGI is the the current-era version of the personal atomic-powered autogyro.

> ...and public school kids are gonna get AI teachers with one real teacher per hundred or so, and bunch of even-lower-paid monitors (or whatever they end up calling them) to maintain order.

The term is "paraprofessionals." When I was a kid, these were the people who supervised the kids playing at recess.

> No, he said we should make it less shitty. And outlined a way to do so. Why misrepresent his words?

No, he didn't outline a way to make it better. He denigrated the people involved, in a way that is (most charitably) an oblique reference to low education budgets (e.g. not enough money to hire enough teachers or attract talented teachers). Then he held up some references to a few techie things.

Maybe he's a genius autodidact that never really got much benefit from his teachers. There have always been people like that, but they've never been common. A system tailored to people like that would fail the vast majority (e.g. be shitty).

> most public school teachers are glorified babysitters at this point anyway

That's a common but pretty twisted bit of logic: "we've made it shitty, so we should make it shittier because it's already so shitty."

> I get that part of the silicon valley ethos is "we know best"...

It's not even really that, because phrasing doesn't really capture how off-target and self-serving SV often is. It's more like "whatever we happen to be hyping right now is your solution."

> Just call this what it is -- entertainment for technologists.

That's spot on.

> But I believe technology is the future of education. Instead of having many, many classes of like ~10-50 students with underpaid/overworked/mistreated teachers, some of who are much better than others, we rely on services like Khan Academy. Not even services with an AI, just pre-planned learning modules, and then we can keep a human tutor for those who need extra for whatever reason (e.g. curiosity, more help).

In other words, the future you believe in is one where we lock kids in a cubicle to stare at a screen all day in a warehouse, with a break for recess and lunch? Where the message is, we care so little that we can't even bother to allocate one real person to regularly talk to you?

We've seen this before: use hype and techno-optimism to sell a bill of goods.

If history is any guide, the concept of an "AI tutor" won't be used to "[give] every child their own personal Aristotle," it will be used to cut costs by replacing human teachers for low-status students with poor substitutes.

Seriously, think about how much money can be saved from firing most teachers and locking poor kids in a cubicle farm to stare at an insane "AI tutor's" screen all day.

And what's the strongest message sent by replacing human interactions with a machines?: "We don't care enough about you to actually bother to interact with you." Think of how you feel when you have a problem, you make a call to fix it, and all you get are phone menus.

And look at all the examples in the article: use GPT to generate crappy stories and educational games for kids to play. How can anyone think that's better than using a book? At least the book's stories and games can be tested and evaluated before use.

The actual problem here is the sociopolitical one of unwillingness to allocate enough resources to education to make it truly effective and satisfying, and that's one that technology can't solve.

Also, I imagine the "people flee[ing] small banks ... into big banks" makes this particular stabilizing action easier. The big banks just redirect all the new deposits they're getting back to the small banks where they came from to stabilize things.

> The spectre of more regulation given all of the recent failures from 2008 to today has them spooked I bet.

Exactly. Also probably the fear of a wider contagion contained by a government response that leaves the shareholders and executives high and dry (rather than the comfortable 2008-style bailouts). It's not in anyone interest for this to blow up further, which could spur fundamentally selfish organizations into seemingly altruistic action.

> Cash is basically illegal for many transactions related to financial services and is likely to become illegal for everything greater than $10k in Australia very soon:

That's irrelevant. My main point is you appear to not want the traditional "bank account" product, but rather a "secure storage" project. I provided an example of the latter from my jurisdiction, but that was only an example.

> Call me naïve, but if I put money in a bank I should be able to get it back whenever I want. If I didn't want it to be liquid, I'd buy something less liquid. The very concept of a bank run is ridiculous. If all a bank's customers want their cash back, they should be able to get it back without affecting the liquidity of the bank.

Then the product you really want is a safe deposit box to put your literal cash in. They bank will make its money from the rental fee you pay. It doesn't sound like you're actually looking for a bank account that pays interest.

> Is this a feedback loop? We keep increasing caffeine content because we need more for our beverages to have the desired effect for customers?

Jolt was marketed to kids, and had twice the caffeine of other sodas. Coffee is an entirely different beverage, marketed at an entirely different group (at least it was when I was in school). What was the caffeine content of coffee in 1950, and how much did people drink? That's what you really need to compare the Dunkin Donuts Large Ice Coffee against.

> What reason do we have to believe that TikTok would follow those laws? Are they going to allow US auditors to visit them in China and make sure?

Or that they'd give the auditors the real system to inspect, not a dummy with the "spy" and "propaganda" plugins removed?

> These points are all so well-reasoned and difficult to argue against, I can't fathom how they managed to get all the way to this point without these things coming up and causing a rethink of the base approach. Quite incredible.

Isn't "launch from a plane" basically reusable first stage, 1.0? It was also more conservative, since the idea had already been successfully implemented in 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_Pegasus.

Some quick googling shows Virgin Orbit started in 2011, and SpaceX landed their first rocket in 2015. Virgin Orbit's idea may have make a lot more sense before SpaceX proved out an alternative, and that didn't happen until maybe they'd done a lot of development that could have possibly paid off.

> Most small town papers are filled with verbatim Reuters reports.

Not exactly. It's mostly AP reports, not Reuters, covering stuff from outside that small paper's area. If there's a flood of national interest in that small town, it's probably one of the reporters from that paper that will write the national wire story.

That's kind of the point of the Associated Press, lots of small local organizations banding together to offer comprehensive local/national/international coverage.

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

> Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers, paying a fee to use AP material without being contributing members of the cooperative. As part of their cooperative agreement with the AP, most member news organizations grant automatic permission for the AP to distribute their local news reports. The AP traditionally employed the "inverted pyramid" formula for writing, a method that enables news outlets to edit a story to fit its available publication area without losing the story's essentials, although in 2007, then-AP President Tom Curley called the practice "dead".[6]