tharne

> I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue.

I disagree. They know exactly what they're doing. Executives get paid and promoted based on quarterly profitability, not long-term vision or a sustainable business model. By the time the damage from what they've done is apparent and felt, the execs responsible will have long since retired to a beach somewhere in the tropics, or taken a higher paying role at another company where they'll start the process anew.

The more I use AI, the more I'm convinced you're probably right.

> To really dig into the actions of even a single company could take months of careful research.

That's a really good point. With the way modern supply chains work, it may not even be possible to really know if you're buying something that was ethically produced or not.

> The thing holding back unions in the U.S is the unions themselves and the laws around them. Once a union forms, they have entirely too much power.

This is a nice summary of the central issue with unions in the U.S. A rational person can quickly see why people are clamoring for unions in the U.S. and also why American companies are so resistant.

> And no, consumers have never really cared in the gaming space. They won't do anything differently because of this.

Consumers almost never care outside of isolated causes du jour or when it directly affects someone they know. Look at all the self-proclaimed socialists and progressives walking around with iPhones manufactured by Foxconn, a company known for treating its employees so badly there were inquiries into the suicide rates of their workers at one point.

While I have my concerns about unions, they are absolutely necessary in many cases. Companies are not your friend, nor are your fellow consumers most of the time.

What is the argument being made here? That we've done stupid and damaging things to our brains in the past so we just stop worrying and just double down?

That's fine; I wasn't referring to the academic quality the grammar. It's the ideas themselves that are muddled and unclear. Proficiency in given language and the ability to express oneself clearly are not as related as we typically think they are.

I know plenty of folks with poor English who are nonetheless very clear and concise when it comes to expressing their thoughts in English. I also know many native English speakers who, despite being proficient in the language, cannot express a lot their ideas clearly or concisely.

> I’m doing most complicated projects I ever work , I would not even try to implement them without AI. My brain is exploding of complexity every time , I passively learn lots of topics I only had a vague understanding in the past

This sentence is very poorly written and ironically is undermining the very case you're trying to make.

> This discourse is as old as humanity. Every tool makes us stronger but also paradoxically weaker.

Of course that statement is true for every tool, but what's missing from the discussion is whether the trade off is worth it. Even truly terrible things have benefits. Smoking cigarettes makes it easier to maintain a healthy weight, this is well documented. Smoking has also been shown to reduce anxiety in some people. The negative consequences that cigarettes introduce, however, are so horrific that no one in their right mind would recommend that someone take up smoking, even if there are some demonstrable benefits to it.

> Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.

I think this is generally true, but human nature being what it is, the vast majority of people will use AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool to assist thinking. You can already see this from casual observation of today's AI users.

As I've grown older, I've noticed that more often than not, when someone says something to effect of, "Thing X can cause problems, but is great if used properly", you can be almost 100% certain that Thing X is going to cause very large problems and practically no one is going to use it correctly.

> Also, Americans have to file both fed and state taxes (with different rules)

And if that weren't enough, you've go municipal taxes too, in a few places like New York and Detroit.

In your opinion, what skills are called for in this current era of LLMs?

> If you don't have a spine, sure

I've never understood this take. A lot of people were saying this sort of thing when Proton Mail turned over some user data to authorities in Europe a while back.

If you're running a tech company and run afoul of the law in some or another jurisdiction, it doesn't matter how much spine you think you have. When a group of men with guns, i.e. the police, shows up at your door and gives you the option of turning over some customer data or spending the next 10 years of your life in a steel cage, I'm betting that practically no one is going to choose the cage, spine or not.

The only way to keep user data safe is to not collect it in the first place.

> Not all countries have an equivalent to the USA CLOUD Act.

Not yet, anyway. Unfortunately, pretty much every country seems to be getting less and less open and free over time. Some are better than others, but it does feel like everyone is regrettably rowing in same direction.

> "We shouldn't use the thing that has memory safety built in because it also has a thriving ecosystem of open source dependencies available" is a very weird argument.

I don't see anyone anywhere in this thread saying that we shouldn't use rust, or C for that matter.

This one of the things that frightens me about LLMs. Like MBA programs, they seem to make people dumber over time, while simultaneously making them feel smarter and more confident in their abilities.

I feel like this comment ^ was made in bad faith. Providing an accurate description of reality is not an endorsement of that reality, but I'm pretty sure you already know this, and your comment here is more of a rhetorical tool than an addition to the discussion.

This is not a U.S. specific issue. Once you strip away all of the formalities, titles, and ceremonies, you'll realize there's no such thing as international law, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word.

The law, by definition is a rule backed up by the use of force, specifically state-sanctioned violence. If you write a law but do not have the ability to use a sufficient amount violence to enforce it when needed, you don't have a law at all, you just have a suggestion around how you'd like people and countries to behave.

The only way you could ever have anything resembling "international law", would be to have some sort of global military or police force capable of exerting enough violence to ensure that the law is followed, and I'm not even sure how such a thing would work.

People tend to underestimate the value of a solution that folks, especially less technical folks, are already trained on, comfortable with, and one that is known to work as expected.

This is something I've never totally understood when it comes to Rust's much loved memory safety vs. C's lack of memory safety. When it comes to replacing C code with Rust, aren't we just trading memory risk for supply chain risk?

Maybe one is more important than the other, I don't know. All the languages I use for work or hobbies are garbage collected and I'm not a security professional. But it does seem like the typical Rust program with it's massive number of "cargo adds" is an enormous attack surface.

OpenAI has yet to build an AI model that can write basic python scripts without confidently making up functions and libraries that don't exist, but in just over two years we're going to get a "legitimate AI researcher"??

Sam Altman is a fraud on par with Elizabeth Holmes. If OpenAI were a publicly traded company, Altman would be getting investigated by the SEC for the amount of blatantly dishonest statements he's made about the capabilities of his company's various models.

My money is on Altman getting arrested or sued into oblivion within the next ten years.

> How is masculinity commonly understood and what examples do you have of the left and democrats not making space?

What would you say is the Democratic or progressive view of masculinity and where does it fit in the progressive or liberal worldview?

As a former Democrat, that's not a question I can even begin to answer, because I don't think Democrats,liberals, or progressives see any value in or a role for masculinity. Simply pointing to the other side and saying, "there's some bad guys over there" is not a meaningful retort.

That's a tough question. There's no one "right" sample size. It depends on the size of the effect you're trying to measure, how much noise is in the data, whether or not you want to analyze subgroups within the data, and many other factors.

The sample size here, 136, is not bad at first glance, many studies get published with smaller ones. It's large enough for the purposes here, but you'd definitely want to replicate the experiment a few more times.

The potential for trolling and general idiocy is high here, so I'll tread carefully. I think this is an uncomfortable truth that the Democratic party has yet to effectively internalize and address; and they will continue to struggle and frustrate themselves until they do. There is very little in current left-wing philosophy that provides any sort of meaningful place or role for masculinity as it is commonly understood. Then, when Democrats or other left wing political parties struggle to win over men, they resort to name calling and try to right off masculinity writ large, causally throwing around phrases like "toxic masculinity".

As much as it has gone out of fashion, the masculine and feminine are ever-present parts of the human psyche and human experience, which is why they can be found and understood across cultures, space, and time. Carl Jung and others who explore archetypes and symbols understood this well. You can't ignore a fundamental component of the human experience and expect your philosophy/worldview/politics succeed long term.

Are those $10-20/user/month costs sustainable? As I understand it, a lot of the price tags we're seeing now reflect steep discounts underwritten by massive debt and VC money.

The other thing I wonder about with respect to cost and availability, at least in the U.S., is the fact that our electrical grid is in shambles and there's a ton of deferred maintenance. Even if AI can deliver on its promises, do we even have the infrastructure in place to power it?

These are just two issues; I'm sure there are more, and I imagine Wall Street is taking some of this into account in their analyses.

I have zero doubt that the car companies will do their best to make it effectively impossible to "own" your own car, in the same way you can no longer truly "buy" software.

There's no incongruence as you say, but focusing on problems in other countries where you have little to no first hand knowledge or influence and no real skin in the game is just a distraction.

I really like heavy codes of conduct. They're the Open Source project equivalent of those brightly colored frogs in the tropics. They're kind enough to signal their own toxicity so others know to keep their distance.

It continues to amaze me how much time Europeans spend criticizing the U.S. for all of our nonsense, while they too are sprinting toward a more authoritarian future.

It would be necessary to have the list of past predictions from UBS for this figure to have any meaning. Otherwise you fall into the trap of "Economists successfully predicted 10 of the last 4 recessions".