tharne

Outside of the Great Rift Valley, every country was built on immigration at some point.

If a group of individuals migrates to another country, the onus is on that group to integrate into their host country, not the other way around.

> sometimes I'll need to go on some "normie" website to book a flight or something

I have ungoogled chromium installed alongside firefox for exactly this reason. A lot of mainstream sites clearly do not care about supporting other engines.

Pretty sure that COVID showed the exact opposite. Our brains evolved in the meatspace and won't be happy anywhere else.

Even the success of remote work shows this. People want to avoid the office (and the commute) to get more time with friends, family, and their hobbies. The internet is most successful when it helps people live the life they want in the meatspace, not when it tries to replace it.

If Windows were really that great compared to Linux, you wouldn't need to write an entire essay on why that is so.

Zig is cool and all, but someone should really rewrite it in Rust.

> From a game theoretical POV this is false;

Except we're not talking about game theory here, we're talking about reality.

> Public transit has always been the cheaper option.

Only if don't value your time.

Love this comment. It elegantly captures something that most of us know, but is very hard to express.

This is a case of "scientism", not science. Science is only equipped to address claims that are falisifiable. The question of whether or not there is a self isn't something that can be proven or dispproven, since consciousness appears to be an emergent property rather than a thing that can be pinned down and measured.

I'm always amused at how these journalists will make very confident and sweeping predictions about how thing X is going to do Y in the future; yet, I hear few stories along the lines of, "Brilliant journalist makes millions in the stock market after boldly predicting how X will affect Y".

I honestly don't know what AI will do to office workers, but I'm hopeful that it will whack the mediocre middle of media outlets, like business insider for one. Most of their articles already read like they were written by Chat GPT.

I said, "majority of the day focused on gathering food, not "spent gathering food". If this seems like an arbitrary distinction, allow me to provide an analogy. Most teenage boys spend the majority of their day focused on having sex, but very few of them spend the majority of their day actually having sex (if they're even having sex at all).

As for a citation, ask anyone who's spent any amount of their life with not enough food available. If you ask them how much of their time is spent focused on getting food or thinking about food, or worrying about food, they'll probably tell you "most of it".

> To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income.

As others have pointed out, this is an incredibly naive opinion. Labor is tied to income precisely because it happened organically, not because a group of self-appointed individuals decided to develop a "system". Most attempts to develop alternative (read: non-organic or top-down) systems for organizing human societies have either failed entirely or have been short-lived.

Exactly. Every discussion I see focuses almost exclusively on AI as it exists right now. Everyone is either dismissing the impact due to some minor shortcoming, or wildly overestimating the short-term impact. The one consistent thing among those who dismiss it and those who think it's going to change everything in the next six months is that they're both drastically underestimating the long-term impact. GPT is already behaving in ways that researchers did not anticipate.

> Wealth distribution has been a challenge since we've moved away from spending our day solely focused on gathering food / farming.

Have you ever considered that this may be due to the fact that our brains evolved to exist in a world where our day is largely focused on gathering food? We're not well-equipped to exist in other modes.

> advocating against the study of business is just as naive as advocating against the study of computer science just because there are some bad CS grads.

Criticizing garbage MBA programs is not criticizing the study of business. Business schools don't study business. They're a place where people make a lot of money selling theories about business that are useless at best and it many places, quite harmful. Learning about business by going to business school is like learning to kiss by reading books about kissing.

> What is so undesirable about productivity going up by a factor of a 100 or a 1000 and everyone living like an aristocrat, because machines do all the work? Why is full employment such an obsession?

Nothing is undesirable about the future you laid out in your comment, except for the fact that it will never ever happen the way you describe (be nice if it did, but I'm not holding my breath). You could have made similar claims about the computer or the internet back in the day, but what we've seen from those technologies is ever increasing concentration of wealth in a few hands, which is what technology does, it centralizes by default. And most human attempts to redistribute wealth on a large scale have been more disastrous than the inequality they were trying to solve.

Can you really blame people? As a country, we still remember all the horrible crap that was built in the 1950's and 60's in the name of the "greater good". Neighborhoods bulldozed to build highways, downtowns hollowed out to build malls and parking lots, and strip mall after strip mall. Practically everything built in this country after World War II looks ugly and cheap. It's not that Americans don't want new things to be built, it's that we don't trust the government and the real estate developers not to fuck it up. As they say, "trust is earned".

> Also - genuine question for anyone with a clue - what percent of high school age kids do you think have smartphones in, say, East Oakland?

Answer: Effectively all of them. Source: worked in inner city schools for a bit in areas at least as poor as East Oakland.

I think the article is probably referring to functional illiteracy, e.g. someone who can understand, "Be there in 5" on their smartphone but can't read a news article and summarize the main point.

On top of that, how will we even now when it's "ready"? We can't even manage social media effectively at the moment and AI is a arguably and order of complex. We're in way over our heads here and I don't see us getting out.

This question misses the bigger point in some ways. The danger of AI is not that it will do bad thing X or terrible thing Y. It's that it will behave in ways we cannot predict and do things we cannot understand, all while we become more and more reliant on it.

> ..but again, the Right will happily use this tiny point to drive the wedge to say "TRANS IS BAD ALL THE TIME."

I have no doubt that folks on the right will exploit that, but I'd also argue that supporting irreversible transition procedures on children, often against the wishes of the parents, is not a tiny point as you callously put it. It's THE point.

> I still respect his models, but I think the rest is the kind of stuff you’re expected to do as part of a media organization.

Exactly. His models are still outstanding. Ironically, I think the signal from his models gets lost in all the noise around the filler content on his site.

"The Signal and the Noise" is a great book and it definitely impacted some of the most important choices I made around my career. I think that's part of the reason I'm so annoyed that Nate Silver has gone so far down the punditry rabbit hole.

> Yup. The right is fuelling the moral panic about trans people

I wouldn't call opposition to performing irreversible gender transition procedures on children "moral panic".

I'm pretty sure the person referencing "ethnic genocide" was referring to China's internment and genocide of their Muslim population in western China, not COVID.

I think their point is that if genocide wasn't enough to motivate us to change our relationship with China, then a revelation about COVID originating from a Chinese lab probably isn't going to do much to move the needle either.

> After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver, condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's such a cop out! Since he never says yes or no one way or the other he always has an out when he's wrong!"), I'm even more convinced not just that people don't understand statistics, but they willfully don't want to.

As someone who does understand statistics, it's made me dislike Nate Silver even more than if I didn't. It's been sad to watch his metamorphoses over the years from an interesting numbers guy with nuanced discussions on polling and models, to becoming the exact kind of pundit and talking head he used to make fun of. There's still a little bit of statistics on his site, but the overwhelming majority of content is the same trite punditry you'll find on pretty much any political blog.

> I find the attitude on display here utterly gross and it makes me wonder where this person got it.

It is gross. It's also very ignorant. The author's argument basically boils down to, "I can't see an obvious major downside to this proposal, so that must mean there isn't one nor will there ever be one". How many times to we have to get burned by large companies invading our privacy and after promising not to before we wise up?

Can we get rid of those damned binding arbitration clauses next? I still can't believe (U.S.) employers are allowed to use coercion to take away an employees right to the court system.