Calazon

The new part is AI makes it much easier and cheaper to produce garbage than ever before. So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.

I think the idea is that a vassal state (operates as though it) owes allegiance to a stronger state, while governing itself (more or less) independently.

And the stronger state exercises a lot of influence on the weaker state, especially in terms of foreign policy, and potentially provides it with protection from other strong states.

Not sure exactly how much this would apply to Taiwan in particular, but I think the idea in general can be meaningful in modern politics.

There's certainly a spectrum between allies, vassals, and directly controlled territories, but it doesn't necessarily need to be about sending troops to help in war.

My understanding is the Confederacy did not give its states the right to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery, and did not give its states the freedom to decide whether or not to associate with each other.

I think they meant obsolete relative to economic, scientific, and engineering objectives.

That doesn't mean they don't provide any value of any kind to anyone.

I read the post as the author acknowledging the compromise, expressing frustration about it, and determining to live on the pareto frontier with his strategy of focus and discipline and so on. Sacrificing other things in order to achieve both ambitions at a high level (though not maximizing either one).

Ultimately any two ambitions will compete with each other for finite time and energy. (Assuming each ambition benefits from more time and energy being spent on it, which is usually the case.)

You can be reasonably successful in multiple areas, but you can't max them all, you have to compromise somehow.

Is there something in particular I'm trying to glean from that information? If so I might look it over, or snap a photo and ask my own LLM about it.

If not, I would politely keep my mouth shut, then pocket the flier to trash later, and on the way home I would complain about it to my wife.

Sure, but neither do skyscrapers.

AI is getting better and better at "house" level building, especially with some supervision.

These are acceptable tradeoffs in many circumstances. It's good that this kind of option is available, while there are other options for people with different priorities.

You also said you "honestly don't understand the hate Flock gets". Which seems to suggests that the status quo is really no big deal, even with the current (lacking) safeguards.

My real argument would probably be that this system is probably not unconstitutional but is very problematic and easily abused. Flock gets the hate that it does because it can be abused, and has been abused, and will in all likelihood continue to be abused.

All kinds of ideas - especially involving having a very powerful government - would be great in theory if we could have "the necessary safeguards", but the necessary safeguards do not exist and I am not sure if they can be made to exist, at least in a practical realistic way.

They certainly think it would be bad for police to read your text messages without a warrant.

Of course it's not real engineering, and most software development never was real engineering.

Trying to apply real engineering licensing ideas to software would just result in the word "engineering" no longer being used in the vast majority of cases. If that's your goal, then sure, great. But it won't stop ridiculous security mistakes from being made, they'll just be made by people with different job titles.

What sources do you think are good for this data for the recent past? My brief initial search is turning up a lot of contradictory data, probably because the sources are defining "programmers" differently from each other.

I agree with you in the broad strokes, but replacement by LLMs isn't the only way the level of employment can be reduced. If LLMs can make it so that two programmers can do the work that used to require five, that can result in a very large reduction in employment, even while having (some) programmers is still essential.

I know lots of people who voluntarily use AI regularly without being forced to - a lot more than either people who are anti-AI or people who are forced to use it for work.

That's probably a function of the people I'm around more than anything else. It is also the case that AI is being pushed on people, sometimes forcefully. But the category of people who use it because they want to is very large.

Being unable to tell a game is garbage without personally playing it is a problem with or without AI. Though AI is vastly increasing the amount of slop out there, for sure.

Knowing that some songs are by local artists who I could go see live doesn't tell me very much about the quality of the music, unfortunately. My friends recommending the music does though, assuming we have similar taste.

Still third even then.

I just tried and it looks like I can do this in Chrome on Android relatively easily. The UI could be a lot nicer for it though.

And I did run into an issue where if the site allows me to install it as a PWA, Chrome will want to do that and won't want to bookmark a specific page on that site instead.

Also, maybe your point was that this could be done at the OS level rather than the browser, which is fair.

My wife (head of accounting for a small business) has been working on automating large parts of her job using AI.

It's not completely reliable and the human cannot be taken out of the loop, but the number of menial tasks she's been able to automate has been really cool. A lot of processing data that arrives in non-standard formats, generating documents based on that data, etc.

She still has to review everything, but her workload is way down, and when her assistant quit she automated away his whole position.

Optional feature, off by default, customizable time interval, and a warning about false alarms?

Even with that you'd likely still trigger false alarms regularly, though they would be the responsibility of the user. Not sure whether it would be a worthwhile tradeoff overall.

Not everyone, no, but some people do choose to avoid lifestyle creep, or at least have a lot less of it than their peers. I'm just saying it's optional and not inevitable.

Automatic lifestyle creep with promotions? Well, it's definitely not a FIRE simulator.

Sure, but arguably education is the easy part. The even harder problem is aligning incentives/values and avoiding a tragedy of the commons sort of situation.

If the decision-makers are elected by the people, it's not a dictatorship, no matter how many atrocities the nation commits.

You can have some gray area I guess, with unfair elections or whatever, but when the bad decisions are made by leaders who keep on getting re-elected in reasonably fair elections, we do not have a dictatorship.

I suspect because some of these things would require us all to say no, which is difficult to coordinate and enforce.

It's not impossible, but it's not as easy as "just" saying no, as a society.

How do you feel about chess?

I read some of the article and skimmed the rest, and didn't see anything about old-fashioned search no longer being an option.

Is the idea that by making the new AI chat UX the default, that's how they're forcing people into it and making them not able to search? Or is there something I'm missing?

I think that was the idea, that MAGAs would see "price discrimination" as a good thing, but "diverse pricing" as a bad thing.