Supermancho

> So why are many of the very same sociopaths who are driving us toward climate destruction now suddenly so concerned about the "danger" posed by AI, and seemingly acting in defiance of their fiduciary duties to warn us that we must slow down development and seek regulation? Of course the reasons are entirely self-serving, which you should almost exclusively be able to determine from their history of narratives! They're combining this "threat to the species" narrative with a "we must stay ahead of China for the sake of our babies and all of Western Civilization" (this is incredibly ironic, I'll explain why in a bit) narrative, while milking the shit out of every perceived accomplishment (especially their highly publicized and highly distorted mathematical "victories"); it's important to understand that these narratives are directly linked to each other, in order to understand the reasons behind them.

This is the paragraph in the entirety. While previous sections referred to “the Elons and Sams of the world”, this section that was specifically called out:

> The connection made to climate change in the latter part of the article is new to me, and would be interesting if true. However, I wish the author would cite supporting evidence for their conclusions.

Does not refer to them explicitly (many of the very same), although it could be believed that the second clause of the first sentence refers to Sam, et al. Elon doesn't fit as he has no fiduciary duty nor has he called for slowdown, nor are there "many" in this demographic, which is a sign that this is more stream of thought. I believe the narrative only fits if you consider this to be a tangent about political sociopaths that was muddled by a very human leading thought intruding (from previous paragraphs), on an otherwise straightforward observation.

It makes no sense in the context of billionaires, as they were not generally driving "us" toward climate destruction prior to the AI boom.

> I don’t think that Sam Altman can be characterized as MAGA

He is not usually associated with MAGA. The reference was not directed at the heads of the most well know tech companies, despite the quote about "Elons and Sams". This wouldn't make sense in context. It was a reference to the ruling political regime.

Worse, the view is largely phrased as gaslighting AI. Blaming the cause of particular grievances that coincidentally have been sourced at the same time as the rise of AI, is purposeful.

> [Your train] never comes on time. Fuel is more expensive. The roads are still congested with traffic. Your kids are (probably) doing worse at school. Food costs more. Houses cost more. Rent is higher. Buying a computer or a PS5 is more expensive. Politics is still full of mentally unstable people. The environment is getting worse. You will still die of heart disease or cancer. Food quality is worse. Your kids can't find work. Wealth inequality is accelerating.

None of this has to do with AI.

> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using), and AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)

Plain wrong on both counts.

> Imagine what a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" will be able to do Apparently...nothing.

Nonsequitor, probably based on a personal beef. Datacenters, at best, are understood to be for hosting more AI - not for people to somehow live in as an arcology of discovery.

> So why are many of the very same sociopaths who are driving us toward climate destruction now suddenly so concerned about the "danger" posed by AI, and seemingly acting in defiance of their fiduciary duties to warn us that we must slow down development and seek regulation?

> interesting if true.

Not sure what you mean by this. This is obviously about MAGA and other allied political forces in the US, at the very least. I wouldn't call it interesting to document the recent observed behavior. It's been evident through journalistic analysis of public statements, policy, and investment for most of the year.

> That's exactly not how the legal system is supposed to work.

It is. This is a misunderstanding of how justice works. People (judges, juries, et al) determine the impact of situations, not machines following abstract rules.

> this was intended to say was that a lot of nonsense work can be done by AI, so let’s eliminate the nonsense work

I'm not sure this makes sense, since there is no getting away from "nonsense work", which is shorthand for low value return on time and cognitive overhead.

I understood the post to mean something different...with my own added context.

The digital age has increased the complexity of life and various processes by orders of magnitude. Programming is at the forefront, having had to deal with implementation for decades. The complexity necessarily grows every day, as the easiest problems are solved first, before tackling more nuanced or difficult ones (very different). Understanding how to identify these, track the tradeoffs, and choose specialized approaches, grows in every vertical. There are many subjects that a person can study for their entire life and not fully comprehend the totality. We have been living in a time where specialists must be increasingly specialized, for decades, due to the breadth of human knowledge and social progress.

One of the best ways to deal with this complexity, has been to be smarter. Have a better memory. Have high cognitive function. This leaves an ever-growing amount of the population in uncertainty. Families all have (or had) a "smart" resource they tapped to answer the tough questions and find paths through seemingly-intractable legalities, kafka-esque bureaucracy, medical emergency, financial advice, et al. AI has given many of the less-gifted (the majority of the population) a "wise" resource that seems to be informed enough to provide solutions and even offer opinions that can be reasoned, for some value of "reason". AI has also granted easily accessible automation. This will make the situation worse. A form of specialized logical processor would have been necessary at some point (mentat or AI). It came earlier than many expected, but this is the form and it's here now.

> In what contexts is lying to the public a crime?

This feels like a disingenuous question. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that claiming X isn't toxic, when you know that it is dangerous. Public health, frequency, scale of impact (more often, who is impacted that has resources to compete in court) et al are all considerations.

Humans act in their own self interest. Relying purely on individual self interest is a degenerate approach in public health issues. One of the many purposes of government, is to act in the collective interest. eg Typhoid Mary

> I keep coming across videos of people talking about burning out

I also keep coming across videos of people talking about quitting Warhammer 40k. This doesn't mean there's a crisis, as much as a self-reinforcing pattern of interest.

My employer retains thousands of devs. I have a handful of software developer friends outside of work. These people are all happy (not to the same degree or the same usage patterns ofc) with the improvements to quality and process that AI has actively sourced or helped produce.

I don't understand where all these AI burnouts are coming from, but it's a minority. It's likely less than ~30% efficiency haircut for the industry - so there's likely to be no additional impact if you're unhappy.

This is far from the implication that all Software Developers are not okay.

One of the national myths rears it's ugly head as a talking point.

American Exceptionalism.

Without taking sides, the US system was broken was when Congress started self-reinforcing the 2 party system institutionally ~1880s. Regardless, it's likely that the decades of lack of enforcement was due largely to perverse incentives, which still exist. Granted, no governmental system runs perfectly.

Failure of enforcement, is not a signal that US politics are broken, as much as a niche inconsistency. There's plenty of enforcement that is not occurring today, due to pure corruption. The US electorate has failed to hold politicians accountable for over 150 years. Again, this is largely because of a 2 party system that only selects for oligarch-directed interests. Most of it (like how immigration law is enforced) is performative. This administration has laid it bare.

> Coding vs Programming

I'm not willing to play word games to indulge in a niche demographic's incessant miscategorization of a profession.

Journalist Adam Cochran highlighted roughly 12,000 AI-related or pro-American political .si domains reportedly registered or transferred before Trump's public push for “SI.” Granted, their ultimate owner(s) remain unknown. The timing and volume is telling enough, given the wide variety of tlds.

> Why is it being politicized?

The US (without the imagined AI valuations) is in a full blown recession. The US treasury/administration is leveraging belief/investment in AI to keep the numbers up (oversimplified, but not by much). This means the administration has a vested interest in keeping AI churning and investment growing with no fallback except maybe the chaos of trying to start off a wartime economy? Because there are few recognizable AI players and the administration is not above extortion (choosing winners), they are leveraging the DOJ regulatory powers (witholding introducing barriers) to push a new grift. The situation is not strictly political, as much as it's a form of corruption.

This has nothing to do with the topic. Cost of maintenance due to usage for pedestrians is effectively zero. Putting more effort into quantizing that maintenance is separate from the infrastructure investment.

This (micromanaging) line of thinking toward maintenance is degenerate social policy.

ie Treating the cost of someone receiving benefits for which they did not pay (or otherwise deserve) is a catastrophic enough to desire more spending and bureaucracy to withold the benefit.

> I don't understand what the value proposition of such an employee is.

Creating the correct prompts to address specific concerns and goals requires technical knowledge and problem solving skills, same as before LLMs. Now, there's less typing of the code. Ofc 40 file changes indicates management is failing, leaving little confidence they could prompt their way to intended features. Code storms should be a converted to a stacked pr on a feature branch, so it is reviewable with great confidence. These words describing these issues require a level of sophistication which will necessarily no longer be a people manager role. I think this kind of (nearly) codeless position is ahead of the curve, not behind.

Gitframes seems like a confusing name, trying to piggyback off git popularity, while being unrelated.

> cost of living is bc of high price of energy

That's a small part of it. The largest part of rising costs is mismanagement of the economy, in the past via inflationary debt plus runaway national debt, and the present overspending while kicking the can by borrowing more. The fed has lost control of the economy through rate locks freezing home prices, while inflationary forces drive them higher, and the hyper-consolidation of wealth while minimum wage sits under 10$ an hour. This is ripe for a societal collapse in the next few decades.

AI is funded by the consolidated wealth, ofc, so it dovetails as a scapegoat.

> Seriously, if you ever thought Gen Z doesn't drink,

They drink less, which has been documented extensively. The fact they are asking about intensity is a sign of this, not evidence to the contrary. This is a good thing, imo.

> I always do not understand why defold

Starting with absolutely nothing but a compiler is always going to be a worse experience (and less likely to result in anything released) than a GUI-driven and aided solution. If Defold developers had produced a fraction of the libraries that Godot has, it might have had a chance. As of now, it's worse than other abandoned engines like Solar2D (was CoronaSDK) for people entering the space. As most people know, the vast majority of games are net-losses, so engines live and die by the ease of adoption by newcomers.

> most people don't really understand the market they are in, the competition, their own products, the customers etc well enough to actually make good decisions

"Product" studies this data and tells engineers what features they want. I am rarely instructed to A/B anything...excepting when it's defensive, to ensure the first rule of "don't interrupt the flow of money" is upheld, if at all. Most of the features are obvious improvements anyway (determined from plain conceptual planning, manual testing, and personal usage).

ofc I don't understand the customer or market or anything else. I'm paid with the expectation that I'm not going to share an opinion about it, especially since am never exposed to the raw data and inner circle decisioning except during a quarterly meeting...maybe. This is part of why AI is so successful. Humans in large organizations are specialized with little creative input and lots of mechanical process. Coding is largely a mechanical black box (turing machine) from the outside looking in. It works seamlessly because I don't need to know about the things product wants, so the AI doesn't know and everyone carries on faster than we were before.

Understanding code is trivial, with AI support. LLMs are better at summarizing and identifying side effects than writing code. Granted, not perfect, but about as good as a person.

Looking at an architecture, module boundaries, and comparing the organization to the domain is the part LLMs don't do well and is unironically difficult for humans. The less you care about the domain (ie having a mental model), the harder it is.

> Difficulty is, by definition, relative to one's skill

It's a factor and not the sole factor. Saying it's "by definition" is incorrect.

> The author does a poor job of justifying why these pop-cognitive-psych theories should have more weight than prior exposure.

There's no reason to believe either way, except one path has decades of evidence. Human behavior is not overcome by programmatic "elegance". The dismissive "pop" prefix is signaling bias.

> no magic keywords and syntax to memorize

ie no syntactic sugar. Pointless repetition is counter productive.

>a there's no [logical] way to fall through >b [no way to] forget an else, >c expressions instead of statements >d no early returns

b. The interpreter catches it. d. Pointless execution is counter productive.

> literally everything about the Lisp example is more readable to me

That's a single data point. Statistically it's worse, but you're practiced and apparently still physically able to quickly discern the nested count (or use an IDE). Yet another example of a position that is counter to existing studies. Heavy nesting is error prone, even when a program compiles (eg Monden et al., “Evaluating the Applicability of Reliability Prediction Models between Different Software,” ISSRE 2001)

"parse don't validate" can be rephrased: "expect the type validation from a parser"

Which is plainly moving the problem around, for types. The value validation is a much simpler problem, as a separate application-specific check.

> Life-ruining? No, not at all. Not even close.

Indeed. Some privileged people confuse being denied opportunity (rightfully) with a life being "ruined". It's a telling behavior rooted in entitlement.

Those poors have to deal with this often, which is considered a "them" problem. Be it because of credit score, carried debt, criminal record, or loss of license, etc, as I have seen and experienced.

The US map wasn't showing Dunkin vs Starbucks for ND. It's Starbucks at volume, by a wide margin, while Dunkin popularity by coverage. How they couldn't measure, is beyond me when there are so few Starbucks and Dunkins that you could manually call them all over a few days.

> It would have a large direct and MASSIVE indirect chilling effect.

Like it did with Ma Bell (the effective telephone monopoly)? No. I'm pretty sure it would have the direct opposite (open frontier) effect. The direct steps to break up a company are well telegraphed to the market.

The first sentence is plain English. The second is clarification through example.

Someone who doesn't know what arbitrary or abstract means, or has trouble with context, I'm sure it can seem confusing.

> I am assuming that your point is that prejudice is ok to some type of group but not other

That's a bad inference. I was explaining the distinction that seems to be confusing the issue.

> Care to give some examples of what you consider to be coordinated groups, functional groups, and abstract groups?

You understand plain English well enough.

Arbitrary classification does not make a functional group. There is a distinct difference between a coordinated group and an abstract group that is the result of external parties adding people into named buckets for their own purposes.

related: Crosswalks don't stop cars from hitting pedestrians crossing on them. Perfect is the enemy of good.