TerrifiedMouse

> 99% of people are far smarter than horses but people still pay to ride horses.

How many working horses are there today vs before automobiles?

Heck, how many domestic horses are there today vs before automobiles?

> AI labor is effectively free at that point, didn't you get the memo? :)

It’s not. Machines need power to run. Even if it was super cheap, there is no reason for their owners to share its output with anyone unless they have something to give in return. You know “trade”.

> My guess is that some people will always be stubborn and prefer me over an AI giving them massages every now and then, even if I won't do them as perfectly.

But why you? There are billions of other people who are out of work they could hire for the “authentic human experience”.

Frankly, I think eventually machines will do it all. I see AGI as the universal automation that can do everything a human can - apart from “being human”.

I’m more worried about people not being able to feed themselves because their labor became worthless. They will effectively be frozen out of the economy as they have nothing to trade with.

> meanwhile, is still so far from our current reality

2 years ago something like ChatGPT (as limited as it is) was “far from our current reality”.

I think it’s worthwhile to think ahead.

> there's literally never been a major technological advancement in human history that didn't ultimately result in more people being employed, not less.

In the past, new automation technologies often open up new possibilities in production capabilities in turn creating new jobs - specifically jobs that have not been automated yet.

AI though promises to be the universal automation, i.e. it can do any job. Thus even if new jobs show up, they will be taken over by AI too.

Then what?

> The shape of my career might change, but I doubt I'll be unable to find a job.

Question you should ask is why would anyone hire you when they can get AI to do the same job.

> I'm not even sure video game journalism was ever good

In my youth I read a few PC game magazines. Not sure about the accuracy of the reviews but the people writing them did try to make their reviews as entertaining as possible with jokes and what not.

Sadly, those old magazines are long gone so I can't really go back and re-read them to see if it's just rose-tinted glasses. I don't even remember the magazine name or which country it was from.

Edit: Come to think of it, those reviewers were kind of like Yahtzee (formerly*) of Zero Punctuation fame.

* https://twitter.com/YahtzeeCroshaw/status/172168721254128042...

I believe Forth is used quite a bit in the embedded world - or used to be. I read, long ago from the Usenet days, you use it when you don't want to write assembly but C is too "heavy" for your hardware.

It was beneficial to both parties. Sony gets to advertise indirectly on Twitter and Twitter gets content and maybe a few new users signing up to post who might otherwise not bother signing up for Twitter.

> We'll need something new and innovative to come out and rid us of constant blogs explaining how Git works because it's too hard to understand how to make it do the things you want it to do.

Read about Jujutsu awhile back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30398662

It's so weird that Nintendo can be forward thinking enough to do something like the Disk System and its successors but fail so hard when it comes to the internet and online distribution.

> Especially due to no freedom of the press in China (you need a permit for each published book) they are all already censored.

Even in a fully censored environment, you can still accidentally run afoul of state censors.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/06/chinese-star-t...

Example? I heard of antitrust laws for corporations - and all the “Acts” that codify them.

What are the union equivalents? What aren’t unions allowed to do? Are there cases where unions have been sued by governments for breaking these laws?

> However, this won't have much impact on SUVs directly

Why not?

Even an increase from 1.5 tons to 2 tons results in 3.16x the damage on the road.

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

Nintendo dabbled with it too.

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

> China is a safe haven

Heh. It’s a safe haven until your LLM says something the CCP doesn’t like.

I’m not anti-union but I am warily of unions getting too powerful.

You cannot assume that unions will always do the “right thing”.

A lot of unions encompass the entire labor force of a sector effectively becoming monopolies on labor. Those aren’t healthy for the economy as there is nothing stopping them from abusing their monopoly position.

Frankly, corporations at least have antitrust laws to check them. Are there laws checking the power and abuse of power of unions?

> Imagine another country was delivering opium to your country and the dock workers went on strike to stop it. This same dumb argument would apply.

Imagine if another country was delivering opium to your country and the dock workers get a cut so they have a financial interest in keeping the opium flowing. You outlaw opium and the dock workers strike grinding all commerce to a halt until you un-outlaw opium.

Monopolies are generally bad. It gives the monopolist nigh absolute power and absolute power will often be abused.

What are most labor unions but monopolies on labor? It would not be so bad if there are competing unions but often there is just one.

> The problem with YouTube is not that they have ads...it is that the platform sprays for effect while claiming to care about what they are doing when any reasonable user can tell that they are simply flooding the pipes with ad content.

From what I heard, Google’s sells ad space via an auction system. They collect information about a viewer then when said viewer watches a video/visits a website, all the ad space on the video/website goes on auction with the viewer’s characteristics attached in real time. Advertisers will look at the viewer characteristics and decide if they want to bid. The winner of the auction gets the ad spot and has their ad shown. All this is of course fully automated and over in just a few milliseconds.

What this means is, advertisers have full control over what ads you get. Ad space goes to the highest bidder. If you have money, you can spam a specific demographic to death with your ads. Google does not in anyway try to protect the quality of life of its users.

Google’s system is both amazing and disappointing at the same time. It’s an amazingly efficient way to maximize the value of ad space but disappointing in the Google doesn’t do any kind of advance user behavior modeling to see what ads the user would be most receptive to (i.e. would not frustrate the user, high probability of engagement with what’s advertised, …) instead they leave it to the “free market” (i.e. the advertisers) to figure that out.

All the UN's military power is provide by its member nations. If those nations willing to lend their military to the UN don't have global force projection capability, the UN doesn't have global force projection capability.

The US does it because

a) it's one of the few countries with global force projection capability

b) it's in both its long and/or short term interest to do so

Today, the US under Biden is pretty selective about intervention. For example, it isn't intervening on the the behalf of the Saudis anymore as their oil isn't as important to the US as it used to be.

It’s none of the US’s business until it is.

If China takes over Asia you think they will stop there?

Kill a monster when it’s small. Defense in depth.

Also shipping lanes.

> but people learn that stuff by reading about it and practicing. You could go that way too, it's not black magic.

It is black magic to people who read and don’t understand a thing. :|

> > Developer and SRE

> I'd say these are pretty interchangeable in one's career if they wanted to. The others not so much.

They are? Now I'm pretty new to this (despite my age) but my impression has always been, with the former you mostly focus on one project and maybe even just a small part of it, with the latter you are keeping an eye on half a dozen systems, have to know their ins and outs to babysit them, and occasionally firefight when something breaks in production.

If you participate in the social network, i.e. post comments and vote, you are creating some content. So your value isn't completely zero.

YouTube isn’t just a video sharing site though. It’s a social media site. There is value in people participating by replying and Liking/Disliking.

Frankly, banning ad-blockers feels like treating the symptoms rather than the cause. There is something wrong with your platform if people hate your ads so much that if they can’t block them they would rather not visit your site at all.

Same. I only visit when someone links to a video or I absolutely have to to get information.

Used to visit YouTube’s front page as part of my daily routine, effectively using it as a social media site - which it definitely is; it’s just that the posts are all videos, the comment section is like every other but moderated by the video poster, and the front page is completely algorithm driven.

> I dont get why americans are scared of us: we're just as scared of them. It's not going well here.

Because your government keep threatening to start a war in the Pacific over Taiwan and no one is taking those threats lightly.

I doubt it’s a language or cultural problem.

The CCP just aren’t very nice people.

US politicians are taking advantage of the situation to score populist points at home - but their caution towards China isn’t totally unwarranted.