Valakas_

And with that every single house around also increases in price, because house prices are often dictated by what comparable houses recently sold for. As if they weren't already expensive enough. Besides, I don't think lack of profit prospects is currently a bottleneck for house building. There seems to be tons of regulations and control to what is allowable to be built. And from, there it doesn't matter that building a house would be 20% profit, if it's illegal to do so.

"Blaming the victim" - commonly used abusive manipulation tactic used to reverse victim and offender. And you just did it.

The other option to why "everything in today's america seems to be a serious threat to democracy" is, obviously, that maybe that's because America's democracy is under attack.

When you're going to cook a frog, the water doesn't immediately start boiling does it? Extreme situations, often don't start extreme.

We need the StableDiffusion's equivalent of language models - open source and released to the public.

I understand that different companies may want a part of the pie, and that's fine. Competition is good. But for us consumers, there should be a central place, where we can find everything, and they those companies that offer shows can still compete with each other somehow. The problem is devising such a system.

Of course we can blame them for not trying. Why spend the money? Because it's the right thing to do for humanity. But hey Google is not a charity, what matter is stock growth, therefore we're excused of throwing ethics and empathy out of the window as long as in the end shareholders have the comfortable monopoly which allows their investments to generate more wealth with minimum effort.

I can't wait for a few years, when ChatGPT is replaced by something 10^x more powerful, and then comments like this look like nonsense of someone who lived in a past era just like we now similarly make fun of comments from people that made in past eras about how certain technologies, criticized in their current state without the ability of the person to look ahead. Even though the person you're replying to mentioned ChatGPT, ChatGPT is just the FIRST of many. Imagine somebody saying in 1803 "Car is unusable because you have to keep filling the coal, it's just not convenient, and a horse will always have a future."

Billionaires should not exist. When one gets to a certain amount of wealth, TBD, there they should get a golden plate saying "Congratulations, you won capitalism" and from them on, tax rate is 100%.

I don't think it was *invented* to sow division, but I agree with you that it can definitely be used for it.

There's different ways to categorize things - lower-class, middle-class and upper-class is a sort of intuitive way which throughout history has made some sense, somewhat, with different names. However, I get that maybe it's not the most useful currently, because there's such a ridiculous divide between upper-class (rich) and the other two, that we, belonging to the bottom 2, should band together to bring change favorable to us.

If the state doesn't apply the money optimally, i.e. it's not doing its job, then that's the problem that needs to be fixed.

It's a form of Stockholm syndrome and a coping mechanism against immense, inescapable pain. It's the 4th F of trauma coping mechanisms: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn.

When something is very painful and inescapable you can: Fight it, run away from it (not talk about it, ignore it, pretend it's not there or won't happen, mentally distract away from it with constant stimulation), freeze (dissociate, numbness, ie shut down emotions, be stoic, feel nothing or little) or fawn (appease, please, embrace the pain in order to feel a sense of control over it, believe it's good, you want it or is positive in some way, thereby releasing yourself from the torment of powerlessness+pain).

This goes back to the root of what creativity really is. Some say creative people don't have anything special in their "brains". They are just able to mix match stuff they already know in different ways, that others didn't consider.

In essence there is no such thing as extrapolation for the human mind. We only interpolate in new ways. We can only remix what we know, and with that generate something new.

How do we actually get new, non-interpolated stuff? By going out into the world and doing things with it. Collecting new data. Experiments, experiencing things, seeing new stuff, reading about new stuff.

That's not so different from the AI.

Our brain is not something magical that works in mysterious un-replicable ways. Much of AI field has been in fact trying to replicate how we learn, and how our brain works.

At some point, people will still be predicting fusion in the next 10 years, and then it will happen in the next.

Brutal honesty, you mean. Where often the person is more interested in the "brutal" part than the honesty.

I think the issue here is that CSAM is and often was used as an excuse for invasive privacy breaking measures. Nobody can "not" think of the children, so whenever someone would argue against a measure, all they can say back is "so you don't care about children then?"

And people start getting tired of this serious issue being used, not because the people who want these measures passed care, but because of whatever agenda those people are actually interested.

It is precisely because it is so severe, that it is difficult to say no to measures in favor of it. But that same fact, is abused by people with bad intentions.

> If I go out on a date and my date sends me money on chain, I now know their public key and can look up every past and future transaction they make.

Not with Monero.

To add to that beautiful quote:

https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e...

This is the point the vast majority of people miss. When we predict the future, we use, without noticing, a lot of things from our current reality and technological perception. This becomes really clear when you look at "future" predictions from past eras. People don't realize the future will have things that people now would mock them for, for being outrageous, ridiculous or far-fetched.

Most predictions just use the technology of the time in a different way, or show something "impossible" based on current technology.

To be able to predict the future, we have to completely lose a lot of mental baggage, and go for things that don't exist. We have to go back to the basics of what's actually possible.

This is a reason i like Asimov's stories. We often writes in an abstract way, that leaves a lot of room for imagination. He definitely is still bound by technology perception, but often that also helps making stories more relatable.

Example: Sometimes people predict the future where AI is so advanced, and we are fighting it to gain control over Earth. But they forget that an AI that would become sentient, contrary to us, could improve itself, its own intelligence. To the point where we would be as intelligent to them as an amoeba is intelligent to us. We can't even comprehend their IQ. This is such a radical shift from what we hold as normal, that most people just don't even register this possibility. Not their fault. Probably an education system focused on fact memorization and lack of critical thinking is partially responsible.

Not on cash, not your fiat.

In fact, banks count assets of their clients as liabilities because it is in fact money in their possession (read: control) that they owe to their clients.

To be fair, in the time he created a company that pushed electrical vehicles to be mainstream, and made reusable rockets a possibility and not just a dream which is helping push mankind to again explore space what exactly has Twitter accomplished?

The way I see it, the current ridiculously high salaries of SWE, the easiness of it, how little so many seem to do valuable work, is in a big part due to inefficiencies in the system, due to novelty of SWE and how invisible it is.

In my field, mechanical engineering, we've had centuries of machine making. Margins are usually razor thin.

In software that's not the case. Subscriptions that should cost the customer cents per month or year, are costing 10-100x that. Margins are ridiculously high. But it's all so new and not intuitive, like a physical part, we just pay whatever.

Then the invisibility of code and difficulty of distinguishing from the outside what is well made and what isn't, enables.

In all my years working as MechE I've never seen anyone just slacking off. We're all always being pushed, working. I look some of the stories of SWE and it's ridiculous.

I think many SWE just rationalize their high salary as bringing more value to the world, which imo is not really true.

"(...)if gasoline has an energy density about 100 times higher (well, 60 times) why are dragsters not even faster?"

Because the limitating factor stops being the power, and becomes the grip to the road.

Because what matters was never productivity but competition. That's inbuilt into the capitalist philosophy. With that, it doesn't really matter that X company's productivity skyrocketed if Y's company, X's competitor, also does. They both will try to grow has much as possible, invest as much as possible in R&D, (...) or they are out-competed by the other.

We should always remember: If a company could, they would have free labour. Expert professional volunteers. That's how a company can maximize their profits. So every single year, every company is, unless forced by laws, wage competition (from other companies) or by force (unions), behind rationalizations, pushing for, unconsciously, getting close to that ideal of free labor.

Also remember that today, free labour has a limit. They can't really pay zero, because people have mortgages, etc. So actually, the modern "zero" is when the workers have zero profit, ie, savings, or even go into constant debt, and have the government pay for it with subsidies.

And this is exactly what we've been seeing the last decades.

Housing market should crash through the floor AND private equity funded businesses barred from using housing as an investment vehicle.

He clearly doesn't know what a monopoly is.

No. It's not "just like". People with Cluster B personality disorders, especially the ones at the end of the spectrum with ASPD/psychopathy crave power over others. They enjoy looking into the eyes of someone while life fades away, or seeing the tears come out due to powerlessness and suffering. They like, crave direct contact. It is VERY different to cause suffering in a dispassionate way through software and hear about it on the news, or do it yourself in person 1on1.

So, no. Besides, it has been shown that there are professions with disproportionately much more psychopathic people than others. Which makes perfect sense, considering what I just said, even though there's more to be said about this subject.

I dont understand why some people still go by brute force memorization when there are better methods. Those that our brain naturally uses. You won't see memory champions using Anki for competitions as their main memorization tool that's for sure.

I've studied a few languages, and by far the easiest, fastest and most long-term proof way to memorize words is by free association.

It takes some initial effort to be able to create these associations, but when done, it's done. There are some words I now basically can't forget, because the association is just too strong.

Example:

Waarschuwing = dutch word for warning. With free association i did it like this.

the "waar" part of the word immediately made me think of english word "war"

schu, shoe

wing, wing

So i vividly imagined a flying shoe with a trompet warning about an upcoming war. Done. Unforgettable for me. The more ridiculous, emotional (funny, stupid, ...) and obvious the better.

Some words are easier than others, and the ones that don't have a quick association jump out quickly are at a higher risk of being forgotten, but even then, they will stay way longer and without much less effort than with brute force, which is basically just creating memories out of nowhere, with no associations to anything on your brain. Our brain loves to relate things to others. Unrelated things = useless things. Everything that is useful has a relationship to something else.

So when you try to memorize by a way that is not based on association, indeed, only brute force works, which is a way to tell your brain "welp i can't really tell you what's the usefulness of knowing this, but somehow it keeps coming back into consciousness, so i guess i need to keep it in here somewhere. A self sustaining island, a dot of knowledge with no connection to anything else i know or care about."

World 1: zero copyright infringement. Everyone pays. No one pirates.

More people write books. (as will be more money in it)

World 1.1 Pays your bills. Doesn't make you rich.

More crappy books. More high quality books.

World 1.2 Can make you rich.

Many people will write purely for financial reasons. Some people will be doubly motivated - financial and professional success. They can focus solely on their area of interest, and creating content for it knowing they can also achieve financial success with it. More books written by companies. More crappy books. More high quality books.

World 2: Not one person on earth pays. Every single book has to be for free.

The fewest books produced. Hobbyists or retired people only. People will write for passion. Not necessarily the most qualified people.

World 3: Somewhere in between (our world)

In-between.

Look at youtube which is close to world 1.2. There certainly is a TON of crappy content. However, there's also very high quality, professionally produced content in there. No financial incentive means few of those high quality ones would be there.

I think you live in a different world than 99% of the people where money is not an issue.