bluefirebrand

> When e.g. receptionists start tossing together their own productivity apps in a few minutes, then we will have entered into the next phase of the economy.

This isn't a matter of tooling through. Receptionists won't start making their own productivity apps because most people do not default to "I will make my own thing to solve this".

Maybe some receptionists will, but most won't, just like most people won't patch their own drywall even though the tools are available in every hardware store

It's also possible that there has been an environmental or dietary "weight gain" effect for a really long time, but previous generations were counteracting it with cigarettes

It's hard to estimate how much the last couple of generations weight was because of smoking cigarettes suppressed appetite too

> What most people either didn't notice or understand is that the U.S. was entering a recession and would have been in one if it hadn't been AI

Is it maybe more accurate to say that the US is in a recession, outside of the industries that are fueling AI?

Life's pretty recession-y for everyone else imo

It really should be against some kind of employment standards to do this sort of bait and switch

There are apparently some new regulations in Canada to protect job seekers from this, but it's not a clean line in the sand. It seems like companies won't likely be held accountable unless it is a pattern of hiring like this, but how do people establish a pattern when most people still won't discuss salaries?

The type of work people used to do was a lot more varied too. Even specialists would have to do more work than just their speciality

As people have specialized more and more we spend more time on a much more narrowly defined set of tasks

And we spend a lot more time per week doing just those tasks

> The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs

I believe you could not be more correct but it seems extremely difficult to get people to take any meaningful action, or even talk about this openly

I have stopped even saying anything like this aloud to people because the reaction I get is anywhere from "it won't be that bad you're exaggerating" to "you're a conspiracy theorist nutjob"

Data centers looking to use rivers for cooling?

My understanding is a lot of residential isps would be angry at you for running servers of a substantial size out of your house anyways?

If people are that rich don't they just have a person to plan that shit for them?

This is where I see a lot of AI stuff right now honestly.

It's just "I want the computer to figure this out for me even if it takes longer than the old tools, because I cannot be bothered to learn how to use the old tools"

I've encountered this a lot

> Why are they trying to build something to replace humanity?

The list of possible reasons is pretty short and mostly not really good for most of us, as far as I see it

> and without any implications, that fact is irrelevant

If you think people's motivations are irrelevant then we just live in different worlds, and there's no point continuing

Come on bud. You claimed

> The fact that it (building data centers) also happens to increase "shareholder value" is irrelevant

It's not irrelevant. It is the primary reason they are being built

Your understanding about the cause and effect around why data centers are being built is completely backwards

"Expects" to receive is weasle-y. How much will they receive?

"Could" generate 108 million a year

Naw man. These numbers need to be more concrete upfront. This sounds like "under ideal conditions (that we won't ever achieve)" weasling

> Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me

No they aren't

They're being built so shareholders can profit off of people like you. The fact that you benefit from it does not actually factor in any way aside from the fact that you will pay them for that benefit

They aren't benevolently trying to help you out, they just want your money.

The fact that you want AI and think it will help you and society is actually what is irrelevant. If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built no matter how beneficial it would be.

> It's not a moral sickness, it's market actors behaving rationally. Believing that people should be willing to leave money on the table because it's the right thing to do is a dead end

I don't agree that "I am just a market actor behaving rationally" somehow absolves you of any moral duty

I'm not an ethicist or anything but I have studied quite a lot of ethical frameworks and I've never encountered one that I think would agree with this

$500 a room is honestly criminal. You're already paying for the labour, different colors should be the cost of the materials and no more. :/

There might have been an actual good reason to seek that much wealth beyond what an individual needs that I hadn't considered before

Controlling other people by "shaping the world to your desires" isn't what I was hoping to hear

> You might not care about that if that’s 1000x away from where you are right now, but if it’s just 10x away, it becomes more tempting

Nah, it sounds sociopathic no matter what amount of money you have

I think it's wild what tech companies think they should be entitled to

I have been trying to reactivate an old Facebook account to get access to marketplace, but Facebook wants me to give them a photo id. My username and password is not sufficient, or email 2fa or anything. They want a copy of my government id.

Hell no.

Same with this. Why should anyone give Anthropic this sort of info just to access their service. It's ridiculous

I'm really curious what difference to your lifestyle being a billionaire would be compared to 400 million

Maybe I'm just too small minded to imagine, but having that kind of money just seems so unnecessary to me

> i think everyone who complains to customer service is doing so because they want something fixed

When I worked customer service a substantial number of complaints to customer service seemed to just be to complain. They won't care if you fix the thing, they'll complain about that too.

Sad to see Google's playbook become "be as evil as possible"

I know they removed "don't be evil" a while ago now, but they didn't have to immediately become the exact opposite

Yeah, this is what I mean

Sure, 9k pre-tax and pre-childcare and pre-housing isn't that unusual in our industry

But takehome after that is a really incredible salary.

Especially given how ridiculous that housing is

I used Claude to help me draft some letters to negotiate severance after I was laid off. It was really useful and I did manage to get a bit extra from my former employer

We're going to be in for a really rough time as more and more stuff gets replaced by AI and it becomes harder for people to earn incomes

$9k a month is still more than I have ever dreamed of making and that's after housing and childcare?

Insane

> I don't see how you can have an independent business and be entirely dependent on third party for your operations

This isn't new though. A ton of software companies are already completely dependent on AWS or Azure or whatever.

Sometime in the last 15 years we got these huge backlog wishlists of one line thoughts. People were convinced because software devs couldn't keep up translating one line thoughts into working software that the code must be the bottleneck

They never realized how much effort went into turning those one like tickets into code was, and the code was the least part of the effort

> It might very well turn out that in a few years, the only way to enjoy software development the way you like it, is to establish your own boutique software development company

That's basically already true, it happened overnight

That's why I'm so damned bitter

Wouldn't that depend on how much hardware you have to run them on, too?