dbrueck

Because the definition of 'art' is somewhat philosophical, the more salient question is "will AI make something indistinguishable from art?" and the answer is easy: yes.

I believe that this is one of the key takeaways for reasoning about LLMs and other seemingly-magical recent developments in AI:

"tasks—like writing essays—that we humans could do, but we didn’t think computers could do, are actually in some sense computationally easier than we thought."

It hurts one's pride to realize that the specialized thing they do isn't quite as special as was previously thought.

For me, the most amazing thing about LLMs is translation between written languages (human, not programming). I can only speak to the translation between English and Spanish on everyday topics, but ChatGPT often produces translations that are near native speaker quality, and even when it doesn't, the results are almost always far, far above the "good enough to communicate clearly" threshold. It's incredible.

What this does != what PHP does.

Hey now, you're moving the goal posts quite a bit there! :)

I was just pointing out that you said several things as if they were proven facts, and they are not. That's all.

Nah, if someone puts forth an argument that is fundamentally flawed, it's neither wrong to point it out nor on me to do their thinking for them.

That said, if we want to talk taxes, I think a progressive tax system is nearly always wrong, immoral, and unfair, so you probably would disagree with any adjustments I'd suggest. :)

This is stating as fact several things that have not and cannot be proven by tools such as the scientific method. Seems ironic, given the subject matter. :)

I don't think that's the case. Instead, it's just that the "let's tax the rich people more!!" idea is ill-founded to begin with, and the easiest way to show that is to point out that if instead of just taking some percentage more, you took everything they have, it still wouldn't solve the problem, not by a longshot.

Do what you want of course, but that better version of you already exists without the booze, and you don't need to give alcohol credit for it. And because it already exists, it is very much possible to learn to let out that seemingly better version of yourself without a drug. Not saying you "should" or whatever, just wanted to convey that it's an option, that's all.

The best value at Costco is the slice of pizza + fountain drink combo while my wife wanders around shopping. Everybody wins!

Exactly this. Typing in the final version is great. Typing up front is almost always getting in the way.

Most interesting programs involve a lot of figuring things out as you go, and so any "tax" on that process is one you hope to avoid. The last thing you want is for the language itself to be the source of that tax any more than it has to be.

>> "Most companies simply are not very good vehicles for bringing about social change."

> That's just not true. Corporations have been maybe the single biggest driver of social change in the last couple of centuries

I'd wager that most experts of modern history would vehemently disagree with your assertion, but even if they didn't, what you said and what I said are not contradictory.

> right and good to challenge their decisions that cause harm

This right here is, in a nutshell, why. Speaking generally, today there is a desire to distill all big, complex issues down to a binary right and wrong. I think that urge has always existed, but in the era of tweets and hot takes and memes, the yearning for everything to fit into a sound bite is overwhelming. And terms like 'harm' have come to mean just about anything.

The problem, of course, is that no big, complex issue is that simple - if it were, there wouldn't tend to be much debate about it. Instead there is nuance, there are tradeoffs or different paths to get to a goal, different priorities. Even when there is that occasional something that is unambiguously a question of right vs wrong, there are umpteen options for what to do about it.

So you have a company that has tens of thousands of different customers. And then you have some middle-to-bottom employee who decides that one particular customer is anathema, and that it is completely wrong to do any business with that customer at all. There's no room for debate because that employee sees things completely black and white - that customer is evil, period, and they speak of that customer with lots of hyperbole. No company can thrive when it can be steered by a random employee like that (and heaven forbid you get into a situation where you have 2 of them who see issues as black and white but take the exact opposite sides, haha).

Yeah, if they are unwilling to be pragmatic, then really the best option for everyone involved is for those types of people to leave the company - if they want to make those big direction decisions, their best bet is to start something of their own.

A guide who loves the subject matter can make an incredible difference - I had a physics teacher who had a contagious love for it, and those who were naturally curious about the subject learned a lot while even the reluctant students couldn't help but be sucked in to his demonstrations and experiments.

I was fascinated by biology right up until I took 2 high school classes on it, and then it took years for me to recover. It had nothing to do with a lack of curiosity. In my classes, at least, the focus was on memorization of names of things. No time for wonder and amazement, what's important is that you can write labels on that diagram of endoplasmic reticulum! :)

I didn't take the article so much as the blame game but more saying that the subject of biology generally could be taught in a much, much better way. That certainly rings true for me and, from your comments, seems to ring true for you as well: you loved the subject despite how poorly it was presented to you.

Of course. But there's a huge difference between labor disputes - renegotiating your relationship with the company - and folks in the trenches trying to steer top level decisions according to their personal world views. Most companies simply are not very good vehicles for bringing about social change.

But that's ok, that's not what they are for, and there are much better avenues. It's fine to use the money you earn from a company to fund your efforts to further your cause, but trying to use someone else's company to further your cause directly is almost always a mistake.

No, no fallacy - in interviews with activist employees who got fired, it's not uncommon to see both surprise as well as outrage.

Regardless, I was commenting on the ones who seem genuinely surprised that being fired was a possible outcome of their protests. It's as if that possibility never crossed their minds, which is itself surprising.

Exactly, and that's how it should be. But all too often (both with this protest and earlier ones at Google), the people who receive consequences seem shocked about being fired.

Personally, I like Google's response to this, and the whole idea of publicly campaigning against your employer (especially during normal business hours) is completely foreign to me. Maybe I'm just an old fogey, but "back in my day" you'd earn lots of money and then go use that money to advance your social causes on your own time and in your own way.

If you disagree with the company's direction, then do what you can through normal channels to change it. If you don't have that kind of power, then vote with your feet and leave. Go work somewhere else. Go start your own company and run it how you want.

And BTW, if your protest can't have any meaningful consequences to you - if there's no real potential "cost" to you - then it's not a protest but a performance.

Part of me feels like the untapped potential is just one of many symptoms of all of the dysfunction going on, and if you can fix some of the dysfunction, then you'd not only unleash some of that potential but fix a bunch of other problems at the same time.

The books are pretty good IMO.

I wash my car annually, whether it needs it or not!

Your comment was a fun trip down memory lane. I'd read Nibble cover to cover, and especially scrutinize Beagle Bros advertisements because of the little one liner programs they'd often include. Good times!

Why the 'western' qualifier?

It would be so great if Nintendo were just a software company.

Over the years they have put out some really terrific games, many of which I'd still buy today if they sold them as software.

But after the Wii I stopped being a Nintendo customer (and stopped buying PS/Xbox/etc. consoles altogether) and I don't think I'll ever go back.

What on earth are you talking about? We give cost of living increases to every employee every single year.

For many of us small business owners, that 1987 opinion is on the money. The direct and immediate consequence of raising the minimum wage by a bunch is that I'd have to lay a couple of people off, which would be heartbreaking (for them of course, but also for me).

Unskilled labor simply isn't worth very much most of the time, but it's nice to help people get their foot in the door. One of my absolute favorite outcomes for an employee is to have them grow in capacity so that I "have" to pay them way much more than some artificial wage floor because they've developed into a solid contributor.

There are plenty of great free resources, and the official one should always be something you're at least somewhat familiar with:

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html...

But if you're willing to spend a little money for some organized material, this is a good reference:

https://pilotworkshop.com/products/vfr-communication/

If you're not ready for VATSIM:

https://arsim.ai/

A good progression could be something like:

  - study FAR/AIM and the above Pilot Workshops books for some specific scenarios
  - sit in a chair and pretend you're doing radio comms for those same scenarios, and just practice saying out loud your parts as if you were really in that situation
  - run through the scenarios with ARSim (this helps you get used to parsing the incoming info)
  - https://www.liveatc.net/ - listen to real world conversations, and try to anticipate what info will be given and what responses will be expected
  - VATSIM and/or https://www.pilotedge.net/
  - get up in the air and talk to real ATC

If you do the above steps, by the time you get to the last one, you might fumble it a little at first but otherwise you'll do ok, and you'll be head and shoulders over many, many other pilots out there.

> Seems to me that he did, in fact, call LGBTQ+ people filth.

I see that you are choosing to read it that way, but that is quite literally not what he said, and I don't agree with the assumptive leap that you took to get there. Is it possible he meant it the way you're choosing to interpret it? Of course it is. But it seems at least as plausible that he didn't (the fact that he said 'that' and not 'them' means he's probably referring to some sort of dogma or indoctrination or messaging, and not people), but you - and the author of that article apparently - are choosing to go with that particular interpretation anyway. If you can't see the rather large assumption you're making, to me that's a far bigger problem, because it all but guarantees a state of perpetual aggrievance.

Regarding the other stats, that is actually committing the common follow on mistake of lumping everyone together as the same. Again, let's pretend this rando really meant things the way you're choosing to interpret it. To go from there to implying that he is equivalent to everyone who is not on board with gay marriage is again a huge (and false) assumption that only serves to ratchet up your frustration / anger / whatever towards people who don't see the world the same way.

(And as an aside, if you are truly interested in making further progress on some of these issues instead of just being angry about them, you need those people as your allies and could probably win many if not most of them closer to your POV, but demonizing them by lumping them in with the tiny minority representing the worst of them all but guarantees that won't happen.)

Actually, I think this is a fantastic example of my point. He did not, in fact, call LGBTQ+ people filth, at least according to the quote in the article - the headline and the article clearly misconstrue what he said.

But let's pretend for a moment that he did say that. Is a state senator from Oklahoma one of the "people in our most powerful sitting positions"? With a sufficiently large population, we will be able to find people saying hateful things until the end of time - I don't dispute that at all. There will always be morons. But as you cast a wider and wider net to find people saying stupid things, you have to also take into account their proportion of the population. Even if he had really said that, he'd be part of a vanishingly small minority. Heck, the very fact that an article was written about what he not-quite said also shows how far we've come.

> Even today there is so much homophobia, transphobia, misoginy and racism being touted by people in our most powerful sitting positions t

Is that really the case though? It seems like in many (most? nearly all?) cases we've gone from people saying things that are overtly and objectively racist / sexist / etc. to things that aren't but could be construed that way if you squint hard enough, and it's largely in the eye of the beholder to decide, and along with that we've seen the rise in assuming people's intent. Once you've crossed the bridge of assuming intent, then pretty much everything can be further "evidence" of the foregone conclusion.

I invite you to take the statements of the "people in our most powerful sitting positions" for any recent period of time (the past month, the past 6 months, whatever) and make a note of all the ones that you are sure are homophobic, transphobic, racist, or whatever and try to take a look at them with fresh eyes. Set aside for a moment what you are so "sure" about their intent and background and see how many you can find are actually and objectively bad, or if they are just "bad" in the sense because (a) they have a different view than you and/or (b) it's only bad because in your mind that person is already <whatever>-ist and so everything they say is just going to be viewed through that lens.

We're never going to say that e.g. racism is a completely solved problem, but the headway we've made over the past century or two is so incredible that from the 30,000 ft view we're relatively close, and the organizations that exist to combat it have largely outlived their purpose and, unfortunately, in many cases seem to exist mostly to fan the flames.

It's almost as bad as when they put the Castile flag on the Santa Maria!