gibbitz

I'm not a doctor or lawyer, but I have a terminal degree in my field of study. Sadly my career in my field of study (Visual Art) failed to take off due to financial pressures in the field and in academia during the first term of the second Bush administration. Tech was my fall back career. I was burdened with over 100k of student debt and ended up teaching myself web development over a period of 20+ years, often as on-the-job training. I wish I didn't have the advanced degree. Many doctors wash out as internists or residents and not all lawyers are well compensated and the legal fields that pay well aren't for everyone. As the valley between the haves and have-less grows there are fewer lead bullet paths to success in America. As competition shrinks due to unregulated monopolistic practices in industry the motivation to pay well for traditional jobs is also diminishing. If I regret anything, it's not moving to Scandinavia before college.

I love how they won't wear masks and think they can make me wear a Fitbit. I'd much rather pay for a mask.

Yeah the agesism is serving the hiring companies that would rather sacrifice quality than cash flow. The issue with retirement goes deeper than the layoffs for the same reason but also is exacerbated by the high cost of living. At the end of the day it's not supply and demand that drives pos-capitalist economies, but pushing in margins to optimize profits while running companies on the brink of collapse. Logan's Run does start to look more like speculative fiction these days...

By paycheck my company's CEO is worth 95 senior engineers and that's before stock options. With stock options he's worth 265 senior engineers! (Or 240 and 670 junior developers respectively)

He's so skilled he splits atoms with his mind. He probably should be president, except he's nowhere near the highest paid executive in the US. Probably not in the top 500.

This is longer than I've worked with copilot, but the manual fix versus prompt time feels pretty right on to me. I think that there's a sweet spot where continuing to prompt will take longer to get to the expected result than coding by hand from that point.

Being able to gauge when to dump the autopilot and take the stick is probably the development skill we all need to learn with LLMs.

The gallery scene is still a thing, but even it suffers from capitalist enshitification as Art has shifted from the signifier of taste to a place to keep your money where it can't be taxed. Making the art world more of a stock market than a laboratory.

On thing I find interesting in all of this is the nearly complete avoidance of the viewer's role in Art. That removing taste, deadening the palate of the viewer through political alienation of the educated class where taste is fostered has largely allowed this to happen. Art made for artists is Art made for viewers with taste. Why can't everyone be taught to understand Art. Media literacy is how our culture can grow, but it has been defunded for decades.

Don't forget that to start a company the more common goal is to make money, not to produce a good or service that others want or need including employment. Meaning this is just a lesser concern. Generally business owners are just as likely to shed quality as to shed employees as long as the profits go up. What helps to sustain this is the gradual lowering of the bar on quality that leads to consumers settling for garbage products and sending a positive signal to the business to continue. This is exacerbated by monopolistic trends in the world where only one company is providing a good or service and buying out the competition when it raises to control choice. What we end up with is similar from the consumer's viewpoint to late Communism in regards to choice and quality. In the end Capitalism didn't win. It just lost last.

They can make the check out to me. I know the answer

Spoken like middle management. If a knowledge worker is only putting in 4 hours they're either mismanaged or dead weight. Fire their manager and see if they are more effective, if not, then let them go. As a developer I routinely work 9 hour days without lunch and so do the others on my team and most people I've worked with as a developer. Myths like the 10% developer and lazy 4 hour knowledge workers are like the myth of the welfare queen. We really need to be more aware that when we complain about 5% of people that it becomes 100% to those outside of the field.

They're misleading to consumers in general. I used copilot to write one suite of unit tests for a react form last week and it took ~7 hours of iterations to get functioning tests. Compared to writing them by hand in 4.5 it feels like vibe coding is pure hype.

All the more reason to go abroad for school and try to immigrate to the country where you study. Soon there will be no reason to stay here except to lose weight on the poverty diet.

> Micromanagement is a form of bullying and micromanagers only see one way to do things — their way

One of the most important things for a micromanager to understand. I've left jobs over this more than once.

I have many opinions.

Firstly, I think current admittedly white US college students are likely the lowest performing student demographic in the world, so this is the low bar. Saying the authors are lamenting the drop is standards seems accurate to me.

Something I found interesting is the suggestion that these students, as bad as they seem, were still improved over when they were admitted to the school. Something the school was measuring as though they were preparing to defend their department budgets. I would argue that having universities run as businesses drives the standards down with self serving statistics like these, meant to muddy the waters IRT the student's actual abilities.

Another point that bothered me was the bit about the students teaching themselves how to read. Context clues, metaphor and simile were all things covered multiple times in my grammar school and middle school classes. Are we missing this coursework in lower schools today? If so, and the professors are finding this, the college coursework needs to adapt.

It feels like the professors feel as entitled to keep doing what they always did as the students feel entitled to their diplomas.

Everyone ads reddit to their searches to get human generated information these days. Not sure if that's still a guarantee, but it's a funny irony IRT what this thread is about...

Wow I should have read this first. Please if you are considering removing the AI button, remove the feature. Don't sneak it in as the article suggests. If I'm going to use AI to do whatever your app does, I don't even want to know about your app. I want the AI to do all of that. In fact we probably don't need your app.

We have nothing to blame for this but our willingness as consumers to continue to buy from companies that do this. It just rewards them to continue the trend.

To put it another way: if we made a machine that could instantly create a baby, how would that effect the notion of motherhood? Sure children are adopted or born to surrogacy but the connection formed during gestation and that time itself is a huge part of our notion of the connection between mother and child. Being an Artist is the same thing, an identity bred from gestation proved by the ends.

Before the rise of Western culture, ancient cultures didn't attribute an artist to a work. Think Ancient Greece or Egypt. These cultures still produced Art because the culture valued it, but in society these creators were seen as tradesmen or they were slaves. AI used in this way both reduces cultural value and removes or reduces the social status of the creator.

I find it telling that LLMs are quite adept at mash-ups and decisions based on data analysis which in my experience is what most business managers do. Why are we not using AI to replace worthless middle management? After all they are lower skilled and higher paid than many developers. I'd argue that anyone who thinks you can replace a job with AI is not doing that job as a career. AI devs who think LLM can replace Java web developers are not Java web developers. Internet trolls who think LLM can replace Artists are not Artists. I think this moment we're in is revealing that we've become so siloed that we have lost our curiosity about each other and cultural history. It's frightening to see how we're changing our culture to accommodate a technology at the expense of people and just how blase we are about it.

I think the point is that part of the value of a work of art to this point is the effort or lack of effort involved in its creation. Evidence of effort has traditionally been a sign of the quality of thought put into a work as a product of time spent in its creation. LLMs short circuit this instinct in evaluation making some think works generated by AI are better than they are while simultaneously making those who create work see it as devaluation of work (which is the demotivator here).

I'm curious why so any people see creators and intellectuals as competitive people trying to prove they're better than someone else. This isn't why people are driven to seek knowledge or create Art. I'm sure everyone has their reasons for this, but it feels like insecurity from the outside.

Looking at debates about AI and Art outside of IP often brings out a lot of misunderstandings about what makes good Art and why Art is a thing man has been compelled to make since the beginning of the species. It takes a lifetime to select techniques and thought patterns that define a unique and authentic voice. A lifetime of working hard on creating things adds up to that voice. When you start to believe that work is in vain because the audience doesn't know the difference it certainly doesn't make it feel rewarding to do.

I think this is as likely to have been caused by random deportation from the street leading to fears of coming to the US.

I don't like that title of this article as the article is really showing that Buffet's track record and investment strategy are proof that US markets are irreparably broken due to the lax enforcement of anti-trust in the last 30+ years. It's not that Buffet is encouraging this or actively fighting a free market, he set a very conservative strategy of investing in monopolies and then all sectors fell to monopolies. He figured out how to beat the house and the house didn't care. Good for him, bad for non-billionares...

In addition to flex, would it also follow statistically that there are fewer bonds to break along the x axis than the y based solely on the fact an egg is taller than it is wide?

The problem with the diagnosis is that those in power are responsible for the organizations and structures that make this happen and don't want to accept that the system as is is causing it. Like a smoker who refuses to believe that their lymphoma is caused by smoking 3 packs a day.

This is due to the same market pressures faced by TV commercial jingles. It's cheaper to license a pop song for the number of impressions than to pay a composer to make something for your brand. The needle drop wins and even the creator of the pop song loses since often the publishing house and whomever owns the rights make the money. It's no wonder AI is the Belle of the ball these days. Anything business can do to avoid paying a person for their talent they will do. Even if audiences stopped showing up, they won't stop doing it. They aim to reduce the cost enough that they'll make money if only one person shows up. The quality will continue the trend we see here.

Does it bother anyone that this is a bill permitting the US to enter negotiations, yet most of it is about what the US will do with the spoils of the acquisition and not what would be offered to win it. This is like the announcement of a hostile takeover and not a merger or acquisition.

100% this a search engine selling ads on the web is more of an advantage than making a browser. It leads to market advantage due to deeper knowledge of properties than other engines get based on ad placement and passive access to authenticated pages. And it's monetized. The browser isn't.

https://youtu.be/9wSQ9Zk_9gQ?si=LIymSh4sGl2jehYo great video on orange juice concentrate futures

COUGH, tariffs, COUGH

Yeah the effectiveness of the hype on investment is more important than the effectiveness of the technology. AI isn't the product, the promise of the stock going up is. Buy while you can, the Emperor's New Clothes are getting threadbare.

Yeah, I was wondering what he actually knows a lot about.

This is depression. I wrestle with it too and it feels just like this. It led me to seek career change and put my livelihood at risk at one point with no noticable effect on my motivation. I've been seeing a therapist and it has been helpful to have more awareness of the underlying feels that lock me up. I hope this validation helps you to work this out. It's not like flipping a switch, but it helps to be able to see there's a way through.