Timeless and seemingly relevant again when reasoning about how and where humans will always have an advantage over super intelligent agent swarms.
1,102 karma · joined December 28, 2020
Honestly surprised this wasn't available sooner.
Please just look at the pictures and decide if it peaks your interest enough to read the post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-five-yea...
Link with highlighted text (It's a single paragraph): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-five-yea...
> If they want to keep your housing costs down, the best thing to do is poison the ground (metaphorically or literally) because it decreases the “productivity” of the land
Yes, if you collapse multi-dimensional problems into a single dimension you can find many logical oddities. If I wanted an easier time finding a doctors appointment, I should murder every non healthcare professional in my local area until all of their calendars are totally clear. Wanting cheaper healthcare is evil! You're really saying things for the sake of saying them and I'm not going to engage further or explain to you when you're saying irrelevant things.
> it’s in someone’s best interest to do this in a Georgism world if they don’t want to be regularly displaced.
Under the majority of proposed LVT policies (and the ones I support) the vast majority of American housing would see a decrease in net property taxes paid since the majority of American's Building / Land value ratio is orders of magnitude higher than the average parking lot, land speculator, etc.
Two things are true: 1. I should have been more precise in my language. "You didn't do anything to make that happen" is a useful generality and not a prescription of every single individual in the community. In this case, we're talking about fairness - which I don't actually care much about myself, but is a point that people most often can emotionally identify with. But, to continue, if you're carrying all that water on behalf of your land value, then good for you! You likely have an existing stake in the community, other than the land that you own (maybe the businesses or houses or other property built on that land or you own a local services business). That is great! The fairness comes from owning the finite resource of land, and not something others can provide (housing, businesses, etc.). I hope you do continue to contribute to your local community and increase its appeal!
2. Your fixation on this point reveals a very fundamental misunderstanding of the goal of an LVT (surely partially my fault). It has to do with efficient taxation. Dollar equal, it's better that your taxes come from the value of the fixed resources of your community rather than things that can be increased. Because then you don't have a depressing effect on productivity and the things, other than land, that make your community nice. It's better that you keep more money from the things you _do_ for your community instead of the monopolies you hold in your community.
In my experience it's infinitely easier and faster to learn deep, "boring" things when you understand how they relate to your shallow and wide understanding of all of the related components.
The LLM is merely a tool. And you can use it for domain discovery that enables efficient deep learning at an unprecedented rate or you can develop a cursory understanding of a topic and think yourself an expert.
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As an early full-stack hire, you will own a massive surface area. You’ll be responsible for building our customer-facing application, scaling our internal tooling, and designing the data pipelines that move CAD and vision data at scale.
This isn't just a "CRUD app" role. You’ll work closely with our core tech and have the opportunity to become a domain expert in radiometry, machine learning, and computer graphics.
What We’re Looking For Product-Minded Engineer: You care deeply about user experience and can independently take a feature from concept to production.
Systems Thinker: Comfortable moving up and down the stack, from sleek frontend UIs to heavy data pipelines.
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If this sounds interesting, send me an email ben at bucket.bot or apply https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/bucket-robotics/jobs/6...
Bucket Robotics turns CAD files into production-ready computer vision models that detect defects instantly with zero manual labeling and no multi-month pilots. We are automation-first, replacing slow legacy processes with instant AI inspection.
As an early full-stack hire, you will own a massive surface area. You’ll be responsible for building our customer-facing application, scaling our internal tooling, and designing the data pipelines that move CAD and vision data at scale.
This isn't just a "CRUD app" role. You’ll work closely with our core tech and have the opportunity to become a domain expert in radiometry, machine learning, and computer graphics.
What We’re Looking For Product-Minded Engineer: You care deeply about user experience and can independently take a feature from concept to production.
Systems Thinker: Comfortable moving up and down the stack, from sleek frontend UIs to heavy data pipelines.
Curious & Adaptive: You don’t need a background in graphics or ML, but you are excited to dive deep into the math and physics behind our core tech. On-site: Joining our team in San Francisco.
If this sounds interesting, send me an email ben at bucket.bot or apply https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/bucket-robotics/jobs/6...
Bucket Robotics turns CAD files into production-ready computer vision models that detect defects instantly with zero manual labeling and no multi-month pilots. We are automation-first, replacing slow legacy processes with instant AI inspection.
As an early full-stack hire, you will own a massive surface area. You’ll be responsible for building our customer-facing application, scaling our internal tooling, and designing the data pipelines that move CAD and vision data at scale.
This isn't just a "CRUD app" role. You’ll work closely with our core tech and have the opportunity to become a domain expert in radiometry, machine learning, and computer graphics.
What We’re Looking For Product-Minded Engineer: You care deeply about user experience and can independently take a feature from concept to production.
Systems Thinker: Comfortable moving up and down the stack, from sleek frontend UIs to heavy data pipelines.
Curious & Adaptive: You don’t need a background in graphics or ML, but you are excited to dive deep into the math and physics behind our core tech.
On-site: Joining our team in San Francisco.
If this sounds interesting, send me an email ben@bucket.bot
If you're going to engage in discussion, at least try to interpret the other parties argument charitably. You're wasting both our time replying to the dumbest interpretation of what I said.
That is absolute utter nonsense. Like beyond nonsense, much closer to fiction than a differing view of reality. But understandable through a lens that innovation and productivity gains are a means of exploitation. Modern systems and societies are not slavery. They're a default opt-in system of incentives that drive people to contribute more to society if they wish to extract more from it - and we even support a growing class of individuals who contribute far less than they extract, happily.
Unless you're talking about the literal slavery that still happens in developing nations, in which case, there are less total slaves and orders of magnitude less slaves per capita than (I think close to) the majority of written history.
From my perspective you're moralizing against technology in the same silly way people moralize for it, and a significant portion of that is well captured with this one statement: (I'm hoping) the average suffering in the world has gone down. - If you make yourself ignorant to the positive effects of technical innovation and instead view it primarily as a mechanism of exploitation that "eventually very far from now _maybe_ brings benefits", that's no different than making yourself ignorant to the negative effects and viewing it as a mechanism of great benefit to which you should enrich yourself for bringing to the masses and "maybe hurts a few people but everyone benefits so much overall it doesn't matter".
I'll make my position very clear. Technology and innovation are the driving forces of quality of life improvements and are so obviously a moral good for society and mankind. However, innovation is never perfect, so it's necessary to have competent policy makers and governance structures that can regulate away the negative externalities of new systems that innovations can spawn, as rapidly and efficiently as possible.
If you disagree that technology and innovation are inherently an extremely obvious moral good, please look up the following graphs over the last 200 years, noting the year ranges of the industrial era and information age while looking at these graphs. 1. Life expectancy 2. Infant / Child Mortality 3. Extreme Poverty 4. Literacy Rates 5. Average years of schooling 6. Food Supply / Calories Per Person / Crop Yield / Famine Deaths
If your claim is that in the short term there are negatives caused by innovation, then… well yeah! There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it’s exceedingly rare to ever have pure upside in anything ever. Life is a series of trade offs and hard decisions. The Industrial Revolution literally lifted a significant portion of the population out of poverty, and also hurt children in the beginning. I’m very glad we have child labor laws that are strict and well enforced. If your claim is that the Industrial Revolution was a net negative because children died, I would like for you to pull up the chart of child mortality from before and after the Industrial Revolution and go ahead and tell me what you see.
On the other hand, I think lots of people over index on the harms caused because it’s so easy to. You’ve clearly thought at length about quantifying the harm of big tech and your work. But have you ever quantified the positive impact? You can rationalize the tradeoffs of your actions without moralizing the harms you caused.
It’s not okay for children to die in factories, but without those factories far more would’ve died from illness, hunger, etc.
You’re conflating Meta’s alignment issue with its overall benefit / harm to society. There is a singular, obvious thing that you interact with everyday that is very very bad (unless like me you don’t have it). And the invisible parts of what they do that are extremely beneficial are less obvious.
To be fair say from the list Meta is closest to being a net negative, like they’re the worst of the big tech companies and the only one I would refuse to work at. So I get what you’re saying, but to say they’re largely useless signals that you don’t know what they do and how they impact society at large, other than their very evil algorithms.
If you believe technology and innovation is characterized as “using economies of scale to exploit the average person” you’d necessarily come to some pretty weird positions throughout history.
Take the natural ice trade for example. Were refrigerators an evil means of exploiting and displacing the 100,000 workers who powered the natural ice trade? Or was it a better solution to the public health hazards, brutal dangerous working conditions, and high price paid by society to the Ice Monopoly?
Seemingly opposing forces.
For my $250 deductible I basically just get a nice upgrade to the latest version / a brand new ebike for ~$200 / year.
The peace of mind alone with insurance (and a really nice lock) have fully mitigated this for me. I've been leaving my ~$2k ebike locked up all over San Francisco for ~3 years without it being stolen. (My first beater bike was a POS locked up in my apartments secure bike storage and it was stolen after I owned it for ~9 days so I figured I couldn't double down on the bad luck).
Was this an oversight? Or did their new image generation model generate an image that was essentially a copy of an existing image?
Like, of course it's creating a job. If you create a million 1-year jobs every year, that's a million jobs.
If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity, it's an extremely low environmental & industrial (all contained clean rooms, no air pollutants, risk to local water systems, etc.) once in a lifetime boon for the local municipality.
The council members (probably, again depending on abatements & water/energy policy) did represent their constituents well.
In 2024, 77M Americans voted for a Trump administration. I was not among them, and I still consider this to be a contender for dumbest decision a majority of that 77M will make in their lifetime. Altman's job is to represent OpenAI. Not my political preferences. Making an enemy with the current government of the country you're incorporated in would be Trump-Admin levels of incompetence.
Reading his actions of playing friendly with the admin as being an organization he relies on for protection is a bias / tilt as ridiculous as the tower of Pisa.
> Blue-collar communities are not going to read his description of an AGI apocalypse and reconcile it with OpenAI's defense contracts. Altman himself empathizes with the "anti-technology" sentiment precipitating his pushback, but refuses to denounce the "AGI" nonsense and apocalyptic marketing spiel. The post is a contradiction from front-to-back, and Altman does nothing to assuage it.
I think anyone with a brain can easily see that his position is simple. 1. AI is _extremely_ powerful. 2. AI can be used as a force of good unlike anything the world has ever seen. 3. AI can be used as a force of bad unlike anything the world has ever seen.
If you start here, it's actually unbelievably easy to reason through _exactly_ what he is saying. Of course AI can be apocalyptic. Burying your head in the sand and saying there is no possibility of an AI apocalypse would be unbelievably irresponsible. It would be like Oppenheimer claiming everything's fine we have MAD so don't worry about these nukes I'm building.
> Why can't Altman apologize for his role in enabling war crimes and extrajudicial surveillance?
Wild strawman. If this is your question, no wonder you're so confused by what you're reading.
I'll say it again because I think half the world is in a state of AI induced psychosis right now. You're obviously intelligent. Intelligent enough to reason through everything I pointed out here. You're short-circuiting your own brain and choosing not to (reason objectively) by starting with a conclusion and working backwards, feigning ignorance to protect your foregone conclusion.
fwiw, this is ridiculous and I won't be replying again because I have better things to do than defend the CEO of OpenAI. I don't even give a shit! I was genuinely curious and your response was so extremely void of logic, reason and empathy.
He very well could be! I’m not commenting on Altman because I don’t know.
But if you applied the same logic to myself in a relatively similar situation, I’d be appalled at your lack of empathy and emotional intelligence.