jameslk

How many of these jobs are getting offshored because of AI?

Language barriers, culture, and knowledge are some of the biggest challenges to overcome for offshoring. AI potentially solves many of those challenges

QoL is one measure sure, but I'd consider it a lagging indicator. I look at GDP growth rate and energy usage to get a better idea of where things are headed

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42295

> We were told that democracy and development go together. That free markets require free politics. That our system was the "end of history."

People and development go together. The more people you have, the more development you can have. India is experiencing a similar early growth trajectory (from a GDP and energy use perspective), because like China, they have over a billion people. Comparatively, the US for example, has a few hundred million people.

Historically, this has always been the case. China and India were the most populated places and biggest economies for much of the past several millennia

What held China and India back the past few centuries? The west, through its Opium wars and colonialism. Globalization accelerated a reversion to the mean

The takeaway here shouldn't be to end democracy and turn to state capitalism or mercantilism. For the US to keep up, it will need more people. Or AGI I guess

> Words including “surpass,” “boast,” “meticulous,” “strategically,” and “garner” have also seen considerable increases in usage since the release of ChatGPT.

Do people really not use these words too often that they'd be called "buzzwords?" Like "surpass" and "garner," really? I don't mean to boast..err...flex but these don't seem like very uncommon words such that I wouldn't use them normally when talking. I hear "strategically" in meetings a lot, but that poor word is likely over(ab)used

Ruby already has this with Sorbet. Nobody is forcing you to use it, are they?

It seems you have a lot of opinion here without really discussing your problem with type hints though. What is it you dislike?

I use Ruby regularly, have used it for more than a decade, and I wish it had something like a TypeScript equivalent (Sorbet is sorta this but not enough). Every time I work with a Ruby codebase without Sorbet, it’s a lot of guessing and praying that test coverage is good enough. It’s not fun having to find out in prod there’s dumb bugs that would have been caught by static analysis. Something I experience virtually never in TypeScript, the other language I’ve also used for a decade

Sorbet has its flaws. I didn’t like it either. Having used TypeScript extensively, there is a way to do it right and a way to do it wrong. I’d classify TypeScript as the ideal way to introduce static types into a very dynamic language, given its extensive flexibility to handle dynamic features in a language (e.g. smart type inference, ‘is’ keyword, very flexible generics). Sorbet doesn’t have a lot of those features

Ruby has a strong history and tradition of TDD/unit testing. This is partially a crutch for its lack of static type analysis. Ultimately checking for bugs before running code is very useful

> The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of illegal use of copyrighted work to train their chatbots. The companies have denied those claims.

I mean, OpenAI doesn’t look good here and seems they deserve more scrutiny in the realm of mental health, but the optics for the NYT writing up this piece doesn’t either. It comes off to me as using a teenager’s suicide for their corporate agenda against OpenAI

Seems like a different rigorous journalistic source where this isn’t such a conflict of interest would be better to read

Static analysis through type hints brings plenty of benefits to a dynamic language, such as helping to eliminate bugs at runtime (albeit not perfectly) and making it easier to grok a codebase. It’s a trade off and Ruby is as dynamic as it gets. But there is a point to it

Was this signal suspected to be from earth? Otherwise why point out the signal was “extraterrestrial origin after all”?

A couple of questions for tackling browser use challenges:

1. Why not ask a model if inputs (e.g. stuff coming from the browser) contains a prompt injection attack? Maybe comparing input to the agent's planned actions and seeing if they match? (if so, that seems suspicious)

2. It seems browser use agents try to read the DOM or use images, which eats a lot of context. What's the reason not to use accessibility features instead first (other than websites that do not have good accessibility design)? Seems a screen reader and an LLM have a lot in common, needing to pull relevant information and actions on a webpage via text

I wasn’t aware we had suddenly mastered the physics for holograms (I was envisioning something Star Wars esque) but there was no linked video so I looked it up:

https://youtu.be/Sj2Rl4SOJe8

This looks more like a… projection? Not exactly my Star Wars fantasy

The Fed is giving indications that rates will be cut. The bubble will not be bursting yet if that happens

If NVIDIA crashes, I can easily see the gov saving it in some way (either massively pumping liquidity or bailing it out). It’s too critical to the US at this point

There is no circular logic there, but it does seem you are leaning on this fallacy:

> For short term stock gains, in order in enrich themselves via their stock compensation.

https://www.equilar.com/reports/34-executive-stock-ownership...

I think your point is roughly "[publicly traded company] CEOs are manipulating the value of their stock for their own personal gain instead of creating real value inside the companies they run" -- if so, perhaps, but you should let the shareholders know so they can park their capital elsewhere

> Not that I'm feeling any rage, I left that unproductive phase a long time ago.

I wasn’t referring directly to you, but in general. “You” in the royal sense. Anyway

> But even so, why cannot we talk about multiple unfair things at the same thing?

Because one of them is a red herring. If you plot median CEO comp of S&P 500 companies to the S&P 500 itself over time, you will find they follow almost the same trend, implying their comp package stays roughly the same each year but the value of their equity keeps growing. Where as the median worker pay has grown much less.

In other words, when comparing median CEO comp to worker comp and noticing a divergence, what you’re witnessing is more so stagnant worker wage growth. To fix the gap, workers need to be paid more, but their wages are being weighed down

Yes, this is an underrated point and potentially a larger factor. It would be interesting to see data on it

It matters where you direct your attention. Performance-based comp is a red herring. If you want to direct your rage at wealth inequality in the working class, perhaps start with the things that have eroded the supply-demand balance of labor, such as globalization and technology.

> The highest paid S&P 500 CEO last year was Rick Smith of Taser maker Axon Enterprise, who raked in $164.5mn mostly from stock awards after meeting targets over several years, according to data provided by MyLogIQ.

> Brian Niccol, chief executive of Starbucks, was second with $95.8mn in total last year, mostly from stock awards.

These articles are outrage bait. The reason for CEO comp to keep growing is because they’re largely compensated in equity (performance-based compensation), which keeps growing. This tracks with how the S&P 500 has performed over the past few years, partially due to inflation

1. Part of your negotiation should be explaining that independent contractors have ~30% less overhead than a salaried employee due to the savings on payroll taxes as well as unemployment insurance, recruiting, benefits, vacation time, etc and therefore require a higher rate than salaried employees

2. If your time is in demand because you’re being referred enough, your leverage is higher

3. You can jump ship as often as you want for a higher rate without having to explain it on a resume

4. Building a brand around yourself lowers your perceived risk for businesses and gives you additional leverage

5. Write off as much as possible, and if you make enough, there’s additional things you can do on the tax savings front beyond just writing off expenses (S-corp salary + draw taxed as capital gains)

6. Specialize in something (e.g. specific ecommerce platforms, web performance optimization, accessibility remediation) and you will become more trusted in that something, get more referred to others for it, and gain more leverage

> Freelancing enjoyment depends entirely on your clients and ability to find more clients.

Yes, though I found the former generally to be dependent on the latter

I wanted to play the start-a-business lottery. After enough success selling your time, you might feel the urge to try your luck selling other things

Maybe times are different now (I’m not freelancing anymore) but I was the happiest when I was a freelancer. I made more than I could have as a full time employee, because I could ask more often for more (vs jumping jobs every 2-4 years). I could write off a ton of expenses. I could put away more for retirement (self-employment gives you higher limits). I didn’t have to do stupid whiteboard interviews. I could work whenever and wherever I wanted. And I could ultimately choose when I took time off and for however long.

It’s not ideal for everyone, especially if you need the security of a predictable salary and good benefits

As someone who's done freelancing previously for years and also has run an agency previously for years, it really depends. I've certainly seen freelancers at double or triple these rates. If you already have clients, are well known, or you're good at selling the value of your time, you can ask for much higher. If you're just getting started or you're going through an agency, these rates seem pretty competitive. Also macro economic factors will change the equation and what you can ask for.

For those just getting started, my piece of advice is to be OK taking a lower rate initially, and just keep pushing it higher until you find resistance. If you're good at what you do, you will quickly find that you will get referrals (make sure to ask!) and can charge a ton more. It's a lot easier as a freelancer/contractor than a salaried employee since the market is much more liquid (you spend less time at one gig) and therefore you can test the waters with a higher rate much more often.

Regardless, what these companies list as what they will pay hourly isn't necessarily what you have to ask for. If you think about it from a negotiation perspective (and you have the ability to sell yourself), these are simply just the lower bound of what you can ask for.

TS was severely underrated. I think it was inspired by Action HL, which of course I can only imagine was inspired by Action Quake. There were so many good ones though, like Natural Selection, Sven Coop, Firearms. It was incredible the quality of mods that were available, all for free

> After several other versions, Valve released Counter-Strike 2 in 2023 without Le’s direct handiwork.

This is closest the article gets to mentioning css and csgo. Both of those games were like 90% of my teens

Lots of history glossed over. Like the maps and plugins/addons. The mappers were legends in their own right

There’s Flock, there’s police drones, there’s Ring cameras everywhere, etc. yes I’m aware

My point wasn’t to say there’s no monitoring in the US. It’s that there’s extreme variance in population densities which therefore means less opportunity and necessity for the same uniform surveillance in many places compared to countries with more even population densities. Whether the power of the federal government keeps expanding and eroding the federalist design the US was founded on to push uniform surveillance policies is another matter

> Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.

OP was comparing the US to Europe and the UK, which have much more even population densities than the US. Finding sparsely populated areas there is a much higher bar than in the US

This may make sense to you if you live in a big city, but luckily a lot of the US is uninhabited, especially in the western US. There’s many places you can drive hundreds of miles and not see anyone or be monitored like you would be in a large city. That’s not to say there’s no monitoring at all, but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah, is neither practical nor desired by the people that live there

Tragedy of the commons is caused by out of sync motives. Like a mismatch in protocols that people speak, which is partially explained by culture and upbringing (only partially of course). That is, tragedy of the commons is a symptom not a cause. Not something that happens just by virtue of something being a part of the commons. The more people you have, the more opportunity for those to be out of sync too

In the case of the coffee shop concept, I’d speculate since there’s not hundreds or thousands of years of history in Korea to establish a proper protocol for what is acceptable to do in a coffee shop, anything goes. Until Starbucks can establish from an early age that coffee drinking as the only culturally appropriate thing you should be doing in a coffee shop, and you may feel morally corrupt, be socially ostracized, or go to hell for your sins otherwise

I was curious who's keeping that website alive, and allegedly it's two former members of the cult: Mark and Sarah King

https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-suicide-cults-surviving-me...

Over rationalizing is paperclip maximizing