keiferski

It's the problem with most Oliver Stone movies, Scorsese movies, and many other directors: the premise of the film requires a charismatic antihero, and therefore the "bad guy" becomes cool and popular.

The directors always try to avoid this criticism by saying, "Well he goes to jail in the end," but I think it's a bit of a cop out.

I tend to agree with the idea that art should try to embody some moral values, which goes against a lot of contemporary thoughts on aesthetics. But I think it’s a basic fact that people look toward fictional characters as role models, directly or indirectly. Avoiding that responsibility is not good.

Denmark has excellent bike infrastructure and terrible weather.

That's essentially a desire path, in crosswalk form:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path

Eliminating parking on a single street is hardly a death sentence for nearby businesses.

And the whole idea is to encourage biking, ergo less parking is a good thing.

It's pretty easy to do in most cities, you just have to eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots. It's quite rare for a modern city to have streets too narrow to do that.

Kind of a misleading title. I would call this creating a dashboard through which you interact with social media. Which is a good idea, and conceivably a lot easier to build nowadays with AI. I'd even expand it to the internet at large, using RSS or something like it.

Having some kind of notification system would be helpful as well, since most platforms are actively trying to minimize the accounts you follow and replace them with their algorithmic suggestions.

I think that’s a small part of it, but it’s not how the critics usually frame it.

It’s almost always criticized because it costs more, doesn’t guarantee a good job, etc. and not because supposed educational standards have fallen. As if the people reading the NYPost were so invested in the quality of education at Berkeley…

I’d even bet that educational standards could be near zero, but as long as the degree guaranteed a high-paying job, those same people wouldn’t care at all about the education.

For sure, I don’t think less of people that decide it’s not financially worth it. In many cases it’s not.

But I don’t like it when people then rationalize that decision into “it actually sucks anyway,” because IME that’s not true.

In my personal experience, I studied philosophy in college, and have continued reading books off-and-on since.

There really is no book replacement for being in a class of 5-10 philosophy students, arguing about Kant or metaphysics for 3 hours, or in having a professor rip your paper apart and highlight every flaw in an argument. It just won’t happen if you’re self-studying.

Big assumption that the average citizen’s opinion has any effect on what the government spends money on. It’s pretty easy to campaign on not doing X and then proceed to do X once you’ve won the election.

I think that influence is a handful of classes at best. Unless you’re suggesting that every university in the United States has no educational value anymore, and has been replaced with a Fox News caricature?

I don’t think it’s merely being around other young people. There are classes on topics that you will never ever come across in a job context, yet will have a major impact on your personality, mind, etc.

If someone says they can replicate the college experience by reading books at home, they frankly don’t know what they are talking about.

Let me use a metaphor.

Let’s imagine a Michelin star restaurant that has rave reviews. Everyone loves it. It’s affordable, too, which helps its popularity.

But over time, the restaurant increases its prices. The food remains exactly the same: absolutely delicious. But now the prices are 10x what they were before. And so naturally the discussion becomes: “I’m sure it’s good, but is it worth the cost?”

A rational response to higher education would be similar. Except that’s not how most people, or at least media articles, frame it. Instead of saying “the food is good but it’s not worth the cost,” they just deny that it is delicious in the first place. It’s a very particular kind of short-sightedness that has its roots in the anti-intellectual cultural history of America.

Okay so isn’t the solution then to increase standards, not to undermine the concept of college?

I really don’t get what articles like this one are proposing. Instead of having an institution like Berkeley, we ought to just give students some YouTube videos?

Like I said, it’s very often just anti-intellectualism and culture war nonsense.

These articles never ever bring up the long history of anti-intellectualism in the United States. College may indeed be getting less “worth it” in pure financial terms, but it’s certainly ironic that many people only had a high view of them in the first place because of the supposed financial benefits. Now that those financial benefits are less certain, out comes the anti-intellectualism again.

A more rational society would acknowledge that higher education is a good thing, and therefore try to make it affordable, not try to undermine it entirely.

I don’t get this reasoning at all.

College should be for becoming educated. Not for getting a job.

If paying huge amounts of money isn’t worth it to you to be educated, fine. But that doesn’t mean the education is bad, just that it’s not worth it from a financial perspective.

I studied philosophy and art, even though I could have studied something more “practical” (a dubious distinction that I think is less and less accurate in the dynamic modern economy, but that’s a separate discussion.) I don’t regret it for a second, and if my future kids want to study art and philosophy I’ll encourage them to and pay for it the best I can by then.

I find the hype exhausting. Especially the pseudo intellectual essays that pop up in my Twitter feed every time I accidentally open the app.

The actual using of AI, though, doesn’t tire me much. But I mostly use it for answering specific types of questions that I’d otherwise need to spend a lot of time researching.

A lot of those acts were definitely in response to criticism, but I think in general the billionaires of the time cared more about their public image and in contributing to society. The whole idea of Silicon Valley rebels didn’t really exist.

Go get a job at a cafe, 30-40 hours a week. Early morning shifts.

You’ll fix your schedule and be motivated to actually apply for better tech jobs.

I grew up in a place with a lot of remnants from the 19th century industrialists (Pittsburgh) which includes a lot of parks, museums, industrial architecture, etc.

One thing that’s always been apparent to me is how the rich of that era mostly attempted to be perceived well by society at large, and they tried to be accepted by the upper classes culturally. For example, Carnegie Hall and the hundreds of Carnegie Libraries around the world. You can debate whether this absolved them of their various sins, but I think it is pretty clear that they wanted society to think well of them.

Compare that to today’s tech and finance billionaires, and it seems like they are actively trying to destroy cultural society and/or want to remake it in the image of a corporate dystopia. Very different types of people.

This is also doable via GeForce Now (I think - it’s been years since I tried doing it, but IIRC I was in chrome on an iPhone.)

I didn't say it wasn't cheaper, I said it's what I've observed.

It's my impression that companies would rather hire 2-3 locals/non-remote workers and enhance their productivity with AI tools, vs. hiring 15 people from abroad that are in countries they have no presence in.

AI is undercutting a lot of these remote abroad jobs, because those types of tasks are more easily done with AI now.

No, that is not the point of an encyclopedia. The point is to condense an entry as much as possible while being thorough enough to cover most relevant information.

I get the idea and I used to try and optimize my computer time this way - working in the park, working while walking, etc.

In the end it was just a hassle and a distraction. I’d rather have 5 solid hours of work and 5 hours of non-work, rather than 10 hours of an awkward hybrid.

But wouldn't it be nicer to have that walk without being plugged into your phone, and have less actual work to do when you sit down at the computer?

I think AI has also devalued a lot of work that previously might have been "mundane" but still felt like an accomplishment once you got it done. But now you can do that work to an ±80% quality level of the old, manual way, but in 1% of the time.

So the result is noticeably worse, but you basically must do it, because the efficiency gains are inescapable. This makes the work seem even more pointless, adding to the feeling that you're working more and accomplishing less.

It's my impression that many of the roles that were previously "remote from anywhere in the world" are being replaced with either 1) a current employee using AI to be more productive or 2) a remote/partially remote job with the requirement to be in the same country/economic zone.

Reminds me a bit of how Andrew Carnegie funded building public libraries: he would only build one if the local community agreed to provide books and operate it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library

For the algorithm to work it needs to have data, and to get that data it needs to show you a variety of things.

I can imagine that some people don’t want to see extreme content, even briefly in order to train the algorithm. Hence the drive toward making all content neutral.

If I create a new Instagram account, and the first 5 things I see are various extreme things (of different "ideological stripes"), I'm closing the app, not waiting for the algorithm to adjust itself to me.

I think this is one of the consequences of the social media shift from “follow the people you like and we’ll give you a feed of them” to “we’ll programmatically determine what you, specifically, would most likely enjoy.”

When you are mostly just shown content that you’ve agreed to see, there’s less of an issue when you see something that offends your particular sensibilities, values, etc. because you agreed to see it, or you went looking for it.

But when the potential content you’ll see can include literally anything, there is a real incentive for the platform to make that content as neutral as possible. Because if you’re shown something that you really don’t like, you’ll stop scrolling and the engagement stats will go down.