thr0wawayf00

Personally, I think it's pretty hard to make that kind of comparison accurately without having professional experience in both fields. One could also argue that it's as intellectually stimulating as being doctor, but how do we actually know that?

I've cleaned toilets professionally, and I'll say once and for all: writing software, no matter how monotonous or boring, is nothing like cleaning toilets. And I'd be willing to bet that someone trying to make such comparisons has ever had to do that kind of work.

> Nowadays when it's just gluing frameworks together and configuring AWS services... it doesn't really feel any different intellectually than cleaning toilets.

Comparing your six figure white collar job to basic janitorial work is pretty damn cringe and pretty objectively untrue.

> The SEC has already hinted at this, while the CFTC has indicated that only bitcoin is likely to be regulated as a commodity.

I think any token that gains enough prominence in the market is going to eventually fall under government purview. Why? Because when financial crime happens, victims want the government to go after the criminals and recover their lost funds. Crypto fans can't have it both ways: if their goal is to create a financial system that lives entirely outside of government control, then they shouldn't reasonably rely on the government to go after the criminals bringing the entire crypto space down.

The reason that the government winds up stepping in is because the chaos and instability created by this completely unregulated side-chain financial system winds up threatening the Federally backed system as well. Market contagion is real and collapses in one sector or market often reverberate across the entire system.

We're seeing it happen in banking right now: a bunch of banks made small business loans to miners that are now underwater because the price of crypto tanked and the GPU market cooled, so their revenue and equipment value has tanked at the same time.

> it’s your choice, but you’re definitely missing out on something special.

I totally forgot to mention the patronizing attitude that so many people come to this conversation with. Thank for you for heads up.

Not to mention that this represents a very median case, whereas a lot of parents want to pay for higher status schools and real estate to get access to higher status education, it's a never-ending keeping-up-with-the-joneses pi*-ing contest. To raise kids around my peers, a child could easily cost $500k+.

> What has democracy ever done for us?

The labor movement gave us the 40 hour workweek, weekends off and the minimum wage. They're the reason you have time to opine online right now instead of working.

https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-the-40-hour-workw... https://exhibitions.lib.umd.edu/unions/labor/living-wage

> But deep down I get it. Babies are a huge opportunity cost. Financially speaking, they are like winning the lottery but backwards. You can't even think of having one without cancelling your subscription to a good night's sleep. And if you take into account inflation, economic recession, and the rest of the news cycle's highlight reel, even a one-child family can seem to have one too many mouths to fish Lego pieces out of.

Every time I visit family for the holidays, I see this in real-time and it reaffirms my decision to not have children. I have an incredibly comfortable lifestyle saving for retirement, traveling and buying real estate. The moment I become responsible for another human, that all goes away.

Saving for college? Yeah right, state schools are gonna cost $100k per year by the time my kid would going off to school. Retirement? Inflation is already killing my parents' retirement so I've got to bank that I'm still probably not saving enough right now anyway.

More power to people who want that in life, but I can't tell you how many coworkers or family members I've met that had kids and just seemed like shells of themselves afterwards.

> That means they will need to find a business model that will afford it, and those business models might be pretty terrible in the short term.

I think AI is going to enable spammers and scammers in ways that we haven't seen before. Once spammers can fully integrate these chatbots into their email systems, it's going to put pressure on email providers to find new ways to detect spam. Thinking in the purely cynical, nefarious case, scammers are going to make fortune robbing people with this stuff.

Maybe this is what will force us to acknowledge and address that using the internet for social interaction isn't scalable from a content moderation standpoint.

It's hard to have sympathy when their "foolishness" involves undermining the existing financial system because they don't like the government and they believe taxation is theft.

The irony is that they now have no problem going to the government (specifically the courts) and asking for help to get their money back. It's only government waste if it's not directly helping them.

But how do you know that you're talking to a human? This question will become much, much more difficult to answer pretty soon.

These models are capable of generating high quality discussion on a variety of topics. I think the days of human-only text-based forums are numbered, especially as AI model trainers look for high-quality content to train their systems with.

The thing that concerns me about this perspective is that it completely ignores human connection and our need to connect as beings.

Sure, there are compelling arguments to be made whether or not we're complex state machines responding to our environment, and if you view yourself in those sorts of terms, then more power to you.

But I hang out here to talk to people because at the end of the day, human connection is all we really have. I believe the day that we consciously choose to supplant human connection with AI-generated input is the day that we no longer care about the existence of our kind.

> Do you honestly still think that anything is ever genuinely "trending" on Twitter? On YouTube? On Reddit?

No, I never put much stock in those aspects of social media because I've always found those curation features to be somewhat limiting. This feels entirely different because I'm beginning to question if I'm even talking to a human right now. Sure, companies have done all kinds of things to look more legitimate on the outside, but this is very different. This upends the fundamental assumption that you are communicating with another human when you have a direct conversation online.

I'm personally not as interested in understanding the synthesis involved in the AI. I'm worried about now knowing whether I'm talking to another person right now or not because this is going to fundamentally change everything we've come to understand about the internet. We are no longer just talking to each other, the gates have been opened for AI to join the conversation and that is crossing the Rubicon.

It absolutely matters. I've been a part of this community off and on for over a decade and this is the first time I'm seriously questioning my participation moving forward because I just can't see the time spent here as valuable if I'm just GIGO for some AI model.

Welp, it's been fun HN.

Serious question: how are we going to know if we're talking to people on forums like these in a year or two and not some AI model piped in via a script or web service? And what is that going to mean for online discourse moving forward? I feel like the era of knowing that you're talking to an actual human on the internet is rapidly ending.

I've toyed around with the idea of creating a service that logs into HN and replies to posts just to see how easy it would be to get people to respond and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's thought about doing that.

I think any company relying solely on AI to build a tech business in the future is itself at risk. Where's your moat if your business is built entirely on AI licensed from someone else?

Ok, but the systems that are responsible for creating those IDs are automated, which means that they can be learned and reverse-engineered. There are lots of passports and bank logins floating around that can be used to train AI.

Do you see the problem now?

> Online platforms will go towards requiring real human IDs for participants.

I just don't see how AI won't be used to manipulate these kinds of barriers. Once AI reaches a point where it can truly equal or surpass humans in terms of operating online, how are we going to prevent it from circumventing those barriers? If AI can generate code from a chat prompt, who's to say it can't solve a captcha in the future? And once that happens (because we all know it will at some point), how are we going to be able to differentiate?

I hope so, but the cynic in me doesn't see this happening because this has long been a problem that isn't going away.

The better that computers get at generating content and behaving in ways that only humans used to be able to is going to make it harder to determine if a source is human or not.

> Humans are perfectly capable of coming up with crimes, but in good news, they’re bad at planning crimes that won’t get caught.

How do we know this? We only know of the failed attempts, there's really no way to track how many crimes are successful outside of cases where there's obvious evidence (like a dead body).

This is what concerns me. Many people worry about being replaced by AI, but I'm far more worried about AI completely polluting digital communication. I think stuff like this is going to make it harder for companies to assess candidates, fight fraud and generally operate. I hope I'm wrong, but thinking about AI entering the digital communications arms race is only going to make things more difficult, i.e. more personalized spam call scripts, more intelligently targeted ads/spam/scams.

I think AI is going to force us on some level to reclaim some of our communication to the physical world, if for no other reason than it's going to be one of the only ways we can truly verify that we're talking to another person.

> The diffusion art models make it very clear that these technologies go from toys to replacing people’s jobs very very quickly.

Do you have any evidence that art jobs are being replaced now? I was talking with a designer friend of mine recently and he's not heard of Stable Diffusion, etc. replacing jobs yet. This is something that people keep bringing up but I haven't yet seen any evidence to back it up.

Somebody screwed up in the sales process then, either on the installer or vendor side. It's not acceptable to request a system in an unsupported configuration like this unless he was explicitly told beforehand "this isn't a supported configuration and we'll build it for you as long as you understand that".

Tech has developed a really bad habit of shipping half-baked MVPs as fully fledged products with powerful marketing behind them, and that's an increasingly dangerous combination. I'm not sure where it started but I see it lot in software dev because that ethos is pretty much baked into iterative product development methodology. Don't build out something until a current or potential customer that's worth the time needs it.

After a while, it feels less like "iterative" product development and more like "highest bidder gets the feature" development.

This is cool, it's always nice to see inertia.js being used.

When the hype train is rolling and the valuation is skyrocketing, nobody asks questions.

A recent Guardian report accused Qatar of physically abusing gay Qataris and recruiting them as agents to track down gay attendees of the WC[0]. These people had zero problem killing thousands to build the stadiums, do not underestimate their capacity for cruelty.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/15/gay-qataris...

> If FIFA was so intent on making history by awarding the WC hosting for the first time ever to an Arab or Muslim-majority country, they could have awarded it to the UAE instead, and they would have delivered a fantastic job honoring the traditions of past tournaments, and ensuring smooth and secure operations as well as a festive atmosphere for all involved, but they instead went with that fundamental and fanatical country of Qatar, and then they have the audacity to act surprised when this crap happens.

This is a great example of what corruption looks like and why it's so devastating to markets. FIFA officials took millions in bribes to sway this and the Russian WC without any regard for the outcome because they all got paid upfront. There was nothing altruistic about the decision to give it to Qatar.

A major beer sponsor is now going to have to lawyer up and fans who have planned for this trip for years will not be able to experience it the way they want to.

I used to work for one of the largest software vendors in the non-profit space worldwide and it fundamentally changed the way I look at the non-profit world. The big ones have essentially become these weird quasi-think tanks that passively influence policy or actively engage the community to achieve an often political agenda.

For example, a large non-profit can't explicitly lobby congress to ban sex education in schools. But, they can go around and "buy out" small non-profits into fulfilling their agenda. This is usually pretty easy to do because small non-profits are almost always cash-starved, and it can be really hard to say "no" when some outside figure is willing to provide a massive percentage of your operating budget in perpetuity in exchange for avoiding certain topics (like mutual consent) in schools.

This very scenario happened to an acquaintance of mine. She wanted to teach consent in schools after the #metoo scandal, spent 2 years grinding to improve access to consent-based communication for kids and then someone offered her obscene money under the condition that she make tweaks (i.e. "don't talk about consent in school because that will encourage children to have sex", that kind of stuff). She took the money because she saw a way out of needing hustle so hard for cash, but of course she sold her soul at the end and regretted it.

And none of those interactions ever get recorded. Nobody is tracking what big non-profits and charitable funds ask (or demand) others to do, and they get to market themselves as doing good for the world. I'm sure some of them are, and I'm sure there are tons of well-meaning people working for some of them, but that world was so much darker than I ever imagined, at least from the periphery.