577 karma · joined August 30, 2021
Companies with RTO policies still usually give the option to work from home a couple days a week, right? Just not every day. You still need to live within commuting distance of an office, which is a pretty big restriction.
NYC is a city. It has 8 million people. There is no room for private cars.
Where is the moped lane? Why is there only one bike lane? Every avenue should have two full-sized bike lanes (the same size as car lanes), one for each direction. Then a bus lane, and no car lanes.
If that doesn't happen, you can't blame bikers for riding on sidewalks or the wrong way in a one-way bike lane. You can't expect someone on a bike to cross to a different avenue just because they want to go the other way. It's the city's fault for failing to provide proper infrastructure.
House: you can still find houses with plenty of room for ~$100k. It just needs to be in an affordable area: think McKeesport, not San Francisco.
Car: for $5k you can get a 2005 Ford Focus or Honda Civic. They're reliable cars that will get you from A to B perfectly fine, easy to repair and fuel efficient.
Education: a Computer Science degree from WGU costs $18k for the average student, and can be as low as $4k if you accelerate.
Career: plenty of remote software jobs paying above $100k, which can fund a good life in most of the US.
I get it though, the average person wants a nice house in a wealthy area with good schools and low crime and two new cars and gets a degree from a school they can't afford in a field without high paying jobs, and they cannot even code. That's completely their fault, no sympathy from me.
For those people, there's an easy solution: just don't have kids. Kids are crazy expensive, and not required for a good life.
I hope what you say is true- mass retirements followed by a plummeting birthrate. We surely do not need so many people, when the overwhelming majority are useless. Robots will be here soon anyway to replace most of the workforce
For example, whether you argue to raise or lower the minimum wage, either way you are still implicitly accepting the wage system. By framing the debate in this way, the teachers prevent students who oppose the wage system from having an opportunity to express their views.
Another example - as Noam Chomsky wrote about in "Manufacturing Consent", after the Vietnam War, the New York Times discussed many different theories for why the US didn't "win" the war. But it never considered the obvious - that the war itself was a mistake, and the US was wrong to be there in the first place. Framing the debate in this way is a way of silencing the opposition, by presenting two "sides" that are actually both on the same side and only disagree about trivial details.
If you opposed the Vietnam war, then it would be against your interests to follow the rules of a "debate" about how to win the war. The correct course of action in this scenario is to take the opportunity to argue for what you believe and to undermine the debate itself, even if it results in you "losing" the debate.
Actors need a unique combination of assets: they need to have the right looks, the right voice and the right skills. That makes them expensive.
But with AI, we can combine one person's likeness with another person's voice and another person's acting, and use this to create new virtual actors.
Finding someone who merely looks good and is willing to sell their likeness will not be hard. Even that might not be necessary, since AI will soon be able to generate photorealistic human models that aren't based on anyone in particular.
When a normal person gets a lot of money (like by winning the lottery) they do not become like Elon or Bezos. A third of lottery winners will declare bankruptcy within five years. The smartest ones will put their money in an index fund and enjoy a nice retirement.
For people with actual ideas, there are lots of ways to get funding- venture capital, government money etc. Having your own money to spend is nice but that's not the overwhelming advantage everyone seems to think it is.
On the other hand, doing the "actual work" as a scientist/engineer is not particularly difficult. Each individual engineer is responsible for a very small and well-defined problem that can be solved using skills that are taught at thousands of universities around the world. If any of them were to quit, they could be easily replaced with someone who's just as good.
My interpretation is that social media use leads to ambition and raises people's standards. Seeing other people doing better makes people think about how they can improve their own lives, which leads to less complacency and drives them towards positive change.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that most relationships are crappy. If the average person was to see what a good relationship looks like, they would leave or try to change their current one, which is a good thing. Same applies for careers.
People in the lower echelons usually don't understand what their product is for, how it works, who uses it or how it fits into their company's overall business strategy. They are only capable of understanding and working with a small part of the product. Because they don't see the "big picture", they often feel unmotivated and think their job is unimportant.
People who have a higher level of understanding- people who can intelligently talk about the product with stakeholders and make high-level executive decisions- these people are rare and extremely valuable, much more so than engineers and support people.
Suppose Instagram added the ability to create text threads in addition to photos, except they did this as an Instagram feature instead of a separate app. A week later, we find that 10% of Instagram users viewed one of these threads. Would that be significant?
"Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a 60 minutes interview, 'one Google AI program adapted on its own after it was prompted in the language of Bangladesh, which it was not trained to know'. This is obviously wrong, so does that mean Pichai was hallucinating?"
At the last second I fact-checked myself, and found that it actually wasn't Pichai who said that. Crazy how close I came to confidently spewing bullshit in a comment about how humans can also confidently spew bullshit.
Anyway, my point is- to be on par with humans, LLMs don't need to be right all of the time, only some of the time.
Affordable education exists. You can get a bachelor's in Computer Science from WGU for a couple thousand. Georgia Tech offers an online MSCS for about $1k per month.
These programs are scalable and practical. They have such high capacities that they don't have to be selective, making them available to everyone. The cost is trivial compared to the potential earnings.
But for this type of education reform to work, people need to vote with their wallets for the most affordable option. That's only going to happen if they are held personally accountable for their education spending.
Why would somebody choose an affordable, practical program over a needlessly expensive program if the government is paying for it? Where is the incentive to minimize cost and maximize ROI?
Human experience consists of more than language, for sure. There is also a visual, audible and and tactile component. But GPT-4 can also take visual inputs from my understanding, and it shouldn't be difficult to add the other senses.
Google's experiments with PaLM-e show that LLMs are also useful in an embodied context, such as helping robots solve problems in real-time.
Yes. Creating a new animation that is inspired by Disney's style is clearly fair use. Otherwise Studio Ghibli would be in trouble.
Humans don't come up with ideas out of nowhere. Open a novel and you will find that even though the overall work is unique, it is composed of tropes from other literature and experiences from the author's life which have been generalized into another context.
Chances are, someone you already know can hook you up with psychedelics. Try talking to your best friend about it. If he doesn't know, try another friend. You won't need to ask a third friend.
If we wanted to encourage diversity in the free software space, we should make sure every type of free software user feels welcome. Not just Linux users, but also BSD users, as well as folks who use Windows or MacOS but enjoy free software like Blender.
Of course, free software naturally has a greater appeal to tech-savvy computer users and software developers, which is a group that is overrepresented by Americans, English speakers, men and white people, mostly due to economic reasons. But these characteristics have nothing to do with free software, and there is already a diverse range of viewpoints and user profiles within the free software space.
When you burn out, you no longer get 5-10 hours of focus per week; that time goes to recovery from last week.
A better analogy would be, imagine you rent your house to someone else. You make a rule that tenants may display political messages in their windows, but only for one political party.
That would be illegal. You can prohibit all signs if you want, but specifically choosing what signs someone gets to display violates their first amendment rights and could trigger a fair housing lawsuit. It doesn't matter that you aren't the government and that you own the property.
Panhandling, for example, can make people feel unsafe. You can never be sure how a person will react if you say no. It's illegal to panhandle on the subway, but still happens all the time.
I'm ok with cleaning up blatant commercial spam and illegal content, but they seem to be removing comments from people who are just expressing their opinion. Not a good sign
The opposite would be better: give financial support to people only if they agree not to waste that money on kids they can't afford to have.
My parents provided me with free housing and food for over 20 years with no strings attached. They never told me to get a job or to help pay the bills. While my less fortunate peers wasted their lives working at McDonald's, I had the privilege of being able to study and experiment with different careers without needing to worry about food and shelter.
Behind every highly productive worker is hundreds of thousands of dollars of FREE support that they did not work for or earn in any way.
The only problem is that how much support you get depends on what family you happen to be born into. When the government provides that support instead, it means everyone gets equal opportunity and it doesn't matter what family you come from.