welshwelsh

Men are going to get in on it too, since this should work just as well with with fictional characters

Surprised to see a sentiment like this on HN. Are you actually OK with government and finance controlling the financial system and making rules that you have to follow? What if you wanted to buy something that's illegal in your country?

I think the intention here is just to keep the undesirables from interacting with the general population.

Unfortunately, banning something from the App Store and the Google Play Store is enough to stop most people from using it. Wrongthinkers might move to Telegram, but they still need to use mainstream platforms to get new recruits.

Sounds like something the market can solve. Instead of giving limited parking spaces to whoever got there first, sell them to the highest bidder.

Monthly parking in Manhattan is $1000/month. If you want a car, you gotta pay for the space it takes up. We could be using that space for better things.

People parking on the sidewalk? Great! Tow them and fine them, and now the city has another source of revenue.

Tik tok videos are speech, therefore banning tiktok is a violation of free speech

I don't support that. Stock buybacks are a great thing; they allow companies to return excess cash to investors, helping ensure that capital is allocated efficiency across the whole economy.

Otherwise companies are pressured to spend money just because they happen to have money, even if they don't have anything productive to spend it on. That's not a good thing.

This seems so backwards to me.

If it's so easy to just copy and paste an essay from an AI generator that is of such high quality that it cannot be detected, then why are we still making students learn such an obviously obsolete skill? Why penalize students for using technology?

Surely, there are still things that are difficult to do even with the help of AI. Teach your students to use these tools, and then raise the bar. For example, ask your art students to make complex compositions or animations that can't be handled by Midjourney without significant effort.

Indeed, but people in countries with lower cost of living are still workers, right?

It irritates me when people say things like "suppress worker wages" when they actually mean "pay less money to American workers living in San Francisco"

The people being hired in Bangladesh are not having their wages suppressed. On the contrary, they are making more and enjoying a higher quality of life than ever before.

I think it's better to ask "what percentage of an employee's output is attributable to the ceo's leadership?"

A reasonable answer, IMO, would be somewhere between 0.5% and 5%. The average CEO gets maybe 1%, which I think is pretty fair.

Often if a CEO makes 1000x an employee, it's because there are tens or hundreds of thousands of employees under them. The executives still get a relatively small portion of employee output.

I must say though that being more valuable than 1000 employees seems like a very low bar to me. I'm sure there are many people who are more valuable than even 100,000 employees.

I'd choose the second track without hesitation.

Shareholders can consolidate all the wealth they want, as long as they deliver the goods: LLMs that are trained on all of humanity's creative output.

I feel like you could say the same about Python.

There's nothing you can do in Python that you can't do in C. But while Python is easier to learn and use than C, it's less efficient, in some cases hundreds of times slower than C, let alone expertly-optimized assembly.

But the ease of application development in languages like Python has expanded the scope of what can be realistically done with software, causing developer employment and salaries to rise while lowering the required computer science knowledge.

As for the luddites, they lacked imagination. Low-skilled laborers might have been able to make textiles, but there were plenty of lucrative opportunities for talented people able to design, build and maintain machinery instead of merely operating it. It was not uncommon for talented engineers to become factory owners themselves, some of whom started as unskilled laborers (Samuel Slater, for example).

It's not true that all of the gains are captured by investors.

Alphabet's CEO makes about 1000x the average googler, but that's only about 1% of salaries. What I mean is that for every $100 a Googler makes, about $1 goes to the CEO. It's not like top executives are claiming ing most of the value for themselves, the majority of the value a worker generates is returned to them in their compensation.

Students don't spend time on their phones because they are "addictive," but because school is boring and doesn't provide them with anything of value.

Schools need to radically overhaul how they operate so that they can compete with TikTok for student's attention. Banning phones is lazy. I want to see:

- Gamified learning, using apps like Duolingo. TikTok-style short form videos produced by top content creators instead of boring lectures from mediocre teachers.

- Opportunities to earn real money, power and status as a reward for school achievement. Good performance should grant perks like the ability to freely skip class to play videogames, study from home or earn an income during the school day.

- Autonomy: give students control over how they learn, holding them accountable only for the results.

Disappointed that Total Crap is not an actual magazine I can subscribe to.

This seems like a really, really easy problem to fix.

It should be easy to check Copilot's output to make sure it's not copied verbatim from a GPL project. Colleges already have software that does this to detect plagiarism.

If it's a match, just ask GPT to refactor it. That's what humans do when they want to copy stuff they aren't allowed to copy, they paraphrase it or change the style while keeping the content.

Unfortunately the framing matters a lot, and people are not logically consistent in their preferences. The only way to know if people support affirmative action is to ask them "do you support affirmative action?"

This reminds me of when Andrew Yang's campaign found that Americans are much more supportive of universal basic income proposals if you call it a "Freedom Dividend" instead of UBI. I imagine whether the proposal comes from a Republican or a Democrat also would have a big impact.

What you can't do is try to determine if someone supports a policy in the abstract and then assume that they must have the same attitude towards a real implementation of that policy.

Is eliminating jobs an unintended consequence, or is it the fundamental purpose of software development?

Personally, I see job elimination as my goal and my purpose as a developer. Whenever my company is able to lay people off as a result of my work, that means I am doing a good job. I always try to keep track of how many people my software can replace and how much my company pays these people, so that I can take credit for these cost savings and claim a portion of their salaries for myself during salary negotiations.

Republicans used Trump to overturn Roe. Trump himself didn't care at all about abortion and was nominally pro-choice until he decided to run for president

The stuff Trump wanted to do himself he had much less success with.

>Assume for now I am not buying anything illegal

Why would we make an assumption like that? Also, who decides what is illegal?

The entire point of decentralized currency is that it isn't controlled by a national government, and is not subject to any particular country's laws or any corporation's policies.

The benefits go beyond just buying drugs, though. Cryptocurrency helps people to circumvent a wide variety of restrictions - from tariffs, to taxes, to labor laws, governments create all sorts of ridiculous barriers that disrupt the free market and make it difficult for people to do business.

If you're happy with your country's government though and are willing to follow whatever rules they happen to make, then of course it would just be easier to use the national currency. Nobody ever claimed otherwise.

As soon as it's legalized.

Cannabis might be bad for your health, but the most significant consequences of cannabis use are getting arrested and losing your job.

As long as that's a risk, and as long as people use health concerns as an excuse to take away other people's freedom, we can't have an honest conversation about it.

Why does interaction need to reach a human though? I'm hoping that once the chatbots get good enough, we can give them all the powers of a human representative and get rid of the human.

Being able to switch jobs is critical; the existence of workers who are unable to quit is devastating to worker's rights.

I would prefer if we had better visas with higher salary requirements, designed to attract the world's best, but without making them jump through hoops. E.g. Someone making $250k = green card instantly. Someone making $80k = denied, try again when you are worth $250k.

"American citizens" are usually just people who, by no fault and no merit of their own, happen to have been born in the United States. Frankly, this shouldn't give them the right to decide who else gets to come to the US and on what terms.

But putting that aside, when Americans issue a visa, they are forming a contract with another person that they are obligated to honor. When someone uproots their life to come to the US by following the rules created by Americans, it would be unconscionable to exploit them and then fail to honor the visa.

Why do you think that? I think it's a good thing for minors to have unrestricted access to porn

>Take responsibility for your actions

>re-train them to use AI

Why can't they take responsibility for their own actions, and train themselves to use AI?

Everyone knows about the disruptive potential of AI now, it's not a secret anymore. Some people will take the initiative to master the new tech, and they will replace the people who don't. It's their choice.

Instead of training luddites to use technology they don't understand, it's better to hire people who already see the potential of AI and are making efforts to capitalize on it. Fill your company with people who share your vision for a better, more automated world, and fire those who don't. Unregulated market forces are the best way to force AI adoption, and people will quickly learn AI once it becomes a requirement for survival.

"chilling effects" usually refers to when people decide not to share things because of potential legal consequences. For example, if people stop creating or distributing AI art because they don't want to be sued by artists for using their style, that's a chilling effect. Basically the opposite of what you are describing

>Just say 'fuck it' until there's nothing left to scrape other than content also made by AI?

Sounds good to me! There will always be people making free art, and AI will make this much easier.

The thing that I think people are missing is that AI-generated content CAN be used to improve AI models. There is no requirement that the input data is created without AI.

Furthermore, AI-generated content on the internet is not random; it is curated content. Generally speaking people don't post every image they generate with Stable Diffusion, they only post the best images. If you consider engagement metrics and user feedback (upvotes etc), they can be a valuable and useful part of a training set.

Quitting is better.

From an individual perspective, switching jobs is the simplest and most effective way to improve your situation, and will likely get you more money than a union could negotiate for.

From a group perspective, a culture where quitting is normalized generates similar benefits to unions. Employers will make concessions and raise salaries if they have too much trouble retaining good people.

It means they are taking the credit for making a good business decision. When the share prices go up because of the layoffs, he wants to make sure everyone knows that he is responsible for it.

None of this is Meta's problem though. Requiring platforms to monitor user activity is unreasonable.

The main issue here is one of education. By 12 years old, a person should have learned enough about sexual exploitation in school that if a stranger asks them for nude photos, they would call the police.

I think an important part they left out is- if you want to make a lot of money, you need to optimize for money.

That means everything you do should have the goal of landing a higher paying job. Instead of studying things you find interesting, focus on learning skills that are frequently mentioned in job postings. Learning how to make your own compiler, for example, might not be the most profitable investment of your time.

To a salary-maximizer, work is simply a way to improve their resume. Before committing to a project, consider whether talking about that project will help you in an interview.

Most importantly, to make more money you need to constantly apply to better jobs even if you already have a high paying job you are happy with. This is where the majority fail, as most people won't apply for other jobs unless they are unemployed or unhappy. Some people are so deluded that they think they can get a better salary through promotions, simply by working hard at their current job, rather than through job hopping.